Abstract
Following the belief that diversity breeds innovation in scientific endeavors, there is a national push for more diversity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce in order to maintain national economic competitiveness. Currently, STEM-related employment is only 28% non-White; however, greater efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented minorities should increase this figure. Amidst the attention given to supporting “leaky pipelines,” less emphasis has been placed on mitigating challenges associated with bringing diverse cultures together. This article presents a framework for supporting underrepresented minorities in building STEM-relevant skills and enhancing their ability to collaborate with peers different from themselves.
A shift in national demographics has led to a push for greater diversity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce in order to maintain the United States’ economic competitiveness. Currently, only about 28% of STEM-related positions are held by minority workers (Beede et al., 2011); however, further efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented minorities should increase this figure. While much attention has been placed on supporting “leaky pipelines” (Clark Blickenstaff, 2005; Riegle-Crumb, Moore, & Ramos-Wada, 2011; Sadler, Sonnert, Hazari, & Tai, 2012), less emphasis has been placed on mitigating challenges associated with bringing diverse cultures together. There is a need for a theory-based approach to supporting underrepresented minorities in building valuable STEM-related skills while also enhancing their ability to collaborate successfully with peers who are different from themselves.
In this article we describe our initial inquiry into this problem. First, we present evidence of the anticipated shift in workforce demographics, along with the opportunities and challenges associated with bringing culturally heterogeneous teams together. Next, we describe our framework for supporting students in navigating diverse work environments. Finally, we describe an initial implementation of the framework with a small number of students and discuss the insights gained from this pilot. The lessons that we have learned should be valuable for educators seeking to enable students to enter the STEM workforce fully prepared.
Background
According to the Pew Research Data Center, racial and ethnic minorities were responsible for 91.7% of the U.S. population growth between 2000 and 2010 (Passel, Cohn, & Lopez, 2011). Furthermore, although minorities make up about 37% of the U.S. population, 50.4% of the children born in 2011 were part of a racial or ethnic minority (Passel, Livingston, & Cohn, 2012). However, all racial and ethnic minorities combined receive only 28%, 24%, and 21% of the total number of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral STEM degrees, respectively, awarded in the United States (Suresh, 2011). Women are also somewhat underrepresented in STEM; although women occupy almost half the jobs in the U.S. economy, they hold less than 25% of STEM jobs (Ashcraft & Blithe, 2009; Suresh, 2011). Furthermore, even women with STEM degrees are more likely to obtain jobs in health care or education than STEM jobs. Described by Shirley Jackson as the “perfect storm,” these statistics for minorities and women, combined with an aging White male population and visa difficulties experienced by foreign nationals since the attacks of September 11, 2001, indicate that STEM jobs will have to be filled by a more diverse workforce or they may not be filled at all (Jackson, 2004).
In response to the demographic imbalance and the need for additional employees in the STEM sector, countless efforts to increase the number of women and minorities in STEM have been developed (Herrera & Hurtado, 2011). If effective, these programs will lead to a demographic shift in the STEM workforce. This diversity may have both positive and negative effects on team processes and performance. Creativity, satisfaction, productivity, synergy, and team member well-being are potential positive impacts of cultural and gender diversity (Stahl, Mäkelä, Zander, & Maznevski, 2010). Generally, the most attractive benefit of diversity for organizations is the innovation that arises as people of different cultures and genders, with different experiences and approaches to problem solving, interact and make connections between previously unrelated agents, goods, and knowledge.
On the other hand, diversity is sometimes framed as a “mixed blessing” or a “double-edged sword” (Distefano & Maznevski, 2000; Stahl et al., 2010; Williams & O’Reilly, 1998) because of possible negative effects, including value incongruence, communication, decreased social integration, inhibition of decision making, and process losses. As a result, organizations all over the United States are grappling with ways to manage diversity within the workplace through diversity initiatives, diversity consultants, and training programs (Stevens, Plaut, & Sanchez-Burks, 2008). Although we believe that these various programs are both important and necessary, we argue in this article that, in order for organizations to realize the full benefits of diversity and avoid obstacles, students must have opportunities to intentionally build the skills necessary to ensure successful collaboration with peers from other cultures prior to entering the workplace.
Proposed Framework
Our proposed framework endeavors to build capacities crucial to working in diverse groups while simultaneously developing the skills needed across STEM areas. Here we define each of the constructs targeted in the framework—emotional self-awareness, empathy, and computational thinking—before discussing their interrelationships.
Emotional self-awareness is defined as the ability to recognize one’s own internal states (Kabat-Zinn, 1994; Langer, 1989; Salovey & Mayer, 1989). The awareness of emotions enables people to know their strengths and limits as well as appropriate times to ask for help. According to Salovey and Mayer, people generally attend to their emotions in three distinct ways: They are accepting, engulfed, or self-aware. Accepting people tend to be aware of their feelings but do not try to alter them. They are passive in the sense that recognition does not necessarily call for action. On the other hand, engulfed people tend to be overwhelmed by their emotions; they try to avoid dealing with their emotions and are often paralyzed by them if they attempt to act. Finally, people who are self-aware maintain a healthy balance between being overwhelmed and unaffected by their emotions; they are able to reflect on their emotions and act according to their perceptions.
Empathy is one of the main factors mediating positive and effective social relationships in many aspects of our lives (Davis, 1996). Whether one is seeking to get along with a boss or collaborate in a team setting, empathy contributes to one’s ability to understand others and build relationships that are beneficial for both parties involved (Batson et al., 1995; Davis, 1983). Preston and de Waal’s (2003) perception-action model of empathy asserts that empathy, unless inhibited, is an automatic reaction to perceiving the state of another. Beyond simply perceiving what another person is feeling, empathy in this model encompasses prosocial behavior (taking action to reduce another’s distress), cognitive empathy (mental representation of another’s emotional state), sympathy (feeling remorse for the distress of another), and emotion contagion (having a similar emotion after seeing the emotional state of another).
Computational thinking is a set of concepts (such as sequencing of events), conditionals, and strategies (such as iteration and modulation) that draw upon the world of computing (Lee et al., 2011). Computational skills are valuable for understanding and problem solving in a wide range of fields other than computer science, including STEM fields and even the arts and humanities (Bundy, 2007).
Prior research literature provides ample justification for focusing on these capacities as part of an effort to improve collaboration across diverse groups in STEM-related professions. Several researchers (Cherniss & Goleman, 2001; Cox, 2011; Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Kamps & Engelbrecht, 2011) have suggested that building emotional self-awareness and empathy is fundamental to enabling effective collaboration in diverse environments. Researchers have determined that empathy has many beneficial effects on attitudes and behaviors (Stephan & Finlay, 1999). For example, empathy may lead people to see that they are not so different from other groups, but that they share a common identity. In turn, these feelings of sameness might reduce the perceived threat and anxiety often associated with other groups and ease one’s interactions with those groups. Empathy may also teach people about attributional patterns, again helping them to see their similarities with others, and it may enhance their concern for the feelings of group members. Overall, it is clear that the ability to empathize with others is an important prerequisite for healthy relationships among members of a diverse group. More straightforward, perhaps, is the relationship between empathy and emotional self-awareness; that is, as people come to understand themselves better, they also develop a greater ability to empathize (Goleman, 2006).
As we further detail below, in this framework we suggest that emotional self-awareness and empathy skills can be developed as students create stories. We also contend that implementing stories in a computational medium should support computational thinking. This framework builds on related prior research demonstrating that digital storytelling can be a powerful exercise for minority youth, as well as on evidence that computational environments can be used to create meaningful narratives. Hall and Damico (2007) suggested that African American students can share and create knowledge with print-based and digital forms of literacy as a culturally relevant form of learning. This approach is exemplified in the Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth (DUSTY) project (Hull, 2003), where students participated in after-school, evening, and summer programs at a community center to create digital texts. This process involves combining text, voice, images, and other media from popular youth culture to create a story, using an approach similar to that suggested by Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2002). In Hull’s project, student participants demonstrated gains in literacy as shown through the recontextualization of text, authorial agency, and compositional strategies, as well as developing the capacity for self-reflection. Indeed, Hull stated that “the goal is to position participants to tell stories about self and community; and to use those moments of narrative reconstruction to reflect on past events, present activities, and future goals” (p. 232).
DUSTY’s goal of self-reflection finds support from other research showing that storytelling gives students opportunities to gain cognitive perspective on emotionally important life events (Dyson & Genishi, 1994). In other words, telling stories about significant life events gives one an opportunity to reappraise thoughts related to an event (Smyth & Pennebaker, 2008). This role of storytelling as a cultivator of self-understanding is important to the present study, in that one of the goals of the learning environment is developing emotional self-awareness. Also, during the act of storytelling the author must imagine the other characters’ thoughts, feelings, and actions (Fairbairn, 2002; Manney, 2008). Since the student participants in our framework are writing about actual events, they have opportunities to practice the skill of reflecting on and recognizing other’s emotions in the context of real-life situations.
We push these ideas further by suggesting that computational environments can harness the power of a digital storytelling exercise and, simultaneously, support the development of computational thinking. The work of Burke and Kafai (2010) suggests that it is possible to guide students toward achievement of two seemingly disparate goals in the same project. Burke and Kafai described a middle-school classroom-writing workshop in which students utilized a computational medium called Scratch for digital storytelling. The ultimate goal of the writing workshop was to teach composition as well as programming, and the authors found this approach to be a viable way to achieve both goals.
Pilot Implementation
Research Question
Research Question 1 (RQ1): Can computational narratives be used to build computational thinking, emotional self-awareness, and empathy?
Technology
For this pilot implementation, the environment used by Burke and Kafai (2010; see Figure 1) was chosen as a platform from which students develop their stories. Factors favoring the selection of Scratch included its ability to support students (ages 8 and up) in learning to program, its ability to accommodate storytelling, and its appeal to diverse audiences. Again, part of our goal is to support computational thinking. Learning to program a computer is an authentic learning activity that requires computational thinking. As shown by Resnick et al. (2009), a number of computational concepts are incorporated into Scratch, and programming is a way to introduce computational strategies (see Figure 1 & Figure 2).
Scratch programming language.
Two examples of computational thinking concepts embedded in Scratch. As students are programming, they must engage in debugging, a computational thinking strategy, when the program is not working as intended.
In Scratch, students can manipulate images of themselves (or recordings of their own voices) to personalize their projects, and they can also use popular media images found on the Internet. This capability is important in the proposed framework in that we want students to use personally meaningful stories to develop emotional self-awareness and empathy. Finally, preliminary evidence (Barker & Cohoon, 2008; Malan & Leitner, 2007) suggests that Scratch might attract a broader audience (e.g., women and minorities) to computing. For example, the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) has called Scratch a promising practice for increasing gender diversity in computing. NCWIT (2008) cites Scratch’s visual appeal and its ability to allow users to express their own creativity as part of its effectiveness as a learning tool. Maloney, Peppler, Kafai, Resnick, and Rusk (2008) found evidence that the multimedia aspect of Scratch facilitated youth engagement with programming. In this framework, we are targeting women and minorities, so Scratch’s potential appeal to these groups makes it a particularly suitable tool.
Participants
Our participants were students at a public charter school serving kindergarten through eighth grade in the U.S. Gulf Coast area. We selected this geographic setting so as to work with students impacted by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in order to have a highly significant event that would be personally meaningful to all participants in which to ground students’ storytelling throughout the project. We began with 20 students; however, 4 left before the completion of the project to attend other summer sports, drama, or music activities. The remaining 16 students constitute the sample referred to in the “Results and Discussion” section below. Of these 16 participants, 9 were female, 15 were African American, and one was of Asian-Pacific Islander descent. Thirteen of the students had just completed sixth grade; 2 were entering Grade 6 and 1 had completed Grade 7. None of the students had prior experience using the Scratch programming environment.
Data Collection Protocol
Individual interviews
We conducted semistructured interviews with each student before and after the intervention. A written biographical questionnaire was administered to each participant before the interviews. The questionnaire was designed to provide the researchers with demographic information about the participants as well as their previous experiences with computers and programming and their possible intention to pursue a career in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics in the future.
Computational thinking test
A study-specific test (see the Appendix) was used to gauge students’ development of computational thinking as a result of participating in the pilot study. The questions presented blocks of code such as the one shown in Figure 3, and it asked students to determine the behavior of the object being controlled by the blocks.
A block of code presented in the logic test. The student is asked to indicate what the cat will do in the scenario shown.
Procedure
Throughout the pilot study, Scratch was used as a platform for students to create their stories. The pilot began in May 2010 with project staff members conducting 10 three-hour workshops for teachers and students in an afterschool program. During the workshops, students and teachers were introduced to Scratch, guided through activities to familiarize them with the program, and then shown how to storyboard and implement their stories in Scratch. The following summer, workshops were conducted at a 6-week camp with sessions lasting from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m.
The 6-week summer camp curriculum was designed through previous iterative studies (Daily, 2010; Daily & Brennan, 2008). Students were guided through the exploration of emotion and identity, beginning first with self-awareness and moving on subsequently to other-awareness. Students first established self-awareness by asking themselves questions such as “How do I feel?” or “Who am I?” and ended by examining their relationships with others (e.g., “Who am I in my community? How do others feel?”). This sequence of activities was useful in developing the two desired traits of emotional self-awareness and empathy.
Week 1 of the digital storytelling camp focused on introducing the students to each other and to Scratch. Students were allotted time for introspection. We began with an overview of Scratch, programming, and computational thinking. Using real-world programming examples and interactive roleplaying, we explored computational thinking concepts. Students’ time on the computer was limited during the first 2 weeks of camp as we devoted more time to understanding the cultures in which they participate.
The goal of Week 2 was for the students to compare experiences. As in the previous week, students were asked to continue their self-reflection, but now they were also invited to begin thinking beyond their own worldviews. Activities were geared toward comparing and contrasting similar or shared experiences. The students continued to build their programming skills with brief Scratch lessons each day. For example, students interviewed each other and then created Scratch projects based on what they had learned.
In Week 3 the focus shifted to understanding multiple perspectives. Students examined their own and other people’s perspectives as well as various different factors that might influence these perspectives. The staff led a group discussion on the oil spill, during which students shared their thoughts, perspectives, and reactions. Students began to do remixes of Scratch projects; that is, they chose a project in the Scratch example folder and changed something about it to demonstrate that they understood how it works.
Week 4 was devoted to diversity of thought. Students were given a chance to delve deeper into trying to grasp the perspective of others, and they discussed how emotions can shape perspectives or result in perceptual differences. They experienced and identified inattentional blindness (Simons & Chabris, 1999), which occurs when a person fails to notice a stimulus that is in plain sight. In a famous example of this concept given by Simons and Chabris, a person viewing a video is asked to count the number of times a basketball is passed. During the short video, a gorilla dances through the midst of the basketball players; because the subject is intently counting the passes, he or she often fails even to notice the gorilla. After each activity, the staff conducted a group discussion on the similarities and differences among what the students noticed in the world. By Week 4 many of the students had gained confidence in their ability to create in Scratch and were progressing from small, exploratory Scratch projects to larger, more focused undertakings. Students created animation projects to demonstrate what they had learned about taking the perspective of others; they also created commercials related to the oil spill, based on what they had shared in the group discussion and their previous research.
Week 5 focused on storytelling. Students learned to identify the parts of a story as they created storyboards for their final projects. Using activities such as storyboard drills and reverse storyboarding, students were encouraged to think about the various parameters of their stories. The latter half of the week was devoted exclusively to preparation of final projects. Students collected factual information through research; created storyboards, scripts, and scenes; and applied their newly developed Scratch abilities to create detailed animations.
During Week 6, students finished their final projects and polished other projects that they wanted to demonstrate for their family and friends on Scratch Day and at the closing ceremony. On the last day of the camp, students displayed their mastery of the program by giving presentations to their peers, teachers, and parents.
Results and Discussion
Emotional Self-Awareness and Empathy
The pilot project showed promise for engaging students in storytelling that can support the development of emotional self-awareness and empathy. All participants reported that they were able to tell their stories successfully using Scratch and express their ideas differently than they had done in the past. Furthermore, the oil spill proved to be a relevant storytelling theme that students could utilize to generate stories. Some of the students’ stories revealed how the oil spill impacted their families and family traditions. For example, one student’s narrative lamented the end of her family ritual of seafood broils (Figure 4), expressing her own sadness as well as that of other family members. By thinking about how she felt, this student was engaging in identification of emotion, a critical part of self-awareness (Perez, 2011). Similarly, by labeling how her family felt, she was demonstrating that she had observed and could understand the feelings of others. As discussed earlier with regard to the Perception-Action model, perceiving emotion is a first step in responding (Preston & De Waal, 2003).
Student project reflecting on the damage and emotional impact of the oil spill. The student used Scratch to express sadness related to loss of a family tradition.
Another student detailed his sister’s personal experience within the restaurant business, where business slowed to a crawl. As shown in Figure 5, the character whom he selected to represent his sister embodied the emotion that he perceived her as experiencing. In this scene of the story, the character is sitting, with her head in her hands, expressing the challenges associated with her business. Here again we see an opportunity for a student to practice perceiving, recognizing, and even representing the emotions of another person.
Student project describing his sister’s experience with losing customers at her seafood restaurant because of the oil spill.
Even the students not as directly impacted by the oil spill had a common event as the basis for interaction with each other and the facilitators around them. These students had heard various conversations about the oil spill but did not understand the magnitude of its impact or how it connected to them directly. As shown in Figure 6, project activities served as a way for them to connect with and empathize with their peers.
Student project describing the impact of the oil spill and the emotions experienced as a result of the damage.
Computational Thinking and Interest in STEM
Almost all of the students (82%) indicated that they enjoyed working with Scratch, and 94% of them felt that they understood its functionality. The overall participant logic posttest average was 68%, as compared with the pretest average of 39%. It should be noted that the pretest figure represents the average of the initial 20 students, while the posttest figure averages the results of the 16 students who completed the program. Some of the participants did not put their names on the posttest, making it impossible to isolate the 16 applicable pretests. Although students still struggled to clearly define computational thinking during follow-up interviews, an analysis of their projects revealed their successful use of computational concepts, including “loops” (repeat a sequence of activities) and “broadcast” (communication between programming objects), as well as the use of conditionals (if-then statements) and sequential logic to carry out their stories.
All of the students demonstrated a more targeted preference when asked about career options. Participants who had shrugged, responded that they did not know, or listed two to four potential career choices in the precamp interview all chose one specific area of interest in the postcamp interview. While only two students moved from humanities to engineering, and only one of those was specifically drawn to computer science, all students demonstrated more focus, even at their relatively young age, in terms of career interest. This result is extremely important, in that having a career pathway in mind at this stage will enable them to pursue the proper coursework and perhaps also seek suitable mentors who can help them develop and stay on course toward their career goals.
Study Limitations
The pilot study had several limitations. First, other than previous work by the present authors, there is little research exploring the idea of supporting diversity and computational thinking simultaneously. The present research, then, should be viewed as exploratory rather than explanatory, but it lays important groundwork for future studies. Methodologically, our commitment to student confidentiality meant that we did not compare any individual student’s pretest with his or her posttest to identify specific improvements in computational thinking. Also, our observations about students practicing skills of empathy and emotional self-awareness are limited to an analysis of the projects that they created. Future studies could add rigor by involving coders who are unaware of the research hypothesis so as to eliminate potential bias. Furthermore, it would be beneficial to see how students apply their self-awareness and empathy skills in actual practice. In other words, does practicing these skills in the digital world extend to real-world interactions? Finally, interview questions always introduce room for self-report bias. Students could have been reporting what they felt the interviewer wanted them to say. Even with these limitations, we believe that the pilot study showed promise for supporting our goals and that, with some of the refinements just mentioned, it would yield more robust results.
Conclusions
The United States will not be able to meet its future workforce demands without developing the skills of women and racial and ethnic minorities who make up a large percentage of the nation’s population. As a result, many programs have been developed to help underrepresented minorities prepare for careers in computing—careers that require strong computational thinking. If these programs are successful in increasing the numbers of minority students, the workforce will become diverse, thus creating an environment where people of different backgrounds will have to work together.
We have presented digital storytelling through computational media as a culturally relevant practice to foster the development of empathy, self-awareness, and computational thinking in students, and we have described the encouraging results of an initial pilot that put this framework into practice. As students developed their stories and interacted within the environment, they were able to reflect on their own emotions as well as those of others. At the same time, they were able to think computationally in order to express their thoughts and ideas in the Scratch environment.
The lessons learned are particularly important for educators seeking to prepare students for the 21st-century workforce, where students must be not only academically competent and creative but also interpersonally skilled. With the large number of requirements and expectations competing for educators’ attention, approaches, like the one presented here, that enable educators to accomplish multiple curricular goals at the same time as well as to address students holistically, will become increasingly important.
Footnotes
Appendix
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation Grant, Award #1116427, “Developing Computational Thinking through Digital Storytelling: Coping with the Effects of the Oil Spill.”