Resisting Edtech Colonialism through Inclusive Innovation in Kentucky Appalachia
Date
2021-09
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Digital Promise
Abstract
Colonialism occurs “when one nation subjugates another, conquering its population and exploiting it, often while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people” (National Geographic, 2019). With K-12 public school systems increasingly becoming 1-to-1, hundreds of millions of tax dollars being directed towards computer science and computational thinking (CS/CT) education, and educational technology (edtech) companies vying to capture the K-12 market share, it behooves us to wonder: Whose interests are CS/CT edtech are promoting? While “CS/CT edtech” is not a nation, it has potential to act like a colonizer because (1) it has its own language and culture that it aims to promote, (2) has great economic and political clout, and (3) the culture and values currently promoted are fairly monolithic.
The NSF-funded researcher-practitioner partnership Tough As Nails project faces this tension head-on because the program objective is to create a K-8 CS/CT curricular pathway in two school districts in Kentucky Appalachia, where the researchers are from Silicon Valley with little familiarity with Appalachian culture and education. Our core project team (from CA, KY, and PA) has so far resisted “edtech colonialism” by upholding shared visions of “student agency is core,” “Kentucky leads the development” and “competencies first (then themes, then tools).”
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Keywords
Kentucky Appalachia, computational thinking, inclusive innovation, community cultural wealth, culturally responsive rural education