So as I studied the patterns of hostility in language around race, ethnicity, and culture differences over time, I also started to notice there were connections with the events that preceded the hostility. In every case it was the same basic pattern: Group A welcomes Group B. As Group B begins to gain power, respect, or wealth Group A begins to feel threatened and resorts to escalating aggression towards Group B. I scoured digital archives and found advertisements and posters against Chinese immigrants. I found newspaper clippings about Irish immigrants. I even included the passages from our North Carolina room. Then I snagged a recent Facebook post that was anti-immigrant. I took these brief passages and created what I dubbed Maddening Libs. I removed the words that referenced specific groups and challenged my test subjects to guess when each was written. It was eye-opening. I shared some political cartoons as well that fit well with this topic. We then turned our conversations to immigration, in particular as we began the abstraction phase of identifying the causes of this type of animosity towards groups of people. At this point, I connected this entire process to computational thinking. Algorithms are everywhere. You start to think differently as you learn about the structure of a problem. So I issued a challenge to those I was working with on this passion project: rewrite these algorithms to change the way we interact with one another to prevent negative outcomes. This was the first experience with connecting computational thinking to subjects outside of science, math, and coding. It will not be the last!
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I grew up in a home with computers...and parts of computers everywhere.
My dad was building computers before they could be commercially purchased. In the early 1980s, I played text based games like Adventure for hours on the first one he purchased: the TI-99. The phrase "computational thinking" was not a phrase I ever heard. I just knew that with logic, I could gather information that helped me solve problems with direct questioning. It should not be a surprise that I was also an avid reader of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were published then. If/then situations intrigued me. The ability to go back and choose differently and change the outcome taught me the impact of variables. I received Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes for Christmas in 1993. The more I read, the more I noticed patterns in the storytelling style: an Algorithm of sorts that makes this author's works uniquely King. Only, in 1993, I didn't have that word on my English teacher radar. I just knew that I was thinking in patterns that helped me somewhat predict the outcomes of the stories. Fast forward to 2019 I stumbled upon the Google Computational Thinking course and put it on my summer learning list. Then an email from ISTE landed in my inbox about a FREE course on computational thinking through ISTE-U. I signed up - the idea of accountability partners and online conversations about my learning with virtual classmates was just what I needed! As I worked through the lessons, my mind wandered and I began to connect my early experiences with Adventure, Choose Your Own Adventure books, and even Stephen King. Then in the midst of the course, I went on a field trip with some middle school participants of one of our summer library program sites. We visited the North Carolina room at our downtown library. This particular visit was in conjunction with a novel that was on their reading list: Crow, by Barbara Wright. In this novel, the young main character recounts events in the days surrounding racially motivated violence in Wilmington, North Carolina - the town where we live. As I read the primary source documents and narratives of those that experienced this event, I began to notice patterns that connected these documents to issues this country - and others - are currently experiencing. I decided then that I wanted to make sure my final product involved my passions: history and language. So I began to decompose the issue of hostility in language around race, ethnicity, and culture differences over time and look for more patterns that would help me help learners identify the precursors to these issues - and hopefully prevent them. ...stay tuned for part two. |
AuthorJeannie Timken Archives
March 2023
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