High Tech Programmers in Low-income Communities: Creating a Computer Culture in a Community Technology Center

Lessons learned from Oakes’s school reform framework (1992) can help us understand similar issues in non-school settings and how to think about equity minded reform in these settings. In this paper, we will apply Oakes’s technical, normative, and political dimensions in the case of the Computer Clubhouse, a Community Technology Center, to illustrate how the barriers to change in afterschool settings are similar to that in schools. We were concerned with the need to help young people become more technologically fluent, particularly in their ability to computer program. Our analysis builds on two years of observation and community development at the Computer Clubhouse, where programming had initially not taken root. In our discussion, we will focus on the impacts of the normative and technical aspects of change, such as the introduction of a new programming environment oriented towards media production, and the increased amount of mentor support. For the last twenty years, issues of the digital divide have driven efforts around the world to address the lack of access to computers and the Internet, pertinent and language appropriate content, and technical skills in low-income communities (Schuler & Day, 2004a and b). The title of our paper makes reference to a milestone publication (Schon, Sanyal, & Mitchell, 1998) that showcased some of the early work and thinking in this area. Schon, Sanyal and Mitchell’s book edition included an article outlining the Computer Clubhouse model, a type of community technology center, which was developed to create opportunities for youth in low-income communities to become creators and designers of technologies by Resnick, Rusk, and Cooke (1998). The model has been very successful scaling up, with over 110 Computer Clubhouses now in existence worldwide. Walk into any Computer Clubhouse and you are likely to see youth creating and manipulating graphics, animations, videos, and music and often integrating multiple media. The professional image-processing tool, Adobe Photoshop, is particularly popular. Indeed, a “Photoshop culture” has emerged at many Clubhouses, with youth proudly displaying their visual creations on bulletin boards (both physical and online), sharing Photoshop techniques and ideas with one another, and helping Clubhouse newcomers get started with the software. What you don’t see very often, if at all, is a culture of programming that was originally part of the Computer Clubhouse vision to promote technology fluency – “the ability to reformulate knowledge, to express oneself creatively and appropriately, and to produce and generate information (rather than simply to comprehend it)” (National Research Council [NRC], 2000). Computer programming is integral knowledge across disciplines from the sciences to the arts, yet minorities and low-income students are notably absent in computer science-related fields. The Computer Clubhouse, therefore, potentially represents an important and alternative pathway towards technology fluency for marginalized youth. In this paper, we will examine why programming, an aspect of technology fluency, despite all good intentions did not become part of the larger Computer Clubhouse culture. Thus, one goal of our investigation is to introduce the issue of change in community technology centers. While discussions about change are prominent in schools, they have not been part of the conversation around communities and technologies. The second goal is to introduce a successful example that illustrates our efforts to extend technology fluency activities in one Computer Clubhouse. We will present findings that examine our efforts from different technical and normative dimensions in line with Oakes’s framework (1992; Oakes, Rogers, Lipton & Morrell, 2002): (1) activities in the Computer Clubhouse before and after the introduction of a programming environment; (2) mentoring practices and technology conceptions of Clubhouse members; and (3) partnerships between community and local institutions. As we will argue, it was not any particular one, but the combination of all three of these factors was responsible for seeding a programming culture with high tech designers in a low-income community. We intend to contribute to the larger debate on creating equitable technology participation in creative design across all communities.