How Inclusive Learning Can Encourage — or Restore — Interest

[This talk was originally given at Codemotion Berlin on October 25th, 2016]

I’m a senior social media and communications manager for a Berlin FinTech company. I wanted to recap my experience at the Django Girls coding workshop, but first — I’m going to start with how I ended up there.

The topic of “women in tech” usually focuses on the macro — on the infrastructural sexism that limits the hiring and advancement of women particular to this industry. It’s also often a discussion of the status quo: what women in tech are facing right now in both digital and physical spaces. But, the macro is built out of the micro, out of individual experiences that repeat and resonate with a collective over time. And, it’s worth following the thread backwards to better understand how this status quo emerged. With that said, I thought I’d give a talk that’s more subjective than most, using my past as a kind of a case study.

In University and CEGEP (in Quebec, where I’m from, this is kind of like college), I studied journalism and liberal arts. I wouldn’t trade in the valuable education I received because it’s helped shape who I am today, and I more or less like myself. But the truth is, I wanted to work in STEM.

I grew up obsessed with space. I read countless books on the topic, had a planetary mobile above my bed, glow in the dark posters of our solar system on my walls, and a toy replica of a NASA space shuttle complete with a Canadarm (which I was particularly fascinated with). At night, I’d go out to my front lawn with the family telescope and try to identify planets and stars. I’d cross reference what I saw using my amateur astronomer books.

In high school, I excelled in science and applied for a scholarship with an essay about my aspirations to be an aerospace engineer. I was accepted into the pure and applied science program in CEGEP. Despite being one of only a handful of women, I still felt like I belonged and was eager to learn.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was quickly squelched. Early on in the semester, in physics class, I had a question and raised my hand (as you do). But, my teacher turned his back to me and ignored it for about a full ten minutes. When he finally addressed me, he told me to simply copy down what he wrote on the board and to do the exercises in the textbook. I felt embarrassed and frustrated. I also never raised my hand in his class again, and instead, allowed the questions to clutter inside me. This wasn’t just episodic. This dismissiveness continued and was also exhibited by my chemistry and calculus teachers. Furthermore, no one kept office hours. It was an incredibly demotivating experience and it convinced me I just wasn’t that good at or that interested in engineering. It seems preposterous that a semester could change my course so dramatically, but it happened.

My best friend, who was studying liberal arts, told me stories of passionate class discussions facilitated by a circular seating arrangement, student lounges, and teachers who were happy to clarify material during office hours. I switched in my second semester and discovered the vast majority of students in the program were also women.

While my experience is my own, there’s ample research to support the idea that gender bias in the classroom and gendered socialisation have a bearing on academic performance, particularly in STEM. In addition to this, female scholars are underrepresented in assigned course content. Dr. Myra Sadker was professor of Education and Dean of the School of Education at The American University and Dr. David Sadker is a professor at The American University. Together, they wrote “Sexism in the Schoolroom,” which examines these forces.

“Teachers praise boys more than girls, give boys more academic help and are more likely to accept boys’ comments during classroom discussions… Numerous researchers… have shown that when students participate in classroom discussion, they hold more positive attitudes towards school, and that positive attitudes enhance learning. It is no coincidence that girls are more passive in the classroom and score lower than boys on SAT’s.”

• Myra and David Sadker, “Sexism in the Schoolroom”

“Girls are less likely to take math and science courses and to participate in special or gifted programs in these subjects, even if they have a talent for them. They are also more likely to believe that they are incapable of pursuing math and science in college and to avoid these subjects… Girls are more likely to attribute failure to internal factors, such as ability, rather than external factors, such as luck.”

• Myra and David Sadker, “Sexism in the Schoolroom”

Women are underrepresented in STEM occupations and hold only 26% of STEM jobs according to a 2013 Department of Commerce report.

I graduated university with a major in journalism and a minor in liberal arts yet I found myself arching back towards STEM. First, as a copywriter at an e-commerce company working with content management systems, and now, with data and some minor Wordpress development as a social media strategist. In all of my work experience following graduation, when I’d have the chance to receive a stretch assignment (which is an assignment that helps build a new skill set), I’d always push for tasks that involved increased analytical thinking and interaction with technology.

A little while ago at work, I was asked by my manager to put together a report on the state of our online brand reputation. She didn’t specify anything more, so I was free to conceptualise this the way I wanted to. I could have kept it relatively static and put together a slideshow on the present state of things: a selection of user questions, comments, and reviews across all spaces where we appear online. However, I wanted to create something dynamic, something that captured the complexity and movement of brand reputation — and a way to make sense of it all. So, I created a brand reputation infrastructure out of Google Sheets and formulated an algorithm that calculated a brand reputation score based on customer sentiment and app store ratings.

Of course, I imagined how much better this infrastructure could be had it been programmed from scratch. So, I started looking into coding workshops around the city. I’m 30, and a total beginner, and really wasn’t sure what was possible for me so late in the game. That’s when I encountered Django Girls Berlin.

Django Girls Berlin is a part of bigger initiative: Django Girls. It’s a non-profit organization led by volunteers who want to bring more women into the world of programming and technology. They hold free one-day workshops for beginners, which teach 30–60 women how to write in Python, a widely used programming language. They’re also taught to use Django, which is a web framework written in Python.

I attended their workshop in late August of this year. It lasted an entire day, from about 9:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m, with a few breaks. Wikimedia was kind enough to offer their spacious and bright office as a venue. When I first entered, I milled around with the other attendees over breakfast and coffee. I was totally at ease within this group: everyone was a woman and everyone was a beginner. The organisers were warm and welcoming, and I was really happy to be in this incredibly positive environment. Of course, this had a motivating effect on me: I was confident and excited to start learning. But, this isn’t a coincidence.

James Paul Gee, an American researcher and member of the National Academy of Education, has done much work concerning affinity groups, and is the author of “Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling” and “Semiotic Social Spaces and Affinity Spaces: From The Age of Mythology to Today’s Schools”. According to Gee, affinity spaces are locations where groups of people meet because of a shared, strong interest or engagement in a common practice, belief, or activity. Because of this, members of an affinity space experience a collective motivation. Gee says affinity spaces are able to bridge barriers of age, race, socio-economic status, and educational level, and thus allow each member to participate as they choose.

After the Django Girls meet and greet, I met my mentor, Ben, who’s working as an engineering lead here in Berlin. I dove right into the tutorial, which contained individual steps for building a website and blog using HTML, CSS, Python and Django. Ben’s mentoring style was relatively hands-off, which was really effective for me. I was able to work through as much as possible on my own while Ben was available to answer what were largely questions of context, and even, tangential thoughts about programming and its uses within the tech industry.

One thing that’s great about the tutorial and perhaps, about coding in general, is the sense of immediate gratification you experience. You type in a line of code and press “Run” and something happens. There’s even something exciting about receiving an error message. Furthermore, coding feels incredibly autonomous. It’s possible to control font, font size, colors, spacing… and even a core logic. Importantly, you also have the power to make these things materialize on your screen.

The tutorial’s steps were clearly explained and relatively small in size, which was conducive to a quick, anticipatory pace. Working through the steps at this speed gave me greater confidence and satisfaction, and there’s been research to support this response. When there’s a ‘problem,’ our brain releases stress chemicals and when we ‘solve’ the problem, our brain rewards us with dopamine.

“The best developed current theory of self-directed learning (or “intrinsic motivation”) proposes a heuristic of increasing predictability. This principle, dubbed Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity (IAC), directs the learner toward activities in which it is currently on a steep part of a learning curve. In essence, the system predicts the outcomes of its actions, and keeps a record of the quality of those predictions. Domains in which predictions have recently improved are probably those in which significant learning has occurred… The relatively well understood mechanisms by which dopamine directs learning and memory toward reward and reward predictive events may also serve to direct attention toward tasks and topics for which learning is currently happening rapidly.”

• Seth Herd, Brian Mingus and Randall O’ReIlly, “Dopamine and self-directed learning”

Technology and code lend themselves particularly well to intrinsic motivation and increased predictability. Let’s see what digital media theorists Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison have to say about it.

“By doing what it says, code is logos. Like the King’s speech in Plato’s Phaedrus, it does not pronounce knowledge or demonstrate it — it transparently pronounces itself. The hidden signified — meaning — shines through and transforms itself into action. Programming languages offer the lure of visibility, readability, logical — if magical — cause and effect.”

• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison, “Fun is a Battlefield : Software between Enjoyment and Obsession

Joseph Weizenbaum was a German and American computer scientist and a professor emeritus at MIT. In this quote, he too, describes the alluring qualities of programming.

“It happens that programming is a relatively easy craft to learn…And because programming is almost immediately rewarding, that is, because a computer very quickly begins to behave somewhat in the way the programmer intends it to, programming is very seductive, especially for beginners.”

- Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason

But, there’s more to programming than its reward and reward predictive qualities. According to Chun and Lison, it’s also fun. However, it’s a specific kind of fun: one that simultaneously involves the pleasure derived from completion and the desire felt when one is confronted by incompleteness.

“The common ground upon which programming and gaming both rest is the double valence of fun: fun as enjoyment and fun as obsession. In both cases, fun is experienced via an encounter with power and its limitations — both, that is, the limited sense of power that enjoyment brings with it and the larger sense of power, both sublime and sublimated, from under which one obsessively attempts to escape. The harnessing of fun’s affective surplus perpetuates both this ultimate, conditioning power and the ‘fun’ it engenders.”

• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison, “Fun is a Battlefield : Software between Enjoyment and Obsession

If I could point to what I feel is the most successful thing about Django Girls it’s this: the mentors act as a guiding force but also, as an interface with which to build more general interest in the discipline. The tutorial itself also provides some background information, first by moving through an introduction as well as installation instructions. Additionally, it contained a section called “How the Internet Works,” inspired by a talk given by Jessica McKellar. Using mailing a letter as a metaphor, this section neatly describes how the internet is run by an international network of servers connected with cables.

This is the kind of context traditional schools often fail to provide. Applying programming conventions is only part of the learning process, you also need context to generate sustained interest for people who’ve not had prior access to programming, and in some cases, to computers. Women in particular lack this access.

“The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers… In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers… This was a big deal when those kids got to college. As personal computers became more common, computer science professors increasingly assumed that their students had grown up playing with computers at home.”

• Steven Henn, “When Women Stopped Coding”

Going on this point, the tutorial is also intuitively structured, beginning with the command line as a mechanism, then moving into specific exercises to try. It doesn’t make any assumptions or leaps, it walks through everything, and importantly, answers the implicit “why” at every junction. For example, why the command line begins with a dollar sign or a greater than sign (these are prompts) or why to install a code editor (code needs to be written in plain text, it also provides helpful features like autofill). Furthermore, the tutorial includes a list of useful commands.

What came to mind when I was working through the tutorial was Joseph Campbell’s work on psychology and storytelling. The Hero’s Journey is a classic archetypal story formula seen in many works of fiction and expressed using many mediums. The idea is as follows:

• A hero is called on a journey into ‘becoming,’ and is skeptical at first
• They’re persuaded (by a mentor and possibly by supporting characters) and depart on a great adventure
• At the end of the journey, the hero is transformed and has also transformed the world around them.

The Django Girls tutorial features a narrative voice and tone that’s friendly, clear, and importantly, acts as a guide through the various steps. Much of the instructions are redolent of verbiage used in a Hero’s Journey. Here’s how the tutorial is introduced.

And, this message appears once you’ve completed the Introduction to Python section.

Once I was familiarized with numbers, strings, operators, functions, variables, lists, and dictionaries, it was time to begin the workshop’s project of building a web application. What was really interesting to experience was feeling my mind reorganise and settle into this particular mode of thinking: it’s rigorous yet simplistic in a way. It’s about assuming nothing, and therefore, stating every possible detail required to see something made whole. The ordering of the code itself can also feel a bit counterintuitive, like a language that places the subject at the end of the sentence. In a way, learning to code reminded me of learning to play the piano. How it felt to move my hands at the same time, but in different, precise motions. It was incredibly disorienting at first. We become so accustomed to the way our bodies move or the way we think, it hardly seems like there’s anything else to discover about ourselves. But these hidden depths exist inside of all us, just waiting to be reached.

At the end of the tutorial, I had a functioning web application that looked more or less like this:

I high fived my mentor and went home with a sense of accomplishment. This positive experience has motivated me to start planning my first personal project: building my own professional website.

Django Girls gets right what many traditional schools get wrong. Let’s recap:

1. Mentors offer academic help, and accept comments and discussion. Active learning generates a positive attitude in students and better performance
2. Tutorial content is written by female developers
3. The workshop qualifies as an affinity space and is therefore better suited to bridge barriers of age, race, socio-economic status, and educational level
4. Dopamine directs learning and memory toward reward and reward predictive events. A quickly paced, step-driven programming tutorial, such as the one supplied by Django Girls, may trigger such results. Moreover, coding lends itself naturally this.
5. Coding is conducive to a double valence of fun: fun as enjoyment and fun as obsession. These dual forces conspire to make programming particularly addictive. In a good way ;)
6. Django Girls makes coding accessible to women by providing background information and context that might not have been available to them. The tutorial and mentors make no assumptions about coding experience.
7. Django Girls takes its students on a Hero’s Journey, appealing to positive and familiar narratives found in literature, film, video games, etc.

Thanks! Please visit the Django Girls website for more information at www.djangogirls.org. You can also follow me on Twitter at @cdlariviere.