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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AuthorJeannie Timken Archives
March 2023
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