Making connections: histories of resistance, coding, and quilting!

A conference room bustling with students, two amazing professors and workshop leaders, and excited parents—this was the atmosphere at CGEST last Saturday morning. Dr. Ronald Eglash and Audrey Bennett, professors at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan, led a culturally responsive STEM workshop for 4th to 12th graders from the Phoenix Chapter of Jack and Jill of America. The event seamlessly connected three things one seldom perceives as related: histories of resistance in the United States, coding, and quilting.

Dr. Ronald Eglash is known for his extensive work in the field of ethnomathematics, interweaving modern computing with indigenous design. Professor Audrey Bennett studies cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary communication in the 21st century, in relation to how individuals are active producers, distributors and consumers of images that permeate global culture.

“We have found that teaching kids to create designs with these ‘heritage algorithms’—fractals in African design, iterative patterns in native American weaving, Latino drum rhythms and so on—brings out a level of creativity and interest that you often don’t see in a regular math or computing class,” says Eglash.

For the first part of the workshop, students were divided into smaller groups to research a particular quilting design, learn about the history of the people who practice it, and present their findings. They had four options to choose from: Appalachian quilts and the abolitionist movement; Gee’s Bend quilts and the Selma to Montgomery marches; Lakota quilts and Native American resistance; and embedded knowledge of local flora in Anishinaabe quilts.

Eglash and Bennett have developed a set of software tools that allow students to simulate quilt patterns. The students chose a certain quilting practice and used code blocks to develop their unique designs. For the last section of the workshop, students physically engaged with different textiles and materials to produce a patch of fabric, which Eglash and Bennett hope to weave together into a much larger quilt—one that attempts to contain a multitude of student experiences, backgrounds, and histories bound as an object of significance for the collective.

As we develop the curriculum for Quarter IV of the CompuPower program, we are also pushing ourselves to embed computer science lesson plans within larger socio-economic and political contexts. We at CGEST often ask ourselves, “What does a culturally responsive STEM curriculum embody? What does the current education system lack when it comes to supporting girls of colour in STEM fields?” And similar to Eglash and Bennett, we are of the opinion that simply teaching technical skills is not enough:

“...many technology programs focus on “populating the pipeline” with girls of color without interrogating the nature of a “leaky pipeline”...Girls of color do not simply “leak” out; they are pushed out by a pipeline wrought with concrete locations of institutional oppressions. Racism, sexism, and classism occur in the institutions—universities and workplaces—that girls and women of color must inhabit as they pursue STEM degrees and careers. Therefore, if technology programs are to address disparity as a complex problem, they need a theory of technology that examines how race, gender, and class function as interlocking systems of oppression that socially shape technology, both as an artifact and as a social system.”

Garcia, P. & Scott, K.A. (2016). Traversing a political pipeline: An intersectional and social constructionist approach toward technology education for girls of color. InterActions, 12(2).

We are proud of our collaboration with Dr. Ronald Eglash and Audrey Bennett because they are educators who have successfully situated computer science education within an interdisciplinary approach to teaching that pushes students to question systems of power, and learn about organized resistance through the resilient histories of people of the United States. There are endless possibilities to make our current STEM curriculums more culturally responsive. We must change how we think about teaching science, and make room for combining technical skills with non-cognitive skills. With educators like Eglash and Bennett, the future of STEM education is bright.