Teaching race across disciplines using interdisciplinary collaboration

In the wake of widespread protests against police violence during a time when the Covid-19 epidemic’s racially disparate impacts highlight the inequities in our health systems and economy, academics are having searching conversations about how we talk about racism with our students. It has also elicited painful testimony about the experiences of college educators who have dared to teach about racism. Scholars in African American Studies, Ethnic Studies and related disciplines have been studying and teaching about racism for decades, often at great professional cost and without adequate institutional support. Faculty outside of those areas who hadn’t seen a connection between what they teach and systemic racism are making connections and searching for ways to respond. Any attempt to address how we should teach right now must acknowledge that while some faculty are approaching this subject with idealism, interest, and concern about getting it right, others – disproportionately faculty of color – are weary and wary.

Much of what’s been offered to faculty focuses on strategies for talking about race and racism in class. There’s advice from civil rights educators, webinars, and tips from the Chronicle of Higher Education. But Brenda Leake, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and professor of Education at The College of New Jersey, cautions faculty who are looking for simple solutions to the problem, such as adding a learning goal to a syllabus along with a related reading or activity. Individually, and collectively, faculty need to be clear about what they are trying to accomplish in talking about race, to know the content and to have instructional strategies matched to the content and the students.

It’s a false separation to say, oh, here’s the curriculum without having instructional strategies to deliver or to have instructional strategies, knowing techniques and strategies for instruction, but not really understanding the content. Well, that it’s a false separation. If you want to talk about effective learning scenarios, you have to understand both. You can have content that’s wonderfully rich in terms of its potential, but if it’s delivered ineffectively or in ways that counter the content that’s being taught, then it’s really a waste.

Personal interview, June 29, 2020

That’s why some scholars who work on race argue that professors who haven’t studied these issues shouldn’t be teaching them. Instead, they argue, students should be encouraged to take classes in African American Studies and related fields, and college should provide the support and recognition that work deserves. Ohio State University economist Trevon Logan made this argument in a recent Twitter thread about his discipline’s failure to value this type of scholarship. (See this cautionary tale about economist Lisa Cook’s decade-long struggle to publish her “groundbreaking” work on the role of racial terrorism in suppressing Black innovation between 1870-1940 for an example of that failure.)

Logan’s perspective has particular salience amid reports that in the face of the financial crisis precipitated by the Coronavirus pandemic, academic leaders are cutting programs in African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies, as well as contingent faculty, where women and people of color are over-represented.

Meanwhile, there are real consequences to producing graduates who are allowed to think that race and social justice issues are extraneous to their fields of study. The recent controversy over a respected science publisher’s reported acceptance of paper whose authors claimed they’d developed a system to predict “criminality” based on facial images is just one of many examples of the problem. As an open letter signed by more that 2,000 scholars from diverse disciplines argued:

“This upcoming publication… is emblematic of a larger body of computational research that claims to identify or predict “criminality” using biometric and/or criminal legal data.[1] Such claims are based on unsound scientific premises, research, and methods, which numerous studies spanning our respective disciplines have debunked over the years.[2] Nevertheless, these discredited claims continue to resurface, often under the veneer of new and purportedly neutral statistical methods such as machine learning, the primary method of the publication in question.[3] In the past decade, government officials have embraced machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) as a means of depoliticizing state violence and reasserting the legitimacy of the carceral state, often amid significant social upheaval.[4] Community organizers and Black scholars have been at the forefront of the resistance against the use of AI technologies by law enforcement, with a particular focus on facial recognition.[5] Yet these voices continue to be marginalized, even as industry and the academy invests significant resources in building out “fair, accountable and transparent” practices for machine learning and AI.[6]] “

Coalition for Critical Technology. “Abolish the #TechtoPrisonPipeline: Crime prediction technology reproduces injustices and causes real harm” Medium, June 23, 2020

Here, the Coalition argues that computer scientists need to be better educated about the historical context and social implications of the work they do and the ways in which they do it:

Computer scientists can benefit greatly from ongoing methodological debates and insights gleaned from fields such as anthropology, sociology, media and communication studies, and science and technology studies, disciplines in which scholars have been working for decades to develop more robust frameworks for understanding their work as situated practice, embedded in uncountably infinite[30] social and cultural contexts.[31] 

Coalition for Critical Technology. “Abolish the #TechtoPrisonPipeline: Crime prediction technology reproduces injustices and causes real harm” Medium, June 23, 2020

Questioned by MIT Technology Review, the publisher, Springer Nature, said that the paper had actually been rejected during peer review. As reported, the Springer statement does not address the Coalition’s other demands – that the criteria used to evaluate the paper be made public, that Springer “issue a statement condemning the use of criminal justice statistics to predict criminality, and acknowledging their role in incentivizing such harmful scholarship in the past,” and that other publishers announce that they, too, will reject submissions employing similar methods.

Would more robust exposure to the kinds of scholarship that the Coalition advocates prevent such misconceived projects in the future? Computer science educators would need to be part of the conversation to find out. In a recent blog post, Mark Guzdial, a leading figure in computer science education, admitted he has a lot to learn: “I know too little about race, and I have not considered the historic and systemic inequities in CS education when I make my daily teaching decisions…. Let’s learn about race in CS education and make change to improve learning for everyone.”

The soul-searching isn’t limited to computer science. For example, the Journal of Chemical Education published a statement June 19, 2020 on Confronting Racism in Chemistry Journals. A related editorial calls on chemistry educators to do a number of things, including:

“Educate yourself and your co-workers on the scientific literature that shows how systemic and insidious bias is in science. Some valuable resources on both explicit and implicit bias can be found here: https://advance.umich.edu/stride-readings/. Use these data to refute claims that science is purely a meritocracy, that the playing field is inherently equal for everyone, and that scientists are being hired/promoted solely on their merits.”

Melanie S. Sanford, ACS Cent. Sci. 2020, XXXX, XXX, XXX-XXX
Publication Date:June 17, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.0c00784
Copyright © 2020 American Chemical Society

Ideally, faculty such as Guzdial who are beginning to learn about structural racism in their own disciplines would be able collaborate with relevant campus experts to ensure that racial literacy and a commitment to racial equity is reinforced across the curriculum. What I propose in this essay is that there are models of interdisciplinary collaboration that can be equitably deployed to deepen students understanding of institutional racism across the curriculum. The models I am going to discuss were developed as a result of research funded by the National Science Foundation over the course of the past dozen years, for the purpose of deepening students’ computational fluency and science literacy. (While I was and am part of these research teams, the opinions offered here are my own.) These models – Distributed Expertise and Collaborating Across Boundaries – provide structures for both reciprocal learning and grappling with real-world issues.

With proper institutional support -flexibility to schedule classes concurrently and logistical support for community engaged learning, for example – these research-based models could be implemented without perpetuating the marginalization of social justice scholarship.

1.Distributed expertise models

These models are intended to facilitate inquiry-based learning and cross-disciplinary collaboration in a way that does not require team teaching. Then collaborating courses have separate learning goals, deliverables, and grading. Below, I will include descriptions of these models, links to some of research that has been published, and a description of our current research project, which is entering its second year. I’ll follow this with some ideas of how the collaborations might work in practice.

What they are. From 2008-2013, I was part of a team led by Villanova University researchers Lillian Cassel and Thomas Way that developed and tested three models for teaching computing across departments and institutions. Our work was funded by NSF Award #0829616. These models were called Remote Experts with Local Facilitator, Cooperative Experts, and the Special Resource model.

Remote Expert Model. Under the remote expert model, one class with deeper expertise in a particular area contributes to a another class’s project, often at a different institution. In an example we described in this paper, game design students at Villanova contributed code to a game engine being designed at at TCNJ and TCNJ Interactive Storytelling students analyzed the story bible for the TCNJ game implementation class to identify plot holes before the story was implemented in code. The game implementation class gave the Interactive Storytelling class an interactive storytelling engine that the storytelling class used in order create their midterm projects. Then the Interactive Storytelling students shared their projects with Villanova software engineering students who did a code review.

Potential application: A chemistry class might have a unit in which students learn to detect contaminants in water. They might provide such an analysis to a class that investigates environmental justice or public health issues. The chemistry students would be exposed to the scholarship on the systemic failures behind such events as the water crises in Flint, Michigan, Newark, New Jersey and elsewhere. The environmental justice students would be exposed to a practical application of scientific research.

Special Resource Model. The Special Resource Model involves bringing in subject matter experts from a different field in to collaborate with the STEM class. The Gumshoe project, a collaboration between TCNJ professors Monisha Pulimood (Computer Science), Donna Shaw (Journalism) and Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Emilie Lounsberry is a great illustration of this model. (Lounsberry became a full-time faculty faculty member in the TCNJ journalism program after this project was published.) Lounsberry had been covering the Philadelphia courts for a long time, and had observed that many cases of firearms possession never seemed to go to trial. Shaw obtained court records of nearly 700 people arrested for unlicensed gun possession in January and February, 2006. A subset of these individuals were also accused of violent felonies. Pulimood’s students created a database to help her and her students manage the data. They tracked these cases through the courts and found that nearly half the cases were withdrawn by the DA’s office or dropped, that witnesses often failed to appear, and that only a small percentage of the arrestees charged with both illegal gun possession and violent felonies received significant jail time. Presented with the results, the Inquirer did its own analysis, reaching similar conclusions. Lounsberry and a team of reporters ultimately produced a four-part series that led to significant reforms in the Pennsylvania court system. You can read a detailed description of the project in this 2011 paper for the Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education for the ACM (SIGSCE).

Potential application. This model is well-suited to collaborations in such areas as journalism, education and public information. For example, chemistry or physics class could collaborate with a writing, education, or health communication class on producing material about climate change or environmental justice. Social scientists could collaborate with education majors or artists to produce works that elucidate issues related to race, power, privilege and trauma.

Cooperative Experts Model. The cooperative experts model differs from the special resource or remote experts model in that each the two collaborating classes are conceived as genuinely collaborating, as opposed to operating in a provider- client relationship. In this model, each class has distinct areas of expertise that they bring to the collaboration. Ideally, the classes are scheduled simultaneously, and there are periodic joint meetings at the beginning, middle and end of the project where students can brainstorm ideas and develop and implement team projects. This requires considerable communication and modeling between the instructors, but it can be very fruitful.

Potential application. Imagine a biomedical engineering class taking on “race correction” in medicine in collaboration with a class focused on some aspect of critical technology studies. Race correction is the practice of creating medical devices and treatment protocols that rely on algorithms that use race as part of their criteria, despite the fact that race is a social, not biological category that serves as a poor proxy for genetically-defined populations.This June 2020 New England Journal of Medicine article has a concise overview of the controversy, and this handy chart illustrates the scope of the problem. Drawing on the work of physiologist Lundy Braun, Ruha Benjamin describes one insidious outcome of employing race correction in a common medical device, the spirometer, when 15,000 asbestos workers filed a class-action workplace safety lawsuit against a major insulation manufacturer.

“[T]he idea [of] race correction [is] so normalized that there is a button that produces different measures of normalcy by race – the company made it more difficult for Black workers to qualify for workers’ compensation. Black workers were required to demonstrate worse lung function and more severe clinical symptoms than White workers owing to this feature of the spirometer…”

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity Press, 2019, p. 286

This 1999 Baltimore Sun article confirms that the company, Owens Corning asked a judge to remove Black plaintiffs from the suit, even though their scores would have been accepted as indicating lung damage had they been white.

I can envision a collaboration in which the students interrogate the impacts of these practices, and perhaps consider criteria for more equitable tools. For example, the algorithm used to determine the likelihood of successful vaginal birth after a cesarean section known as the VBAC caculator, includes race corrections for both Black and Hispanic women. As this 2019 article from the Women’s Health Issues Journal notes, the inclusion of the non-biological category of race in the algorithm not only lacks scientific justification, it also evokes discredited ideas about the supposed anatomical differences between Black, white and Hispanic women. In an interview with the investigative reporting podcast, Reveal, the lead developer of the VBAC said the inclusion of race in the algorithm was based on empirical observation. However, the authors of the Women’s Health Issues article argue:

The danger of including race in this manner within a clinical algorithm is in implicitly accepting these categories as natural rather than historical and socially constructed. More often, race is included as a proxy for other variables that reflect the effect of racism on health: factors like income, educational level, or access to care.

Darshali Vyas, et. al. Challenging the Use of Race in the Vaginal Birth after Cesarean Section Calculator, Women’s Health Issues 29-3 (2019) 201–204

2. Collaborating Across Boundaries Model (CAB)

Phase one: CABECT. The CAB model builds upon these distributed expertise models by adding a community-engaged learning component. Our study, Collaborating Across Boundaries to Engage Undergraduates in Computational Thinking (CABECT), was supported by he National Science Foundation DUE Award #1141170. As Project PI Sarah Monisha Pulimood explains, “The primary goal of the project is to develop a model for students and faculty to collaborate across diverse disciplines and with a community organization to develop technology-based solutions to address complex real-world problems. ” I served as co-PI.

Students in successive classes in computer science, journalism, and interactive media worked with our local chapter of Habitat for Humanity to develop tools that would make it easier for both the agency and potential homeowners to understand what pollutants might be on their properties, along with the the associated cleanup costs.

This project resulted in the creation of the SOAP database (Students Organized Against Pollution), including maps of brownfields, data on contaminants that could be accessed via maps or tables, links to relevant state legislation and other explanatory content. The journalism and media students also developed content on Ushahidi’s Crowdmap platform for eventual incorporation into the SOAP database, and they used Sanborn Fire maps, old industrial directories and Google images to build tables identifying the locations of polluted sites that might have been torn down and repurposed before the establishment of environmental regulatory authorities in the 1970s. They also built an alternate reality game, #TrentonTrending, to allow community members to deliberate over and propose solutions to the challenges presented to the community by years of economic disinvestment and environmental injustice.

An abandoned factory site in Trenton New Jersey that was part of the focus of the SOAP project. Students in computer science, journalism and media developed tools to help Habitat for Humanity identify pollutants and cleanup costs in properties they might acquire for low income housing.
An abandoned factory site in Trenton New Jersey that was part of the focus of the SOAP project. Students in computer science, journalism and media developed tools to help Habitat for Humanity identify pollutants and cleanup costs in properties they might acquire for low income housing.

Assessment outcomes for the CABECT project were encouraging: students made gains in both computational thinking and civic engagement. More details on the study and the assessment data are available here, here, and here.

CAB: The current work. Our current project, Collaboration Across Boundaries to Engage Undergraduates in STEM Learning, expands the CABECT model across the campus. As we explained in this video for the 2020 STEM for all Video Showcase, by the end of the project, about a dozen faculty, 700 students and perhaps a dozen community partners will have participated in the project by the end of its three-year run. We’ve just concluded our first year.

As you can see from the poster below, the structure of the CAB model readily accommodates collaborations focused on addressing historical and contemporary inequities. Our research questions are focused on STEM learning, but they also include questions related to community engagement and STEM diversity that are best addressed by attention to systemic inequities faced by the community partners, as well as in our classes and curricula. The collaborations we are testing span the range of disciplines and disciplinary combinations, forming a community of practice that is contributing to broader deliberations and actions across campus.

CAB project research design.

We hope that what we learn will be a useful tool in the broader effort to improve both students’ STEM literacy and constructive civic engagement Our project website will report on our progress.

Not just STEM. CAB PI Monisha Pulimood has extended our model beyond STEM in her capacity as the Barbara Meyers Pelson Chair in Faculty-Student Collaboration. Pelson CAB collaborators also complete an interdisciplinary project. They also participate in the CAB training sessions and workshops, but their outcomes are not assessed as part of the research project.

This past spring, English professor Glenn Steinberg’s Bible as Literature class worked with Music professor John Leonard’s College Chorale class on a performance of Arthur Honegger’s symphonic psalm King David. Steinberg’s students supplied extensive program notes based on their research. Although the Covid-19 shutdown kept the concert from being staged, both the program and a virtual performance of selections from the work will go online later this year.

In the 2020-2021 academic year, Computer Science professor Sherif Ferdous and Communication Studies professor Yifeng Hu will lead teams of advanced research students from their respective departments in a unique collaborative course.

As Hu explained in an email, the course is titled: ‘Virtual Reality for Social, Cultural, and Health Issues’, and multiple student groups will explore different topics surrounding social/cultural/health issues… There will be projects that use VR to raise awareness of racial and/or cultural understanding as well as meeting health communication needs, and to potentially bring about social/cultural/behavioral changes.” 

Personal email, July 14, 2020

Conclusion

The challenge of fostering anti-racist pedagogy across the curriculum is both institutional and instructional. At the level of the institution, there must be, as Logan says, respect for the “body of knowledge” generated by scholars on race, racism, and racial inequality. This includes matters that are well beyond the scope of this essay, such as ensuring that support for academic units focused upon these areas is a strategic planning priority as administrators make hard choices during hard times. It also includes fostering faculty deliberation and action on the best ways to ensure that students understand the relevance of these issues across the curriculum.

This essay posits that collaborative classes with interdisciplinary community-engaged projects might be one way to develop both effective instructional strategies and relevant content. The institutional resources required to support such collaborations are already in place in many colleges in universities where offices of community-engaged learning, instructional design and Centers for Teaching and Learning are common. TCNJ’s Center for Teaching and Learning sponsors learning communities that allow faculty to deepen their understanding of issues that affect their pedagogy, often leading to specific actions in the form of campus programming, and administrative initiatives. This could be an ideal place to incubate ideas for teaching collaborations along the lines of the CAB model.

While the protests (or at least the media attention) may subside, the need to address these issues in our classrooms will persist. We have an opportunity to address longstanding inequities and give our students a more comprehensive understanding of their fields of study that will positively inform the kind of professionals and citizens they become.

Acknowledgements

Whenever I talk about this work, I am reminded of the debt of gratitude I owe to many current and former colleagues at TCNJ. I must thank Ursula Wolz, CEO of Riversound Solutions and my former colleague at TCNJ, for inviting me into the world of interdisciplinary computing collaboration. Ursula, Phil Sanders and I collaborated to write the initial proposal for the Interactive Multimedia Major at TCNJ. Ursula was the PI for the first NSF grant for which I was co-PI with Monisha, Broadening Participation in Computing via Community Journalism, which led to the creation of the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers (IJIMS). Reaching back further, I am grateful to TCNJ colleagues Elizabeth Mackie and Terry Byrne. In the early 1990s, we undertook a number of teaching collaborations to give students the experience of creating advertising and merchandising campaigns and launch both print and online magazines.

Collaborating Across Boundaries to Engage Journalism Students in Computational Thinking

This presentation was part of a poster session at the 2015 AEJMC conference in San Francisco, California. A paper based on this publication is currently under review. More information on the CABECT project is available on our research website.

A Post-#Ferguson Reflection

This is the morning after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the August 9, 2014 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. I watched St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s announcement, said a prayer for Brown’s family, the people of Ferguson and the protestors who filled the streets outside the police station there, as well as in cities around the country. I said a prayer for my friends in St. Louis County, some in the media, some who are educators, some in government. I said a prayer for all of the black men I know, and for all of us who love them. And then I went to bed, because I knew that the morning would come, and there would still be serious work to do.

The details of what is happening in Ferguson matter, but the response must take into account the reality that, as New Yorker writer and University of Connecticut history professor Jelani Cobb has written, “Ferguson is America.” full of fears and frustrations that, often misdirected and misplaced, circumscribe the lives of black men daily. Cobb writes:

I was once a linebacker-sized eighteen-year-old, too. What I knew then, what black people have been required to know, is that there are few things more dangerous than the perception that one is a danger. I’m embarrassed to recall that my adolescent love of words doubled as a strategy to assuage those fears; it was both a pitiable desire for acceptance and a practical necessity for survival.  I know, to this day, the element of inadvertent intimidation that colors the most innocuous interactions, particularly with white people. There are protocols for this. I sometimes let slip that I’m a professor or that I’m scarcely even familiar with the rules of football, minor biographical facts that stand in for a broader, unspoken statement of reassurance: there is no danger here. And the result is civil small talk and feeble smiles and a sense of having compromised. Other times, in an elevator or crossing a darkened parking lot, when I am six feet away but the world remains between us, I remain silent and simply let whatever miasma of stereotype or fear might be there fill the void.

I was 24 years old and in graduate school. I had decided to surprise my parents by popping in for a weekend, unannounced. It must have been autumn, because it was dark when I arrived, and it was still early evening.  I came in the front door and found out they weren’t home. I put my bags upstairs, turned on the kitchen light, and I saw their car pulling into the back driveway. I went downstairs to open the back door for them, reaching up with my right hand to flip a light switch, and pulling the door back with my left.. On the back lawn, I made out the figure of a young white police officer pointing his gun at me. I think he said something like, “Hands up! Police!” but I no longer remember. From the right, I heard my father’s voice, and I saw him rounding the back of the car with his arms outstretched.

“Don’t shoot! That’s my daughter!”

The officer paused. I think he turned his head to look at my father and back to me. I stood still. My father stood still, where the officer could see him. He holstered his gun. He confirmed that everything was okay and he left. The crisis had passed. Later, we learned that a neighbor had seen the light go on in the kitchen and panicked, knowing that my parents’ car was not in the driveway and I was away at school. There had been some robberies in the neighborhood. It was a simple misunderstanding, easily rectified.

Fortunately, the officer did not feel threatened. Fortunately, he was able to hear my father. Fortunately, he was not like the panicky rookie cop in Brooklyn who recently shot an unarmed man to death in a stairwell.

Of course, I was reminded of the Richard Pryor joke about one of his own encounters with the police, where he loudly intoned, “I am reaching into my wallet, to get my driver’s license,” because, he said, “I don’t to be no (bleeping) accident!”  Years later,  I told my Race, Gender and News students about the encounter as we discussed how one should cover the acquittal of four police officers in the shooting death of unarmed 22-year-old Amadou Diallo in the doorway of his apartment building. He was, it turned out, reaching for his identification when the heavily-armed police officers fired on him.

What if I had been male?

What if something had been in my hand?

What if my father had not shown up?

My experience was not that of Mike Brown, Amadou Diallo, or John Crawford, the 22-year-old who was shot to death (graphic video warning) in an Ohio Walmart while talking on the phone and holding a toy gun in an open-carry state.  It was, however, frightening enough that I cried writing this, 33 years later. My encounter happened before the height of the crack epidemic, mass incarceration and mass marketing of the hypermasculinity and lunatic madness of corporate-sponsored gangster rap. (See Byron Hurt’s “HipHop Beyond Beats and Rhymes.”)

As the fires are doused in Ferguson, there is pain and anger in the streets. People who put their faith in peaceful protest feel betrayed. Civil libertarians worry about the militarization of police. Certainly these are important issues. TheUS Justice department may impose reforms on the Ferguson Police Department in light of this and other charges of the use of racial profiling and excessive force over a period of years.

Indeed, as former police commissioner Anthony Bouza has argued, police-community tensions reflect a larger societal failure to confront disparities of poverty and race.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has set up a commission to examine the root causes of and potential remedies for the region’s racial and economic divides. When Pres. Lyndon Johnson appointed a similar commission nearly 50 years ago, one of the common understandings to emerge was the need for everyone to feel as if they had a stake in the system. Author Michelle Alexander put it this way:

[T]rue justice will come only when our criminal injustice system is radically transformed: when we no longer have militarized police forces, wars on our communities, a school-to-prison pipeline, and police departments that shoot first and ask questions later. True justice will be rendered not when when a single “guilty” verdict is rendered in one man’s case, but when the system as a whole has been found guilty and we, as a nation, have committed ourselves to repairing, as best we can, the immeasurable harm that has been done.

I’ve asked friends who know the Ferguson area what young people there have to look forward to. They struggle for an answer. Jobs are scarce. Normandy, Missouri, the school system where Michael Brown earned his diploma is so poor, it lost its accreditation in 2013.  In Education Week this past September, Normandy teacher Inga Schaenen argued,

Nearly every student I teach has lived through encounters with the police that nobody should ever have to experience. (I know this from their journal entries written the first week of school.) And we know from research conducted by Gloria Ladson-Billings,Alfred Tatum, and many others regarding African-American students that best practices call for teachers to actively, critically, and morally engage students’ real lives and communities. When we do so, our students will achieve academically. Pedagogically speaking, designing community-responsive, standards-based activities and lessons is a moral imperative in Normandy.

One friend to whom I posed this question directed me to St. Louis Community College’s Bridge to STEM program, which provides intensive tutoring and mentoring to prepare students with a diploma or G.E.D. for study in the life sciences. The school also offers accelerated workforce training in a range of technical fields, in partnership with local industry. Certainly, this is part of the puzzle.

But it leaves unanswered the question that Du Bois posed more than a century ago: “Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white? Especially since, it must be acknowledged,  most poor Americans are not black, and pessimism about future economic opportunities is pervasive in the US and other advanced economies.

Here, again, the work begins anew. I am a journalist and educator, not a civil rights attorney or policy maker.  There is a lot to be said about how the press has covered all of this, and I will leave that to others. I want to help people find a reason for hope.

My own effort, although it may seem unrelated, is to think about how we can use media to support those who people together across lines of difference to work on common community problems. That’s part of my personal stake in projects such as SOAP, an interdisciplinary collaboration to provide New Jersey residents with accessible, comprehensive and current information about polluted properties in their neighborhoods. (If you follow the link, you won’t see much now, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes, that we hope to make public in coming months.) Our hope is that SOAP will help agencies such as Habitat for Humanity in siting affordable housing. We also hope it will be useful to Isles, a Trenton non-profit working to promote environmental and economic sustainability, in finding safe property for the dozens of community gardens its volunteers build to combat hunger. Community gardens not only help combat hunger – they may make communities safer.

This is one of several projects, and it is only a beginning. Ultimately, I think the media’s part of the solution will also have to include a shift toward what I’m calling culturally responsive journalism – a journalism that covers community responses to problems in ways that emphasize that humanity and enlarge the capacity of the community to take action to solve problems. We saw elements of that approach in the coverage of Ferguson – Michel Martin’s #Beyond Ferguson forum, for example. I still believe alternate reality games can be useful in this area. But that is another post.

-30-

 

Also of interest: Sheila Seuss Kennedy calls for a new GI Bill that includes a one year program of civic service and participation.

Toward a more perfect union: the case for culturally responsive computational journalism

The slides below are from a presentation I gave today as this semester’s Faculty Senate Colloquium lecturer at The College of New Jersey. To be chosen by one’s peers to deliver such a research talk is a singular honor. I am particularly grateful to my English department colleague, the distinguished scholar and pundit Cassandra Jackson, whose introduction made me sound like someone I’d like to meet.

Here is the presentation abstract:

I moved from industry into academia 25 years ago because I had come to an understanding that the “hollowing-out” and flattening, of corporate, political and cultural hierarchies would make the role of professional communicators more central to the effective functioning of businesses and communities. As the expansion of the Internet and online technologies upended the news and communication industries, I became increasingly engaged with understanding how professional communicators could adapt to these seismic changes. This ultimately led to my current research in the development of culturally responsive models for teaching and practicing computational journalism. In this talk, I will draw upon that research to articulate a vision for a culturally responsive journalism. I will argue that culturally responsive computational journalism is essential to realizing the constructive potential of the seismic changes that computer science has visited upon the news industry. Properly crafted and implemented, culturally responsive journalism could:

1. Create an inclusive epistemology of journalism that moves beyond naive empiricism and the current propagandistic journalism of assertion
2. Democratize access to media technologies by broadening participation in the development and deployment of civic media
3. Deepen and broaden critical user engagement with the news
4. Deepen and broaden civic engagement
Computing technology and networks afford almost everyone the opportunity to be a publisher, but they also reward those who are computationally fluent with superior access to the public square. For this reason, I envision a future in which broad application and refinement the pedagogical models being developed here and elsewhere can actually empower citizens and strengthen democracy.

Here are links to sources for the presentation:

“Newspaper Newsroom Workforce Continues to Drop.”  Pew Research Journalism Project. March 20, 2014

Broadband technology fact sheet.” Pew Research Internet Project.

Computer and Internet Use 1984-2012 US Census

Closing the Digital Divide: Latinos and Technology Adoption Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project

The State of Digital Divides. Pew Internet Research Project. Nov. 5,2013

The Digital Divide is Still Leaving Americans Behind.” Jessica Goodman,  Mashable,  August 20, 2013

Yahoo Latest Tech Icon to Reveal Lack of Diversity.” Jessica Guynn, USA Today, August 15, 2014

Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers

CABECT research website

CABECT in a nutshell (flyer describing the project, with some preliminary data)