Introduction to Special Issue: Centering Community Healing, Sustenance, and Resilience in STEM and Computing Education Through Art and Social Justice

Abstract

Computing, technology, and engineering education are in particular need of examining how we can bring love, community, and joy to the center of learning experiences to support a diversity of youth to flourish. Computing and STEM disciplines are often taught in ways that detach knowledge from people and communities, making it difficult to explore a variety of personal, social, and societal connections that are not already at the center of the tech industry. These exclusionary practices limit the way work is accomplished—including who is involved in the design work and who technological innovations are designed for; as well as the way the work is situated within our society—including what problems technology is designed to solve and who benefits from particular innovations (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). Learning experiences and spaces for technology education should support youth as they develop new knowledge and skills in ways that recognize them as full humans, and enable them to ground it in their ideas, perspectives, interests, goals, identities, communities, relationships, and local environments. The goal of this special issue is to bring together educators’, researchers’, and youth voices in conversation about how we are centering self-empowerment in our educational work and how we can drive forward our practices.