Supporting critical computational literacies through interactive storytelling
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation explores how pedagogical uses of interactive storytelling can support the development of youth critical computational literacies, in and out of school. Despite extensive documentation of inequities in K12 computer science education and numerous initiatives working to address them, we lack theoretical accounts and practical tools for how computing itself plays a role in marginalization and oppression. Meanwhile there are few opportunities for literacy educators and researchers, who are centrally concerned with the relationship between language and power, to participate in K12 computer science education. One barrier to interdisciplinary pedagogy and research has been the lack of shared constructs between literacy studies and the learning sciences. This dissertation proposes critical computational literacies as an interdisciplinary construct encompassing cognitive, situated, and critical scales of literacy practice, and the relationship of each scale of practice to the infrastructural media through which it is enacted. Critical computational literacies provides an account of identity authorship and channeling voices, two forms of critical action by which authors can transform literacies through participation to make room for their identities and for their voices. This dissertation focuses on a ten-week curriculum unit in a midwestern US sixth-grade classroom using Unfold Studio, a web application for reading and writing interactive stories written with a combination of prose and programming. Building on three years of participatory design-based research, this study used mixed methods to analyze how authors used affordances of text and code toward rhetorical and critical ends, how they used interactive storytelling to connect across literacies, and the extent to which literacy participation was associated with computer science learning. One primary contribution of the dissertation is an articulation of critical computational literacies grounded in constructs and methods which are important to both the learning sciences and to literacy studies. I show that interactive storytelling can be an effective medium for supporting critical computational literacies which connect youths' existing literacy practices to the classroom, and which support critical action through identity authorship and channeling voices. Unfold Studio and its curriculum are practical tools for teaching with interactive storytelling. Finally, the dissertation offers a theoretical justification for a literacy-based approach to K12 computer science education which centers youths' lives and stories, with empirical evidence of its efficacy
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Proctor, Christopher Coffey |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Barron, Brigid |
| Thesis advisor | Barron, Brigid |
| Thesis advisor | Blikstein, Paulo, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Garcia, Antero |
| Thesis advisor | Pea, Roy D |
| Degree committee member | Blikstein, Paulo, 1972- |
| Degree committee member | Garcia, Antero |
| Degree committee member | Pea, Roy D |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Christopher Proctor |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Christopher Coffey Proctor
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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