Culturally Responsive Debugging: a Method to Support Cultural Experts’ Early Engagement with Code
In this episode I unpack Lachney et al.’s (2021) publication titled “culturally responsive debugging: a method to support cultural experts’ early engagement with code,” which explores a strategy for situating debugging within professional expertise among participants within an introductory programming workshop for adults.
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Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary
each episode of this podcast is either
an interview with a guest or multiple
guests or a solo episode where i unpack
some scholarship in relation to computer
science education in this week's
particular episode i am unpacking a
paper titled culturally responsive
debugging method to support cultural
experts is early engagement with code
this paper was written by michael
lachney aman yadav matt drazen madison c
allen and william babbitt apologies if i
mispronounce any names and here is the
abstract for this particular paper quote
despite the value that cultural experts
bring to efforts to broaden the
participation of racially minoritized
youth in u.s computer science there's
been little research on supporting their
knowledge of computing this is a missed
opportunity to explore the diffusion of
computing knowledge across local
community context where underrepresented
youth of color spend time to address
this gap we present one strategy for
promoting cultural experts's early
engagement with code culturally
responsive debugging using culturally
situated expertise and knowledge to
debug code we analyze qualitative data
from a professional development workshop
for cultural experts to evaluate the
strategy our findings have implications
for broadening participation efforts and
supporting non-program managers
acknowledge of code end quote if i were
to summarize this paper into a single
sentence i would say that this paper
explores a strategy for situating
debugging within professional expertise
among participants within an
introductory programming workshop for
adults by the way before i get started
quick disclaimer that my allergies are
bad so that's my when my voice sounds a
little weird today alright so this paper
starts off in the introduction
mentioning that there are some racial
barriers
in gatekeeping and computer science
education and professions so in
particular they mentioned that for
degrees only one percent of people who
receive a degree in cs are black whereas
black
and then they cite that there are some
culturally responsive computing ideas
that people have been implementing and
so this builds off of the work of people
like gloria lads and billings through
the culturally relevant pedagogy or
geneva gay through the culturally
responsive teaching and then django
paris's discussion on culturally
sustaining pedagogies which by the way
in the show notes i will include a link
to some podcasts that i have discussed
that are on similar topics such as glory
lads and billings's paper on culturally
relevant pedagogy you can find a link to
this at jared o'leary.com then just
click on the podcast tab or you can also
find it by clicking the link that's in
the app that you're listening to this on
as it should take you directly to the
show notes for this particular episode
so further in the introduction the
authors mentioned that there's often a
deficit approach to education where
people will assume whether it's like
curriculum developers or teachers or
whoever will assume a deficit with
students and in particular some specific
demographics or cultures
and so they cite some authors who
problematize this so i highly recommend
checking out the actual paper itself so
you can see some of the works that they
are citing and read some more about it
so for the purpose of this particular
paper they define cultural experts as
people with knowledge of the local
culture and community then this paper is
guided by three research questions so
this is from page 772 how do we support
cultural experts's knowledge of
programming in ways that are motivated
by and affirming of their cultural
expertise autocultural experts and
educators who work with them
example teachers and librarians solve
computational problems that make
explicit connections between computing
and cultural expertise and how do
cultural experts and educators who work
with them talk about technology after
experiencing a crc workshop that
includes a culturally responsive
debugging activity unquote and crc by
the way is culturally responsive
computing all right so the next section
in this paper talks about the literature
review and again i recommend taking a
look at the citations in there and
diving deeper into any of those
publications that stand out but one
quote in particular from page 773 is the
following that really stood out to me
quote having a multi-directional
strategy for broadening participation in
cs education is not only important
because teachers should not be expected
to do this work alone but also because
primary and secondary us schools have
long histories of alienating youth of
color through eurocentric curricula and
structures of assimilation end quote
this is really important to consider one
of the things that i mentioned in
previous episodes like i think i talked
about this in paulo ferry's book
pedagogy of the oppressed is that the
u.s has deliberately tried to assimilate
different cultures so for example in the
native or indigenous or first nation or
american indian depending on what tribal
affiliation you're with one of those
terms is more preferred than others the
verbiage of a lot of schools at the time
was
to quote civilize the savages end quote
which is highly problematic framing but
the way that they were promoting schools
was hey we're going to take the
native children off the tribal lands and
reservations and we're going to
basically
teach them a eurocentric way of being to
quote civilize them by killing off their
culture and forcing them to assimilate
to eurocentric ideals so if you haven't
read about that i highly recommend
actually looking that up maybe i'll do
an unpacking scholarship that
specifically addresses that with some
examples but this is just one of many
examples that you can point to which is
why this particular quote really
resonates with me because yes i totally
agree that we need to take this
multi-directional or
multi-perspective-list approach to
broadening participation and not just
take this from a eurocentric view or
from any single culture all right so the
next section of this talks about the
context and the method so i'm going to
give you just enough detail to kind of
give you an understanding of what was
going on in this particular study but i
again highly recommend actually reading
this particular paper so this particular
study was part of like a multi-year
project so this is one particular
workshop that we're kind of like zooming
in on with a microscope and looking at
potential implications within it and in
particular this workshop was using an
arduino microcontroller to be able to
measure ph values of stuff so like ph
values you can measure in cosmetic
products you can also measure like soil
ph values like all sorts of things that
you can measure with this now one of the
reasons why they ended up doing this is
because in conversations with the
different authors and with different
cultural experts within the community
they found that being able to understand
and measure ph values was relevant to
cosmologists and to urban farmers within
the community and so in this particular
workshop what they ended up doing was
intentionally putting in a logic bug
within the program that would make it so
that it would give you the opposite
results for the ph value so for example
if the ph value was high it would say on
the little indicator that it was low and
then vice versa if it was actually low
it would say that it was high and so
this is a logic bug in that it was just
an error in the logic behind the program
rather than the syntax so like it wasn't
missing a semicolon or something like
that so it would give you a result but
it would give you an incorrect result
and the way that you could solve it
involved many different methods so you
could have changed it so that you
switched some of the operators or you
could have switched the string that was
output or you could have added in new
lines of code as some of the
participants ended up doing etc so there
are many ways that you could go about
solving this particular logic bug that
was relevant to the participants which
speaking of so the participants were
primarily in three different groups like
librarians or teachers or cosmologists
or urban farmers 16 adults ended up
signing up for this and so seven were
cosmologists who identified as black or
african-american six were librarians or
teachers three who identified as white
and one is black or african-american and
two is multiracial and then three urban
farmers two who were white and one who
was black or african-american 13 of
which were women and three of which were
men and they had an age range between
over the age of 35 and four of the 16
participants had some prior experience
with programming whereas all the rest
this was their first time programming
which sounds like a pretty neat way to
engage with programming for the first
time by working with an arduino and
that's a paraphrase from page 776
so in order to actually collect data and
analyze it they used four different
types of data so this include video data
of the debugging observational notes
from the different workshop facilitators
pictures that were taken during the
workshop and then a focus group
interview at the conclusion of the
workshop if you want to read more about
the analysis make sure you check out
that particular section called data
collection and analysis i won't get too
nerdy in this particular episode now in
the findings one of the things that they
note is the approximate amount of time
that it took to find the bug versus the
approximate amount of time that it took
to fix the bug once it was found now to
find the bug groups took between one and
four minutes to actually find it and
then groups took between 1 and 15
minutes to actually solve it and it was
interesting that the novice programmers
tended to spend more time than the
non-programmers trying to solve
something and so the authors mentioned
that this could be because that the
novice programmers were trying to take
on more of a mentorship and were trying
to like demonstrate some of the
different things that you could do but
it's also because one of the groups in
particular that spent a good amount of
time we're adding in more code rather
than just trying to
change
like the operators or the strings in the
code itself in particular if there is
any value below 7 for the ph then it
would say low and if there was any value
that was equal to seven or higher than
it it would say high so what some of the
groups wanted to consider was well what
if it was exactly at seven so adding in
a different condition than the two that
were already present so for example some
of the urban farmers were curious about
well what would it mean if it was
exactly at seven for the ph what would
that say
to us as urban farmers and the
cosmologists some of them were like okay
well knowing that something is high or
low with ph doesn't make as much sense
as
if we change the
wording to battery acid or lie which is
relevant to cosmology so in the post
workshop reflections there are some
quotes from the different participants
and some of these quotes are honestly
pretty heartwarming so like one
participant mentioned that they had a
brother who worked as a programmer and
they had always viewed programming as
intimidating but once they actually got
into this project she had a shift in her
attitude and she realized oh this is
something that i can do and she felt
able to read the code and figure things
out which to me indicates that the way
that this particular workshop was
designed was smart it took into account
the limited understanding of programming
that the participants had but it also
situated it within something that was
relevant to them and so there's this
need to know to be able to dive into the
code and try and figure out how to solve
something and as a result of that they
had a positive experience with coding
and now they might be more interested in
learning more after the fact which is
awesome one of the librarians also
mentioned that it was helpful to debug
in parents and they found it was useful
to kind of like bounce ideas off of each
other and what was interesting among the
urban farmers in particular there's some
contrasting responses here from this
group discussion so
one of the farmers mentioned that they
felt like oh this is something that i
can actually do and that this is
relevant to me but another farmer
expressed some concerns over how the
large-scale for-profit
farming industry is kind of taking the
soul out of farming but this experience
with the arduino helped them to kind of
reconnect with the soul of farming while
using technology in some kind of a
meaningful way which is really neat in
the discussion section of this paper the
authors for the first question which was
how do we support cultural experts's
knowledge of programming in ways that
are motivated by and affirming other
cultural expertise one of the key things
they point out is that they engaged in
sustained conversation with the cultural
experts it wasn't just outside people
coming in and saying hey we're experts
in our domain and so we're going to
impose our way of understanding and
seeing the world onto you this would
have been a form of colonization whether
it's like epistemological axiological
ontological which would be like
colonizing the way of knowing the way of
valuing or the way of being instead they
engage in a conversation to really
understand okay well how do the
participants in this potential workshop
how do they see the world what is
relevant to them what can we actually
explore that is related to code that
would be meaningful to them rather than
imposing our own ideas onto them that is
excellent i highly recommend that for
any k-12 practitioner any researcher etc
and again this relates to the
conversations that i previously did on
paulo freddy's book pedagogy of the
press which all four of those chapter
podcasts are linked to in the show notes
i highly recommend checking it out if
you have not read a particular book the
authors also mentioned in this
particular answer to the first research
question that they found some benefit in
pairing people in particular pairing
some novice programmers with people who
were programming for the very first time
because it led to some more creative
solutions so in other words rather than
pairing the novice programmers with the
novice programmers and the brand new
programmers with the brand new
programmers having like mixed expertise
which is something that i strongly agree
with and i mentioned this in particular
in the podcast that talks about affinity
space characteristics and how i applied
them in my classroom so i highly
recommend checking that out if you
haven't listened to that one yet alright
so for the second research question how
do cultural experts and educators who
work with them example teachers and
librarians solve computational problems
that make explicit connections between
computing and cultural expertise so
because this particular
logic error was situated within a
project that was meaningful not only to
the cosmologists but to the urban
farmers this made it so that you weren't
just coding for coding sake or solving a
problem for the sake of solving a
problem but you were doing it in order
to
make a useful tool for what you do in
your day to day and this likely made it
more motivating which again highly
recommend and highly resonates with the
approaches that i use with the boot up
curriculum that i create 100 free it's
at boot up pd.org it's all about making
projects that are individually
meaningful to the kids who create them
and in this case it happened to be
individually meaningful to two different
professions and then for the final
research question which was how do
cultural experts and educators who work
with them talk about technology after
experiencing a crc workshop that
includes a culturally responsive
debugging activity the authors note that
generally they had positive attitudes
and this is great and i love the fact
that this was like a community program
so even though the beginning of this
article is mentioning youth and it
mentions it in the abstract they
specifically were working with most
adults who were over the age of 35 which
is awesome i i love this continuing
education stuff especially because like
many people like myself only had one
opportunity to take programming in k-12
context and it was part of an ap course
it was very limited in who could
actually take that so many people who
are around my age and older might not
have had the opportunity to program so
having these like community-based
workshops and whatnot is an awesome idea
especially because these workshops
aren't just teaching for the sake of
getting a job in computer science but
instead it's like hey here's how you
could use programming in computer
science in your current job in cosmology
or in urban farming all right so this
was a pretty neat study and i definitely
recommend checking it out but at the end
of every one of these unpacking
scholarship episodes i'd like to share
some just lingering questions and
thoughts it's not meant as like a
critique of the authors or anything
because i enjoyed this paper and i've
enjoyed some of their other works that
i've taken a look at one of the
questions that i have is what are some
other examples of what culturally
responsive debugging might look like and
how might those other examples compare
in different cultures so while i really
enjoyed this particular example i'm
curious what the authors and
participants and other researchers and
other practitioners and other community
and cultural experts might come up with
for debugging exercises or even just
projects in general that are relevant to
the communities and cultures that they
live in and are a part of another
thought that i have is there appears to
be some conflation with the use of the
word culture to mean both race and
profession so in particular at the
beginning of the article it's talking
about how people of color are often
underrepresented within the field of cs
but then the remainder of this article
was talking mainly about profession so
it was comparing and contrasting
primarily the cosmologists with the
urban farmers so i definitely see the
connection to the professional expertise
but i'm not entirely
sure on what the word culture means to
them and it's very likely that my
understanding of the word culture is
just simply different than that of the
authors as the word is loaded with many
different meanings so i don't say that
as a critique for me what might have
clarified rather than calling this like
culturally responsive debugging it may
have made more sense to say that it was
relevant or situated or contextualized
debugging so in particular in the
abstract they have the wording that says
using culturally situated expertise and
knowledge to debug code i think if the
wording was simply changed to using
situated expertise and knowledge to
debug code i think that would have made
more sense to me only because culture is
just a very vague term and it's often
like conflated with
demographic information like i mentioned
in other podcasts when some people talk
about culturally relevant pedagogy they
specifically are talking about pedagogy
that is relevant to race or ethnicity a
culturally relevant pedagogy can apply
to any kind of demographic or culture
not just race another thing that i'm a
little bit hung up on is the use of the
word expert or cultural expert it almost
comes across as being homogeneous so in
particular i'm unsure like how do we
delineate between the different types of
expertise people might have in relation
to different cultures so for example if
we go with a demographic of gender with
myself so i'm a non-binary individual so
i have lived expertise as a non-binary
individual i've also presented and
published on trans culture that's with a
capital t however i do not consider
myself to be an expert compared to some
of my trans co-authors and co-presenters
who have done more extensive research on
the topic what i'm saying is like
there's a difference between somebody
within the trans community who has lived
experience and understanding versus a
cis person with academic experience and
understanding of trans culture versus a
trans person with both academic and
lived experience within a particular
culture in this case gender so the same
is true for any other type of culture or
in that case also any type of profession
as well so just because somebody's doing
something doesn't necessarily mean that
they have expertise on it so for example
if you pick any kind of demographic that
you can think of that is typically
measured in like surveys and whatnot and
compare that with somebody who is born
and raised in detroit versus somebody
who has lived in rural utah their entire
life compared to somebody who immigrated
here from i don't know maybe norway or
something while they might have the same
demographic or
pot culture their type of expertise
within that culture is going to be
different based on their lived
experiences now i say all this not as a
critique of the authors or their work
just in the wording that was in here i
just personally didn't understand what
exactly it meant to be a cultural expert
or what expertise was or what exactly
was meant by culture and by the way this
could have been a result of like editors
changing things or removing wordings and
whatnot or just giving some suggestions
to cut stuff that may have been explicit
or at least perceived as explicit so as
an example i had a publication that came
out a few months ago where the editors
removed all of the references that i
gave in the publication that i wrote and
so my response to the editors was like
hey you need to cite the people who
actually came up with this idea that i'm
talking about this is not my idea i'm
pointing towards others here and they
have entire books dedicated to this i
never heard back from the editors and
actually received a physical copy of the
published document and saw that the
editors did not include any of the
references that i put in there which
honestly was quite upsetting because it
makes it look like i'm taking credit for
other people's work now as another
example i've also collaborated on some
projects where there wasn't consensus on
the terms being used within the team
that was working on this so i'm
personally curious what each author
thinks of each of these wordings like
how do each of these authors think of
what cultural expertises or culture is
or expertises et cetera now because the
authors have cited some of the seminal
works within this area on culturally
responsive computing i'd certainly trust
that they know what they're talking
about i'm just not entirely sure if
there was a conflation between
race and profession as being culture and
one and the same but maybe i'm just
misreading or misinterpreting what was
written if any of the authors happen to
be listening to this podcast i'd love to
have you on to chat about this
publication and any of the other works
that you've been working on and invite
you on to correct me on some of the
areas that i may have missed or
misunderstood but that kind of concludes
my own lingering questions and thoughts
i do recommend you take a look at this
particular publication even though the
study looked at adults this is certainly
relevant to k-12 educators as well and
again going back to paulo ferreira's
discussion of engaging in dialogue and
the importance of that when coming up
with like curriculum and projects and
resources etc which i include links to
in the show notes that kind of unpack
some of this some more so i highly
recommend checking out not only this
paper but also those other episodes
which you can find at jaredoleary.com
thank you so much for listening to this
particular episode i hope you found it
useful and i hope you consider sharing
with others so others can check out this
publication stay tuned next week for
another episode and until then i hope
you're all staying safe and are having a
wonderful week
Article
Lachney, M., Yadav, A., Drazin, M., Allen, M. C., & Babbitt, W. (2021). Culturally responsive debugging: a method to support cultural experts’ early engagement with code. TechTrends, 65, 771–784.
Abstract
“Despite the value that cultural experts bring to efforts to broaden the participation of racially minoritized youth in US computer science, there has been little research on supporting their knowledge of computing. This is a missed opportunity to explore the diffusion of computing knowledge across local community contexts where underrepresented youth of color spend time. To address this gap, we present one strategy for promoting cultural experts’ early engagement with code, culturally responsive debugging: using culturally situated expertise and knowledge to debug code. We analyzed qualitative data from a professional development workshop for cultural experts to evaluate this strategy. Our findings have implications for broadening participation efforts and supporting non-programmers’ knowledge of code.”
Author Keywords
Debugging, culturally responsive computing, computer science education, adult education
My One Sentence Summary
This paper explores a strategy for situating debugging within professional expertise among participants within an introductory programming workshop for adults.
Some Of My Lingering Questions/Thoughts
What are some other examples of what culturally responsive debugging might look like?
How would those other examples compare in different cultures?
There appears to be a conflation with the use of the word “culture” to mean both race and profession
I’m also hung up on the word “expert” as coming across as homogenous among the participants; however, I’m unsure how to delineate different types of expertise people might have in relation to different cultures
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