Fractal Village Unplugged: Design-Based Research On Computing with Marginalized Youth

Abstract

At an alternative high school serving predominantly at-risk underrepresented students evicted from mainstream education, we designed and implemented Fractal Village, a critical/computational/constructionist-pedagogy (C3) learning environment. Fractal Village, instantiated in the virtual-world "Second Life," constituted an empirical environment to research my emergent model of mathematical/computational agency (m/c) as well as an intervention aiming to foster such agency. Key research objectives were to: (1) study relations amongst cognitive, affective, material, technological, and social factors that would contribute to individual development of m/c agency; and (2) delineate design principles for fostering m/c agency. The student cohort engaged collaboratively in virtual-world imaginative construction activities each manifesting generative themes (Freire, 1968), to which the designers-as-teachers tailored mathematical and computer-science concepts, such that students appropriated the STEM content apropos of tackling their own emergent construction problems. We argue that to build agency, students must develop both skills and dispositions—a spiraling inter-constructive growth and articulate a developing methodology for fostering agency development. We conclude that we can, and must, engage at-risk youth by helping them to build STEM identities, engaging their a priori m/c agency, and customizing skills and dispositions-related classroom discursive supports.