UCLA Ed&IS Magazine, Spring 2018

SPRING 2018

UCLA Ed&IS

Earl Edwards:

IMPROVING PATHWAYS FOR HOMELESS CHILDREN AND YOUTH

Advice From a Formerly Homeless Youth PAGE 14

MAGAZINE OF THE UCLA GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND INFORMATION STUDIES

Examining the Complexities of Data-Sharing

ď ˝

Christine Borgman, Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies

Data have many kinds of value, and that value may not be apparent until long after those data are collected, curated, or lost. The value of data varies widely over the place, time and context.

Having the right data is usually better than having more data.

ď ž

PA G E 4

Power-Conscious Approaches to Campus Sexual Violence Assistant Professor Jessica C. Harris offers three recommendations PA G E 3 0

SPRING 2018

Ed&IS MAGAZINE OF THE UCLA GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND INFORMATION STUDIES

3 From the Dean 4 UCLA Information Studies Scholar: Examining the Complexities of Data-Sharing Christine Borgman, Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies 8 Research at UCLA Lab School Explores Children’s Attitudes on Poverty and Wealth Professor Rashmita Mistry and a team of researchers at UCLA Ed&IS joined with teachers at UCLA Lab School to design and study new curriculum 14 Advice from a Formerly Homeless Youth: Educators Need Better Training to Help Homeless Students Earl Edwards, Ph.D. candidate, UCLA Ed&IS 18 An Interview with Professor Johanna Drucker A conversation about the institution of the book and the art of eco-fiction 22 Cracking the Code: Why Aren’t More Women Majoring in Computer Science?

Professor Linda Sax looks at the dynamics of increasing diversity in computer science education 26 Ethnic Diversity in Schools Benefits Everyone Professor Sandra Graham is proving the social benefits of diversity and its implications for academic achievement and civic engagement 30 Power-Conscious Approaches to Campus Sexual Violence Assistant Professor Jessica C. Harris offers three recommendations

Ed&IS MAGAZINE OF THE UCLA GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND INFORMATION STUDIES

SPRING 2018

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Ph.D. UCLA Wasserman Dean & Distinguished Professor of Education, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies Laura Lindberg Executive Director External Relations, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies EDITOR

Leigh Leveen CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Earl Edwards Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA Ed&IS eedwards@gseis.ucla.edu Tiffany Esmailian Writer, UCLA Daily Bruin Joanie Harmon Director of Campaign & Development Communications, UCLA Ed&IS harmon@gseis.ucla.edu Jessica C. Harris Assistant Professor of Higher Education and Organizational Change, UCLA Ed&IS jharris@gseis.ucla.edu Chris Linder Associate Professor of College Student Affairs Administration, University of Georgia John McDonald Director, Sudikoff Family Institute jmcdonald@gseis.ucla.edu Shana Vu Writer, UCLA Newsroom DESIGN

Robin Weisz Design © 2018, by The Regents of the University of California

gseis.ucla.edu

MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN

WHY WE ARE REALLY #1

E

arlier this spring, as we were planning this issue of the Ed&IS magazine, we were very pleased to receive some good news. The UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies was named the nation’s top education program by U.S. News and World Report. We were gratified to top a much-watched list of excellent institutions.

Here at UCLA, our work is driven by a quest for excellence through diversity and a passion for social justice, and ­fueled by the talent and energy of Los Angeles, the great global city at the gateway of Asia Pacific and Latin Amer­ ica. And while we take this recent ranking with a grain of salt, I’d like to share with you some thoughts on why I think our work is so essential and a ­beacon of light to our peers.

OUR STUDENTS come first. They are highly talented and tremendously diverse. More than 70 percent of our graduate students are people of color representing a wide range of races and ethnicities. They are the future. Their energy, sense of purpose, and dedication give us hope. They light the way.

OUR FACULTY members are making essential contributions to educational research and practice, and forging a culture of excellence in everything we do. And like our students and community, they are extraordinarily diverse. They understand and care about the communities we serve and set important examples for our graduate students to follow.

OUR STAFF work every day to support our faculty and students and further our scholarship.

OUR LEADERSHIP is committed to excellence in scholarship, while deeply focused on equity, diversity, opportunity and social justice. They provide a vision for our graduate school and critical support for our students, faculty and staff.

Photo: Jennifer Young

OUR SCHOLARSHIP is bringing research and practice to bear upon the defining issues of our times. Whether it’s conducting research on the importance of critically understanding social media, seeking ways to preserve climate change data, or working to prepare great teachers for urban schools, our faculty and staff are leading the way to new knowledge and better practices.

And we are doing it all through a lens focused on furthering social justice, equity and opportunity for all.

OUR COMMUNITY is filled with people who bring talent, energy, and optimism to UCLA, to California and to our nation. There is no better place to study and learn than Los Angeles. We are deeply engaged with our community. And that community includes you.

It is your support and participation that makes our success possible.

In these pages you will find examples that illustrate that success. There is perhaps no better example than that of Earl Edwards, who was homeless as a youth, but is now a doctoral student conducting research to improve pathways to success for homeless youth and children. Our Q&A with Professor Johanna Drucker provides insight into the scholarship and work that make ­UCLA Information Studies one of the top programs in the field. The research of Presidential Chair in Educational Equity S ­ andra ­Graham will help you to better understand why we are so committed to diversity. We also take a look at the cutting edge research of faculty members Professor Rashmita M ­ istry, who has been researching ways to better ­understand and to promote children’s understanding of wealth, poverty, and civic engagement, and Assistant Professor Jessica Harris, who has been studying sexual violence on college campuses. And our commitment to the success

of diverse communities can be seen in the work of Professor L ­ inda Sax, who leads the BRAID Research Initiative’s efforts to understand how colleges and universities can ensure more women and minorities pursue degrees and careers in computer science. Last, but certainly not least, I encourage you to read the article profiling the work of Presidential Chair Christine Borgman. Her contributions to the field of Information Studies and to our graduate school and university are immeasurable. Professor ­Borgman, who is retiring this year, is a true giant in her field and stands as a shining example of this university’s and our graduate school’s commitment to excellence. It is indeed people like Professor Borgman who have made UCLA number one. Brava!

Paraphrasing Voltaire, I leave you with a final thought, “If we didn’t have GSE&IS, we would have to invent it!”

Go Bruins!

Enjoy— Marcelo

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco

Wasserman Dean & Distinguished Professor of Education UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 3

UCLA INFORMATION STUDIES SCHOLAR

EXAMINING T H E C O M P L E X I T I E S O F DATA- S H A R I N G

BY TIFFANY ESMAILIAN AND JOANIE HARMON

C

hristine Borgman, the Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA, challenges prevailing notions about the

value of sharing information. Borgman studies how research information is retrieved, processed, cu­ rated, and conveyed—at a time when the demand for data by researchers and scholars in many different disciplines is greater than ever before.

But sharing data isn’t as simple as it sounds.

“Data are complex, compound, heterogeneous, and messy objects that rarely lend themselves to easy sharing or reuse,” said Borgman, who holds degrees in mathematics, library and information science, and communication research.

4 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

Borgman and her research team at UCLA’s Center for Knowledge Infrastructures are analyzing how data are handled in an array of research projects in astronomy, biology, environmental sciences, and medical sciences with the aim of simplifying the complexities of data practices and challenging prevailing assumptions about the value of sharing data. Her team’s work with the UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, an NSF Science and Technol­ogy Center (2002–2012), laid the foundation for two consecutive grants from the ­Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2012–2019): “The Transformation of Knowledge, Culture, and Practice in Data-­Driven Science: A Knowledge Infrastructures Perspective,” and “If Data Sharing is the Answer, What is the Question?”.

By presenting their findings to scientific communities as well as to funding agencies, government agencies, publishers, and other key stakeholders, the team hopes to influence policy, she explained.

Christine Borgman, the Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, UCLA Ed&IS

In addition to her research, Borgman’s prize-winning book, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World,” published by MIT Press, builds upon earlier assessments of the global information infrastructure and examines data and scholarly research.

“Having the right data is usually better than having more data; little data can be just as important as big data,” she points out.

In the book, Borgman lays out the challenges of data-intensive scholarship; includes a series of case studies of data practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities; and assesses data sharing, reuse, credit, attribution, and discovery.

“While I don’t claim to have the answers to these challenges, my goal is to provoke a much fuller and more comprehensive conversation about the diversity of data and practices, the infrastructure required to support them, and the roles and responsibilities of varied stake­holders,” Borgman explained.

She maintains that we need to make a huge investment in knowledge

infrastructures to support the management, curation, and use of data in the future. She defines knowledge infrastructures as “an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects and relationships.”

Borgman, who has been teaching at UCLA since 1983 and is retiring this year, but returning in August on recall as Distinguished Research Professor, has led classes on information retrieval, data practice and policy, privacy and information technology, bibliometrics, electronic publishing, library automation, and ­information-seeking behavior. Prior to joining UCLA, she developed the first course on human-computer interaction at Stanford University.

When Borgman came to Los Angeles, she not only established a new course in human-computer interaction, but also brought information policy, electronic publishing, bibliometrics, and data curation into the curriculum.

She also expanded existing IT courses in the then-Graduate School of Library and Information Studies.

Borgman has applied her expertise

in scholarly communication and information technology policy to UCLA and UC activities throughout her career, including service as chair of the UCLA IT Planning Board and of the UC Academic Computing and Communications Committee. In 2015, Borgman, along with Kent Wada, UCLA Chief Privacy Officer and Director, Strategic IT Policy, was named a co-chair of the joint Academic Senate and Administration data governance task force, which was formed to recommend a campus governance mechanism in response to the increasing demand for data about UCLA students, faculty, and staff.

“The reason we have this joint Academic Senate and Administration task force is because you can find very different opinions and sets of ethics on both sides. It is important to get everyone in the same room to come up with something we can all live with,” Borgman said. In their first meeting, the task force articulated many of the data-related issues facing the campus, including information security, privacy, appropriate data use, and third party partnerships.

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 5

“We can assume that data always need to be properly secured. We can assume that data about individuals— whether Social Security numbers, information about health, or grades—must be surrounded by the appropriate privacy controls,” Wada explained. “So the task force is focusing on how the campus considers new uses of these data that have potentially negative conse­ quences. We need to ask ourselves, ‘what benefit is there to our community? What are the risks? Is the use consistent with the values of the institution?’

And even, ‘Is it creepy?’ The question we need to answer is not ‘Can we?’ but ‘Should we?’”

An exemplary role model with a passion for interdisciplinary research, Borgman dedicates a large amount of her time to mentoring students and young researchers in these fields.

“What excites me about interdisciplinary research is the opportunity to combine disparate perspectives and to learn from each other,” she said.

Despite her impressive achievements, Borgman remains a humble leader. “The most rewarding outcome of these projects is guiding my brilliant team of graduate students and post-­ doctoral fellows to making their own discoveries,” she said.

When asked about her proudest accomplishments and what she looks forward to achieving in the future, Borgman remained modest.

“My proudest accomplishments are my students, who have gone on to lead their own research teams, win their own grants, found companies, and take on leadership roles in professional socie­ ties,” she said. “My future goals, in addition to successful research and influencing policy, are to advance my current students, to mentor my graduates, and to learn from all of them.”

6 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

BIG DATA, LITTLE DATA, NO DATA Scholarship in the Networked World Winner of the 2016 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Awards) Excerpted from Chapter One: PROVOCATIONS

INTRODUCTION “Big Data” has acquired the hyperbole that “big science” did fifty years ago. Big data is on the covers of Science, Nature, the Economist, and Wired magazine and the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many other publications, both mainstream and minor. Just as big science was to reveal the secrets of the universe, big data is expected to reveal the buried treasures in the bit stream of life. Big data is the oil of modern business (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier 2013), the glue of collaborations (Borgman 2007), and a source of friction between scholars (Edwards et al. 2012; Edwards 2010).

Data do not flow like oil, stick like glue, or start fires by friction like matches. Their value lies in their use, motivating the Bits of Power (National Research Council, 1997) report. The unstated question to ask is, “what are data?” The only agreement on definitions is that no single definition will suffice. Data have many kinds of value, and that value may not be apparent until long after those data are collected, curated, or lost. The value of data varies widely over the place, time and context. Having the right data is usually better than having more data. Big data are receiving the attention, whereas little trickles of data can be just as valuable. Having no data is all too often the case, whether because no relevant data exist; they exist but cannot be found; exist but are not available due to proprietary control, embargoes, technical barriers, degradation due to lack of curation; or simply because those who have the data cannot or will not share them.

Data are proliferating in digital and in material forms. At scale, big data make new questions possible and thinkable.

For the first time, scholars can ask question of datasets where n = all (Edwards et al. 2013; Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier

2013; Schroeder 2014). Yet digital data also are far more fragile than physical sources of evidence that have survived for centuries. Unlike paper, papyri, and paintings, digital data cannot be interpreted without the technical apparatus used to create them. Hardware and software evolve quickly, leaving digital records unreadable unless they are migrated to new versions as they appear.

Digital records require documentation, not only for the rows and columns of a spreadsheet but also for the procedures by which they were obtained. Similarly, specimens, slides, and samples may be interpretable only via their documentation. Unless deliberate investments are made to curate data for future use, most will quickly fade away.

It is the power of data, combined with their fragility, that make them such a fascinating topic of study in scholarly communication. Data have no value or meaning in isolation. They can be assets or liabilities or both. They exist within a knowledge infrastructure—an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships. All parts of the infrastructure are in flux with shifts in stakeholders, technologies, policies, and power. Much is at stake, not only for the scholars of today and tomorrow but also for those who would use the knowledge they create.

BIG DATA, LITTLE DATA This book’s title—Big Data, Little Data, No Data—invokes Price’s legacy and the concerns of all fields of scholarship for conserving and controlling their intellectual resources. Data are inputs, outputs, and assets of scholarship. Data are ubiquitous, yet often ephemeral. Questions of “what are data?” often become “when are data?” because recognizing that some phenomena could be treated as data is itself a scholarly act (Borgman 2007, 2012a; Bowker et al. 2010; Star and Bowker 2002).

A nominal definition of data can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary: (1) “an item of information; a datum; a set of data”; (2) “related items of (chiefly numerical) information considered collectively, typically obtained by scientific work and used for reference, analysis, or calculation”; also (3) “quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer, considered collectively. Also (in non-technical contexts): information in digital form.” These definitions are narrow and circular, failing to capture the richness and variety of data in scholarship or to reveal the epistemological and ontological premises on which they are based.

Features of data, combined with larger social and technical trends, are contributing to the growing recognition that data are becoming more useful, more valuable, and more problematic for scholarly communication.

PROVOCATIONS Data is a far more complex subject than suggested by the popular press or by policy announcements. It remains large and unwieldy, even when constrained to research and scholarship. Although the literature on research data is growing rapidly, each journal article, conference paper, white paper, report, and manifesto addresses but one part of the elephantine problem. This book is the first monograph to assess the whole elephant of data from social, technical, and policy perspectives, drawing on examples from across the academic disciplines. It picks up where the more general exploration of scholarship in the digital age left off (Borgman 2007), addressing the radical expansion of interest in data in the interim.

Ambitious as the goals of this book may be, yet more questions about the nature, roles, and uses of data in scholarship remain. Theory, evidence, and practice are deeply entangled. Points of intersection are identified and disentangled when possible. The arguments presented herein explore the issues of the day, based on deep concerns about what is at stake for scholarly research and the academic enterprise in the foreseeable future. The narrative is framed by six provocations intended to provoke a deeper conversation among the many stakeholders in the scholarly enterprise: 1. Reproducibility, sharing, and reuse of data are issues that have been discussed for decades, and in some cases for centuries. Addressing matters such as who owns, controls, has access to, and sustains research data will determine how their value can be exploited and by whom.

2. Transferring knowledge across contexts and over time is difficult. Some forms and representations of data can be shared readily across disciplines, contexts, and over time but many cannot. Understanding what features matter and which do not is necessary to inform scholarly practice and policy and to guide investments in knowledge infrastructures.

3. The functions of scholarly publication remain stable despite the proliferation of forms and genres. Data serve different purposes in scholarly communication than do journal articles, books, or conference papers.

Treating data as publications risks strengthening the roles if vested interests at the expense of exploring new models of scholarly commu­ nication. The functions of data in scholarship must be examined from the perspectives of diverse stakeholders.

4. Scholarly work is being disseminated more widely through movements such as open access publishing, open data, and open source software. The different purposes of data and publications in scholarship influence the incentives, means and practices for dissemination. Providing open access to data has implications for scholars, libraries, universities, funding agencies,

publishers, and other stakeholders that are poorly understood.

5. Knowledge infrastructures are evolving to accommodate open access, data-intensive research, new technologies, social media, and changes in practice and policy. Some stakeholders gain advantage and others lose. Costs, benefits, risks, and responsibilities are being redistributed.

New kinds of expertise are needed but their application will vary across contexts and research domains.

6. Knowledge infrastructures develop and adapt over generations of scholars. A long view of design and policy is needed, but research funding operates on short cycles. Substantial investments in infrastructure are necessary to acquire, sustain, and exploit research data today, tomorrow, and beyond. Those investments will be contentious, because choices that are made today will determine what data and other information resources will be available tomorrow and beyond.

This book opens up the black box of “data,” peering inside to examine conceptions, theories, practices, policy, values, incentives, and motivations.

Data, per se, is not a terribly exciting topic. It is, however, an extremely useful environment in which to view radical shifts in scholarly practice and how they intersect with technology, education, and policy. The six provocations are intended to broaden and deepen the conversation about research data, with all stakeholders at the table. None of these provocations has a simple or clear answer. Many of the questions will be negotiated individually, often on a daily basis. All of them will influence how scholarship is conducted, now and in the future. Therein lies the heart of this book.

For more about the book, please visit: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ big-data-little-data-no-data

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 7

EXPLORES CHILDREN’S ATTITUDES ON POVERTY AND WEALTH R E S E A R C H AT U C L A L A B S C H O O L

T

he divide between rich and poor in the United States is greater than at any time since the Great Depression.

In 2018, American earners in the top 10 percent average more than nine times as much income as those in

BY JOANIE HARMON AND JOHN MCDONALD

the bottom 90 percent. And those in the top one percent average more than 40 times the income than those in the bottom 90 percent. With increases in homelessness, limited access to quality housing and other ills confronting our communities, that divide is often on display. Poverty in America has become plain to see.

But what do children think about poverty? And what can teachers do to help them to understand inequality and its ­implications for economic opportunity and social justice?

8 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

That’s what Professor Rashmita Mistry and a team of researchers at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies wanted to know. To find the answers they joined with elementary school teachers at UCLA Lab School in an intervention study to design, implement, and evaluate an artsbased inquiry guided unit focused on teaching children about wealth and poverty, and civic responsibility.

“Children today are growing up amid heightened levels of poverty and there is a need for schools to further their understanding of economic inequality,” Mistry says.

“Teachers can help students to understand these issues, and even to begin to develop strategies for addressing the problems. But they may feel unprepared for these lessons and lack needed resources, training and support.

Hopefully this project can provide some guidance.”



It is imperative that schools foster students’ understanding and reasoning about economic inequality … [and] that instruction about poverty and economic inequality should start early and be delivered in coordination with efforts to help students become justiceoriented citizens.

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 9



The results suggest that concrete and developmentally appropriate activities can be beneficial for fostering young students’ perspective and reasoning about economic differences.

10 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

Mistry, together with researchers Lindsey Nenadal, Taylor ­ Hazelbaker, and Katherine M. Griffin of UCLA, and Elizabeth S. White, at Illinois State University, teamed up with UCLA Lab School teachers to assess whether explicit instruction influenced students’ reasoning about the meanings, causes, and consequences of wealth and poverty. Mistry and the research team helped teachers develop curriculum that would enable them to discuss, explore, and ultimately, provide their students with an understanding of the many forces that shape socioeconomic status. Embracing the school’s processes of fostering inquiry, Professor Mistry and her team co-created interventions with the teachers that enabled them to have conversations with their students on economic inequality and how it happens.

Teachers engaged students in activities such as reading aloud from books including “A Chair for My Mother” and “Where Children Sleep,” and art activities such as making collage materials that represent feelings about the words “poor, rich, and in-between.” Students

also participated in action-oriented projects such as a donation drive to meet children’s nighttime needs for blankets, toothbrushes, pajamas, and other items.

Lessons included looking at the similarities and differences between people in different economic groups. Students and teachers discussed using the terms “none, some, most, all” to talk about people, and the difference between “wants” and “needs.” For example, in one classroom, the students worked together to compile a list of things that people need to survive such as food and water, and a list of things that people want, but do not necessarily need in order to live, such as candy and toys.

“The curriculum infused everything else that the teachers were doing,” says Mistry, “bringing in things they might be talking about in math, in their reading circles and language arts. They drew on books and materials with themes of some people having more than others, and how we treat people with respect and fairness and appreciation of those differences.”

To assess the effectiveness of the intervention effort, students from racially and ethnically diverse and mostly middle class backgrounds were enrolled in one of two kindergarten and two combined first and second grade classrooms. Students in one classroom at each grade level were taught the inquiry unit over 5–7 weeks, while students in the other classrooms acted as a comparison group and received instruction as usual. With their parents’ permission, students in both intervention and comparison classrooms were individually interviewed before and after about their conceptions and causes of wealth and poverty, their ideas about wealth distribution in society, and ways to help the poor.

The findings indicated that the curriculum intervention was related to students’ beliefs about wealth and poverty, economic mobility, and ways to help those in need. At the end of the project, students in the intervention classrooms were more likely to say that poverty can change over time and more likely to offer varied ways to help families that were poor beyond giving money, such as in-kind donations or help finding jobs.

The results suggest that concrete and

developmentally appropriate activities can be beneficial for fostering young students’ perspective and reasoning about economic differences. In addition to findings related to economic mobility and helping behavior, the study observed modest evidence of an impact of the curriculum intervention on students’ beliefs about wealth and poverty, and mixed evidence of impacts on their causal attributions for wealth and poverty.

“We asked the straightforward question, ‘If someone is rich, will they always be rich? And if someone is poor, will be they always be poor?’” Mistry says. “And we found that the kids in classrooms where the teachers were having these conversations were less likely to say yes, which I think is an important shift in terms of thinking about mobility, in the fact that it is changeable.”

Mistry’s team also found that the children’s solutions to poverty were not limited to simply handing out money.

“Their responses around how you can help someone—a family or a child that is experiencing financial hardship— tended to give us more different kinds of [solutions] rather than just giving money.

In fact, they were less likely to say to give them money than they were to say that you could help by giving material goods or providing shelter or helping them get or train for a better job, things like that.

“The kids in the intervention classes were more likely to mention these kinds of structural attributions. They were more likely to say that you could be rich or poor because of the kind of job you have or because you have a better education. Pretty simple, but still, this idea that it’s not just about how you behave. So, you’re not poor because you’ve spent all your money or because you’re not working hard. There can be other reasons that are outside of your own control that can make it more or less likely.”

Professor Mistry added that the kindergarten-age children are aware of wealth and poverty, although at first it tends to run to extremes.

“We know that their concepts are pretty concrete,” she says. “If you give them photographs of houses and cars and different kinds of possessions, they are able to sort them into piles pretty



The results suggest that concrete and developmentally appropriate activities can be beneficial for fostering young students’ perspective and reasoning about economic differences. accurately, what is rich and what is poor.

Little kids tend to equate being rich with having lots of nice things. Being poor is the absence of possessions [or being] homeless, and being rich means you have a nice, fancy house. It’s not just about the amount of [things], but the quality of those things as well.

“As they get a little bit older—like between the ages of five and seven— we know they’re starting to develop some idea of the causes of why people become rich or poor. Seven and eightyear-olds have this sense that you get money from work or because you did well at school. The little ones think you find money—they associate it with treasure or someone stole your money—that is a typical response we would get.”

Mistry notes that eventually, the children’s thinking would evolve into the concept of a middle class.

“The teachers were trying to get them to think about distribution and dispersion,” she says. “At one point, the students themselves started outlining a continuum. They said, ‘At one end, you have people who have nothing. You can have someone who is homeless, who

Rashmita S. Mistry, Professor of Education, UCLA Ed&IS

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 11

This article draws on “Promoting Elementary School-Age Children’s Understanding of Wealth, Poverty, and Civic Engagement,” Rashmita S. Mistry, Lindsey Nenadal, Taylor Hazelbaker, and Katherine M. Griffin, University of California, Los Angeles; and Elizabeth S. White, Illinois State Univer­ sity, excerpted from PS: Political Science & ­Politics, October 2017.

To read the full article: http://bit.ly/2K1RfRC

12 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

doesn’t even have shelter. But you can also have a place to live but not have enough money for food or you don’t have nice clothes.’ So, they started talking about this and at one point they decided, ‘There are people who have enough. They have enough food, they have a place to live, they have a good job. But they don’t have extras.’”

Professor Mistry says that the yearlong observations of UCLA Lab School teachers utilizing the speciallydesigned curriculum revealed that, “When you have these carefully scaffolded and guided conversations with students, you can extract that level of understanding. It’s there, but it has to be guided. The nice thing about the Lab School is that they have mixed-grade classrooms. Even though that level of understanding may have been coming from the older children in the classroom, the younger children were a part of this conversation, so they were at least, exposed to it.”

Mistry says that while the study revealed only gradual shifts in children’s thinking about poverty and wealth, the ability to observe these students further as their thinking matured might show the curriculum as building blocks for a better understanding about economic inequality.

“We’re not thinking that this is, in and of itself, going to shift their thinking,” says Mistry. “Part of it is that they’re already thinking of these things. So, you’re helping children understand how they should be taking in information and processing it, rather than necessarily saying there’s a right and wrong answer.”

In their research, Mistry and her team conclude that it is imperative that schools foster students’ understanding and reasoning about economic inequality. They believe that instruction about poverty and economic inequality should start early and be delivered in coordination with efforts to help students become justice-oriented citizens.

They also argue there is a compelling need for more resources to help educators engage in such dialogue and inquiry with their students, especially in the early grades and that such efforts should be taken up systematically by schools, at a district, state, and national level to more optimally influence young

minds about economics and civics more generally.

“As adults, we tend to do a lot of victim blaming [toward] the poor, so our attributions tend to be overwhelmingly individual: you are poor because you have failed to work hard. You have failed to get a good education. If we can do something that helps younger children reflect on that more and reflect on whether all poor people didn’t work hard enough, or whether all rich people worked really hard … we can get them to step back and think about some other reasons.”

ď ˝

Children today are growing up amid heightened levels of poverty and there is a need for schools to further their understanding of economic inequality.ď ž

F R OM

A

ADVICE

F O R M E R LY

HOMELESS YOUTH

E D U C A T O R S

N E E D

B E T T E R

T O

H E L P

H O M E L E S S

BY EARL J. EDWARDS As first appeared in Education Week on April 18, 2017.

T R A I N I N G S T U D E N T S

I

n the middle of my freshman year of high school, I started my fourth episode of homelessness. My parents, five brothers, and I mi­grated back and forth from relatives’ living rooms, motels, and family s­ helters for more than two years. By the time I graduated from high school,

I had moved a total of 14 times.

DATA FROM THE RESEARCH NONPROFIT CHILD TRENDS show significant growth in youth homelessness in the last decade. Since my own high school graduation in 2006, youth homelessness in the United States has increased from approximately 815,000 youths nationwide to more than 1.3 million youths in the 2013–14 school year, the most recent year for which data are available.

Experiencing homelessness as a child has a direct effect on academic achievement. In 2014, America’s Promise Alliance reported that youths affected by homelessness are 87 percent more likely to drop out of high school and, as a result, are more likely to become homeless as adults. Additionally, homeless youths have higher levels of physical trauma and social isolation when compared with their housed peers, including those living in poverty.

Youth homelessness is a devastating epidemic with negative outcomes for students across all racial groups. However, African-American students are disproportionately affected.

African-American children represent 48 percent of all children living in homeless shelters, even though African-Americans make

up only 14 percent of American families with children, according to Child Trends. Concurrently, a 2013 study of homeless youths in San Francisco from the California Homeless Youth Project found that homeless African-American youths are less likely to self-identify as homeless compared with their white peers, and thus fail to receive aid and services to which they are entitled.

Although my parents notified my school district of when we became homeless, I was unaware that anyone knew of our circumstances. I never spoke to any teachers, counselors, or administrators about my living conditions, and no one ever asked me about them. Keeping such a secret was extremely difficult, but fear of being reported to the Department of Social Services kept me silent. I spent more energy lying about where I lived than studying, and as a result my grades dropped dramatically.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, federal legislation enacted in 1987, defines as “homeless” any child who doesn’t have a “fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” That includes children from families who are doubling up in homes with relatives or other adults, as well as those living in shelters, motels, or cars.

The McKinney-Vento Act established that homeless students have the right to transportation, free lunch, school supplies, tutoring, and school choice. In addition, students who are designated as homeless have the option of continuing to attend their current school or enrolling in the school closest to where they are currently residing.

In 2015, the McKinney-Vento Act was reauthorized under the Every Student Succeeds Act and now requires school districts to increase outreach efforts for identifying homeless students and informing families of their legal rights. According to Education Department guidance on ESSA issued in June 2016, the amendment to the McKinney-Vento Act also requires school districts to disaggregate their student-achievement data and graduation rates to explicitly show the academic progress of their homeless youths.

The improvements to McKinney-Vento are significant, but they are in vain if key stakeholders continue to be in the dark.

As a student experiencing homelessness, I wanted my teachers to attend to my social and emotional needs.

But now, as a former high school and special education teacher myself, I understand why my teachers did not respond to my needs: They did not know.



Many teachers are often uninformed about homeless populations at their school. UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 15

YOUTH HOMELESSNESS IN THE UNITED STATES HAS INCREASEDÂ FROM APPROXIMATELY

815,000

YOUTHS NATIONWIDE TO MORE THAN

1.3 MILLION

16 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

As a teacher, I never received training on the McKinney-Vento Act, nor was I informed that there were homeless youths at my school. The McKinneyVento Act requires state coordinators to train district liaisons on identifying homeless students and implementing the policy. Each district liaison is then charged with disseminating the information to his or her respective school leaders and supporting the homeless youths identified. Teachers are not mandated to learn about the McKinney-Vento Act. Thus, many teachers are often uninformed about homeless populations at their school.



In 2015, the McKinney-Vento Act was reauthorized under the Every Student Succeeds Act and now requires school districts to increase outreach efforts for identifying homeless students and informing families of their legal rights.

An overall lack of awareness of homelessness prevents homeless students from receiving support or even being identified. Principals and teachers should consider the following when creating a network of support for youths experiencing homelessness:  SCHOOLWIDE TRAINING. The entire faculty should be trained and versed on the McKinney-Vento Act. Faculty members are in the best position to identify homeless youths and refer them to the district liaison for additional support.  STUDENT AWARENESS. All students should know the McKinney-Vento Act’s definition of homelessness and that the rights of homeless students are guaranteed.  MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIPS. Teachers should foster meaningful relationships with students to affirm that students’ well-being matters.  TARGETING THE MOST VULNERABLE POPULATIONS. African-American youths are overrepresented in the foster-care system, the special education system, and the penal system. African-Americans’ distrust for institutions is warranted, and it needs to be considered when identifying and supporting African-American youths experiencing homelessness. The school is responsible for establishing trust with both the student and his or her guardians.

While housing insecurity is a societal issue well beyond the scope of public schools, educators have an obligation to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education. The first step to providing educational equity for homeless students is to identify who they are, what they need, and what resources can be made available to them.

Earl Edwards is a Ph.D. student at the UCLA Ed&IS. He completed his Master’s Degree in Public School Leadership at Columbia University and received his B.A. in Sociology from Boston College.

He is a researcher at the UCLA Black Male Institute and the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools. Edwards has over ten years of professional experience in youth development and curriculum design. As a school administrator and classroom teacher, Edwards has designed and facilitated district-wide professional development modules covering data analysis, formative assessments, and effective teaching strategies for students with learning disabilities. Edwards also co-authored graduate course curriculums focusing on educational leadership development in urban public schools for Columbia University Teachers College principal certification program. Edwards has founded and contributed to several youth development programs that support Black and Latino males across the country.

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 17

AN INTERVIEW WITH

BY JOANIE HARMON

Professor Johanna Drucker

J

OHANNA DRUCKER likes “puzzles to solve.” To find solutions, the Bernard and Martin Breslauer Professor of Bibliography connects with units across the UCLA campus in order to give her students the skills they will need

to work in the fields of libraries, archives, and preservation, and to further her

­research. Her 2013 book, “Digital Humanities” was co-written with UCLA colleagues from areas as diverse as comparative literature and design media arts and was her first online textbook.

Professor Drucker’s signature course, “The History of the Book,” was created five years ago with funding from UCLA for an innovative and experimental course that would showcase the university’s Special Collections, and provide students with research and practical skills by giving them the opportunity to contribute to an online textbook themselves, utilizing the world-class holdings of UCLA’s Special Collections. Professor Drucker’s ever-expanding body of creative and insightful work includes two brand-new books, “Downdrift: An Eco-Fiction” and “The General Theory of Social Relativity.”

18 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

Q: What is unique about the “History of the Book” course?

Part of the charge as the Breslauer Professor was to be sure that special collection materials were integrated into the education of MLIS [Master of Library and Information Science] students.

I made an online textbook for “History of the Book” because I don’t think [lecturing] is the best pedagogical approach. So, what I decided to do is to take the lectures that I would normally give in that class and write them out and use materials from UCLA Special Collections as the images. It’s a narrative, from the invention of cave painting to digital book production, in ten weeks.

The students write the interpretive work. They go into the library and learn some basic bibliographical methods and then contribute to the content.

This [past] quarter, they went to Special Collections and picked a book to work on and a topic that they can build a library guide around. Their job is to make sure they’re authoritative, get as close to evidence as they can, and learn some basic research skills.

We have students who want to be librarians or work in special collections.

To give them a chance to work on something that goes online and becomes part of a resource, feels like, and is, real work.

At this point, I’m really committed to trying to build into our curriculum as much as possible a set of competencies that our students need to get jobs. That’s my highest concern.

Q:

Why do you still believe in the institution of the book?

Online materials are so vulnerable.

People are very foolish. They think if something is digitized, it’s archival—it couldn’t be further from the truth. Digital files are extremely vulnerable, they’re very ephemeral. We have no idea how any of these materials will last. Things that are instantiated in material form are going to last longer.

A lot of people talk about the fact that they can carry [digital readers] with them. I use my Kindle when I’m traveling

so I can read books on the plane and carry ten books. But, there are a lot of navigational and orientation issues that still work better in book form. A ­biography without photos is kind of anemic. When libraries deaccession books, they’re being irresponsible and ignoring some fundamental issues. There are so many things about the exploration of the physical space of the library that are very important for learning as well.

Q:

What interested you in library studies?

Reading books is what did it. My mom was very literate—she kept giving me classics to read when I was a kid. And she took us to the library every week to get books. Then we’d go back the next week and change our books. We were big readers. And everybody read at home. After dinner, you got your book out and read.

I was a page at the Philadelphia Public Library, that was my first job. I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s this thing called the Dewey Decimal System? And the Library of Congress—what is that?” It was like the keys to the universe.

Q: What inspired “Downdrift”?

It’s an eco-fiction. The first image for it came to me in a dream … about squirrels sitting on branches with little pine needle [knitting] needles, and they were knitting furiously. All this knitting was just coming out of the trees—it was just this craziness.

We have this image of animal species as kind of stable, but in fact, they are constantly evolving. The book is ­really about rapid evolution under the influence of climate change.

Everything in the book is based on a combination of real [biology] and imagination. It’s narrated by a 3.8 billion-year-old unicellular animal called an Archaean. There are five categories of living things and Archea were discovered in the latter part of the 20th Century.

When they were discovered, it helped to reorient the classification systems for living forms that used to be just plants



At this point, I’m really committed to trying to build into our curriculum as much as possible a set of competencies that our students need to get jobs.

That’s my highest concern. UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 19

and animals. Now, it’s bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and archaea. Archaea are ancient. They can survive in interstellar space and they are extremophiles.

They live near the Mariana Trench, they live in the backs of fur­naces. They can survive at temperatures that would kill a normal living organism.

I got really interested in distributed forms of intelligence, like lichen, which are a combination of fungi and algae.

And they live as unicellular animals but they can act collectively as an aggregate. The Archaean who narrates is both a single point of view and something that is in all of these places all over the globe, watching all of these things happening.

Q:

“Downdrift” and “The General Theory of Social Relativity” are somewhat related …

They’re both about these processes that are distributed, aggregated, and emergent, and have quantum features to them.

The theoretical principles are generally related. One of the influences for me is the renegade biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, who came up with the theory of morphic resonance. What he was looking at were isolated pockets of species—let’s say, English song sparrows living in different places with no contact with each other, who would almost simultaneously start a new behavior. They all started using bottle caps. Why did they start using bottle caps when they weren’t in the same space? It starts to raise some interesting questions. You can see why he was very discredited by a lot of people. But he said there are configuring patterns that can be shared across populations.

The linguist George Lakoff said that ideas don’t float in the air. They’re

20 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018



Online materials are so vulnerable. People are very foolish. They think if something is digitized, it’s archival—it couldn’t be further from the truth. Digital files are extremely vulnerable, they’re very ephemeral. We have no idea how any of these materials will last.

Things that are instantiated in material form are going to last longer.

communicated between people and then baked into your neural circuitry. I say, no, they do float in the air. That’s the point. They have form, they are transferred, and they are formed as an emergent phenomenon of social behaviors.

All these reasonable people are trying to keep everything within the terms of empirical evidence.

Q:

How does “The General Theory of Social Relativity” play into the current political and social changes that we see today?

I was writing this long before the Trump election, but when that happened … [I realized] we need better tools for talking about social processes and the forces of affect and how they work, collectively and individually.

One of my concerns was that so many of the political tools of analysis of the current phenomena—wherever you fall on the political spectrum—are inadequate to deal with the fact that this affective force of persuasion, the kinds of alignments that are happening, and the polarizations, have nothing to do with rationality. They’re affective, and affect is a much stronger force than reason. Reason isn’t even a force, it’s an abstract idea invented by 17th and 18th Century philosophers in the Age of Enlightenment who thought that people would be reasonable. Well, they’re not reasonable.

Part of it is tongue-in-cheek and part of it is totally serious. It reads like an academic book, but it’s not, exactly. One of the principles in “The General Theory of Social Relativity” is that all relationships can reach equilibrium if the relation between frequency and proximity is right.

In certain relationships, when you see someone too often, it gets out of balance. We all know this is true, right? This

is a general principle of social relativity.

Everybody understands it, but nobody talks about it on those terms.

The Media Ecology Association had asked me to give a keynote a few years ago. We talk about “social media” all the time [but] was talking about the fact that we [should] understand that all media are social. What we don’t talk about is the way that sociality—the sphere of human engagement—is also a medium.

Q:

How can fiction— particularly eco-fiction like “Downdrift” explain complex truths?

It’s consumable. I think that the ideas become tractable. It’s like when you say, “Give me an example.” If I give you an example, you get it right away. With fiction, we skip the theory and go right to the description. There’s no theory in “Downdrift,” it’s just the playing out of events.

It’s a story, it’s a narrative. The main protagonists are a housecat and a lion, and the lion is a figure from the natural world, whose world is falling apart. The housecat is the figure from the human world, who is also seeing everything change. They have a connection to each other and move across space until they meet.

It’s very elegiac, it’s mournful. I wish the world as we know it wasn’t coming to an end—it just feels that way more and more every day.

The main problem to consider in the general theory project is how to think beyond the self-destructive conditions we’ve gotten ourselves into [and find] a vision of a sustainable and just future that would really make sense. That would seem to me, the biggest puzzle, the most important one.

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Bres­ lauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. Professor Drucker is internationally known for her work in digital humanities, experimental poetry, fine art, and the history of graphic design and typography. D ­ rucker has held faculty positions at Columbia University and Yale University, as well as visiting faculty positions at Harvard University and State University of New York at ­Purchase. She was a ­Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard, and the first ­Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, where she created the undergraduate Media Studies program and co-funded SpecLab, the Speculative Computing Laboratory. She has earned numerous Fulbright, Getty, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and grants, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. Drucker’s books include “Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide” with Emily McVarish (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008) as well as numerous independently authored publications. Her most recent books, “Downdrift: An Eco-­Fiction” and “The General Theory of Social Relativity” were released in April 2018. She is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Riot Material. Professor Drucker is a member of UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education’s Humanities, Arts, Architecture, Social and Information Sciences Collaborative.

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 21

CRACKING THE CODE

WHY AREN’T MORE WOMEN MAJORING IN COMPUTER SCIENCE?

LINDA SAX LOOKS AT THE DYNAMICS OF INCREASING DIVERSITY IN COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION

W

hile identifying the root cause of the gender gap that exists

among computer science degree holders is difficult, researchers are finding that what happens in an introductory CS college classroom can greatly influence women’s decision to enter or stay out of the programming field.

BY SHANA VU AND JOHN MCDONALD

22 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

C

lose your eyes and picture a computer science college student. In all likelihood, you imagined a male. Sadly, statistics about who decides to major in computer science in college back you up. In 2015, women earned only 18% of all computer science degrees in the nation; that percentage dips even lower for women of color, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

And while identifying the root cause for this gap is difficult, researchers are finding that what happens in a CS college classroom can greatly influence women’s decision to enter or stay out of the programming field. While there is increased interest in addressing gender disparity in Silicon Valley as well as a push to expose young girls to coding, more research is needed to understand the role that colleges can play in the diversity process.

The BRAID (Building, Recruiting and Inclusion for Diversity) research team, led by Linda Sax, professor of higher education at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, aims to pinpoint specific strategies to attract and retain women and students of color as computer science majors. “The university experience for prospective CS students, especially when it comes to introductory CS classes, can make or break a student’s decision,” says Sax. Sax’s research team is part of the BRAID Initiative, started by the Anita Borg Institute and Harvey Mudd College in 2014—with funding from Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft and Qualcomm—to increase the percentage of women and minorities in undergraduate computing programs. The initiative partners with 15 universities across the U.S. that have pledged to increase diversity and inclusivity within their own computer science departments.

Armed with a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation awarded in 2015, Sax’s team is conducting an unprecedented, large-scale longitudinal study with the ultimate goal of identifying best practices for keeping women and students of color in the field.

“We want to find out how CS departments can instill not only a sense of confidence in computing skills, but a sense of belonging among women and students of color,” Sax says.

While women have made significant gains in many fields, including medicine, business and law, the percentage of women who receive CS degrees is the smallest across all STEM fields, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Most dishearteningly, the percentage of CS-degree holders who were women peaked in the 1980s at 34% and has been on a downward trend ever since, even though women currently earn 57% of all undergraduate degrees.

“If girls aren’t involved in building technological products, not only are they missing out on some of the ­fastest-growing and highest-paying jobs,” Sax says, “we’re also missing out on the brainpower that these women can bring to the table.”

To find out what students experience in an introduc­ tory CS class, surveys were distributed across the 15 BRAID schools, which include smaller, private schools, like Villanova



We want to find out how CS departments can instill not only a sense of confidence in computing skills, but a sense of belonging among women and students of color.

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 23

University, as well as large public research institutions, like Arizona State University and UC Irvine.

“While it is admittedly convenient to sample the BRAID-affiliated schools we work with, it’s surprising how well it maps onto the national trend,” says Kathleen Lehman, Associate Director of BRAID research at UCLA. “We account for geography, size of institution, whether it’s public and private.”

The team also conducts student, departmental and faculty interviews, as well as syllabi analyses, and researchers track academic major trajectories and final degrees as well as long-term career aspirations to understand the factors that encourage a student to complete a CS degree.

While the study will run for at least three more years, some initial findings have already emerged.

A recurring theme in the qualitative interviews, for example, is that student experiences in introductory CS classes, especially those taken by non-majors, are instrumental in developing a desire to stay in the field.

Women who take intro-to-CS classes tend to be further along in their college careers than men, and they are usually not CS majors. Since women are better represented in CS intro ­courses (32%) than among actual CS degree earners (16% among BRAID schools), BRAID researchers believe that CS intro classes are particularly significant in whether a student chooses to go down the CS pathway.

Lehman stresses that students’ first impressions about CS are shaped by these introductory classes, especially because women, on average, are less likely to have taken a CS class in high school.

When it comes to programming, you first have to master how to learn programming, Lehman said. “So if [an instructor] just assumes that all the students have some background in coding, it can put some students at a disadvantage.”

Female students in these c­ lasses may also be made to feel as if they ­aren’t allowed to make mistakes.

“Women are socialized to feel that they can’t fail and that they have to achieve perfection, so when their code doesn’t run, women often feel discouraged about their own abilities,” Lehman says. “Men, on the other hand, are often more aware of the fact that learning programming is a t­rial-and-error process and don’t see code not running as a reflection of their own skills.”

Building smaller checkpoints to affirm successes and breaking down assignments into smaller parts can help students build confidence in their learning and work. That confidence, Lehman says, is key to retention within the world of programming and computer science.

Collaboration also is a determining factor, according to Sax. “If someone stays in the major, it’s usually because they have strong peer connections,” she says. “When they leave, it’s not because they’re not

capable, but it’s typically because they have this idea that CS does not contribute to the social good, and they want to help people.”

A paradoxical finding is that even when men’s and women’s achievements are similar, women typically have lower confidence in their programming abilities than men.

While these findings are far from conclusive, Lehman and Sax predict that there are a few main factors that explain the 4:1 ratio of men to women in CS. One factor is society’s portrayal of programmers, especially in media— think “Mr. Robot” and “Silicon Valley.”

“Programming is seen as something that’s overtly masculine and geeky,” Sax said. “There’s this idea that a programmer is a skinny, nerdy hacker who has poor interpersonal skills and works in his basement.”

And even if students don’t harbor these negative stereotypes, Sax says, many students tend to think that majoring in computer science means devoting their life to computers.

“A lot of people think that CS and programming aren’t as impactful in society as other fields,” Sax explains. “In reality, programmers have an incredible social value.”

BRAID Initiative Research Team: Seated left–right: Tomoko Nakajima, Julia Karpicz, Dr. Linda Sax, Connie Chang.

Standing left–right: Annie Wofford, Kaitlin Newhouse, Kari George, Dr. Kathleen Lehman, Jennifer Blaney, Sarayu Sundar.

24 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

REASONS FOR CHOOSING A COMPUTING MAJOR

MALE FEMALE

BY SEX I am interested in creating computer animation

into best practices to encourage diver­ sity and inclusion in computer science

3.71 3.64

I enjoy working with computers* 2.82

I am interested in solving problems with computing*

education. The new ventures will ex-

3.11

amine the impact of booming undergraduate computing enrollments and

3.36 3.15

strategies for responses that increase

Computing offers diverse and broad opportunities

3.44 3.44

diversity and retention of women and underrepresented minorities in com-

3.30

I have an interest in computer games*

2.66

puter science. The research team

I am interested in helping people or society*

3.08

CS allows me to be creative

will also closely examine alternative

3.34

pathways to participation in comput-

3.31 3.31

CS provides good financial opportunities after

ing degree programs and careers.

3.37 3.37

I am good at math or science

In addition, through a partnership with researchers at the University of

3.23 3.11

1 (NOT AT ALL)

2

initiative is launching several new special-focus projects for research ­

2.84 2.88

I like to program computers*

Currently, the UCLA BRAID Research

3

Oregon, the initiative will support na4 (A LOT)

* Statistically significant (p <.05)

tional research examining the role of Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science in increasing diversity in computing. The new special-focus projects are supported through a gift from ­Pivotal Ventures, the executive office

Linda J. Sax is a Professor of Higher Education, UCLA Ed&IS. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Computing Research Association, AnitaB.org, and the Women’s College Coalition, among others. She is the a ­ uthor of “The Gender Gap in College: Maximizing the Developmental Potential of Women and Men” (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 2008) and numerous studies of women’s experiences in STEM fields.

Kathleen J. Lehman serves as the Associate Director for BRAID Research. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Higher Education and Organizational Change at UCLA where her dissertation focused on the experiences of undecided students in introductory computing courses. Dr. Lehman holds a master’s in Higher Education and Student Affairs from The Ohio State University and a bachelor’s degree in French from Miami University.

of Melinda Gates.

“This investment will enable the collection of new data that increases our understanding of how colleges and universities can most effectively increase diversity in computing,” said Sax. “It will also help us to learn more about the role that high school AP Computer Science courses can play in attracting more women and students of color to computing.”

Hilary Zimmerman serves as a postdoctoral scholar on the BRAID research project. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Higher Education and Organizational Change at UCLA. Her dissertation focused on the leadership pathways of women who run for student government president. Hilary holds a master’s degree from Indiana University in Higher Education and Student Affairs and a bachelor’s ­degree from the University of Minnesota in Speech-Language Pathology.

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 25

ETHNICDIVERSITY I N SC H OOL S

BENEFITS EVERYONE

BY JOHN MCDONALD

S

andra Graham, an education professor and the Presidential Chair in Education and Diversity at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is focused on research on the social benefits of diversity and their

implications for academic achievement and civic engagement.

“This is not just about black and brown kids and closing the



The study found that middle school students from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds feel safer, less lonely and less bullied if they attend schools that are more diverse.

26 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

achievement gap, it’s about all of us,” Graham says. “The world is changing and people are going to have to learn to get along. Being exposed to and building relationships with people who look different can help us to have better attitudes and be more positive about other races and cultures.”



… students in diverse schools—those with multiple ethnic groups of relatively equal size—reported more tolerance and less prejudice toward students of other ethnicities and believe teachers treat all students more fairly and equally. In 2017, along with colleague Jaana Juvonen, a UCLA professor of psychology, and Kara Kogachi, a UCLA graduate student in education, Graham published research showing a wide range of personal and social benefits for students of all races and ethnicities from attending ethnically diverse schools.

Published in the journal Child Development, the study found that middle school students from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds feel safer, less lonely and less bullied if they attend schools that are more diverse.

The study also found that students in diverse schools—those with multiple ethnic groups of relatively equal size— reported more tolerance and less prejudice toward students of other ethnicities and believe teachers treat all students more fairly and equally.

Underscoring the importance of these findings, the study’s authors point out that the nation’s population has become significantly more diverse and will become even more so. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2015 more than half of school-age youth in the United States were ethnic minority. By 2040 White students will no longer be the majority in our nation’s public schools. As UCLA Civil Rights Project co-director Gary Orfield has detailed in his research, the United States is rapidly becoming a four-race population. Yet today, U.S. schools have become more segregated than at any time in the past 40 years.

“Immigration is changing everything. We need to realize it is in everybody’s interest for K-12 schools and classrooms to be more racially diverse,” Graham says. “Diversity enhances learning because divergent points of view challenge students’ own beliefs.”

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 27

Sandra Graham, Distinguished Professor of Education, UCLA Ed&IS



We need to understand the neighborhood context, the economic context and historical context if we are going to understand the educational and developmental aspects of diversity and the importance of equity and access to resources. 

28 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

As a next step, Graham and her colleagues will follow the middle school students from their research into high school. The intent is to determine if their experiences in diverse settings provide some social and educational benefit.

“Our thinking is that the relationships and friendship students build with students from different racial and ethnic groups may give you some special social benefit,” Graham says. “While it may not be with the same kids from middle school, will students cross racial boundaries to form new friendships in high school? And will those relationships provide some access to different forms of social capital that may offer social and academic benefits? Will they increase tolerance and foster improved civic engagement?”

Graham is also joining with UCLA colleague Education Professor Rashmita Mistry in a new project to explore the experiences of younger children with diversity and the implications for their social and educational development.

Launching what they hope will be a long-term longitudinal initiative, Graham and Mistry are setting up shop at diverse elementary schools in Los Angeles to examine cross race friendships beginning with students in the second grade.

“We want to see how cross race friendships form, what are the benefits and when do the benefits begin,” Graham says. “Do students begin cross race friendships at younger ages and sustain them, or do they level off? And is their some academic and social benefit over time?”

Working with students in grades 2–5, Graham and Mistry will study the number of same-ethnic and cross-ethnic friendships at each grade level, the quality of those friendships, and whether cross-ethnic close ties are related to three meaningful psychosocial outcomes: better attitudes about the ethnic groups to which the friends belong, greater social competence, and less social vulnerability defined by feeling safe or unsafe at school and experiences with peer harassment.

In addition, they will also examine the academic advantages of having cross-ethnic friends who are academically engaged. They posit that such friends can function like social capital,



It is in everybody’s interest for K–12 schools and classrooms to be more racially diverse.

facilitating the flow of important information across ethnic boundaries about what it takes to be successful in school. By forming a relationship with an academically oriented cross-ethnic classmate, students are gaining access to new resources: their friends’ academic skills and possibly exposure to a larger academically oriented social network.

Graham underscores that it is really important to understand the context of the schools they will be working in. For example, one of the schools in the study is very diverse, almost equally divided between White, Black, Asian and Hispanic students. The parents have a higher socioeconomic status and have made a strategic decision to intentionally place their children in a diverse school setting. In another school, almost all of the students are Black and Hispanic and are almost all bussed to the school they attend. Graham and Mistry want to understand how these factors may impact what happens in these schools and what effect if any it has on students.

“We really can’t understand the impact of school diversity without understanding the larger context of the school,” Graham says. “We need to understand the neighborhood context, the economic context and historical context if we are going to understand the educational and developmental aspects of diversity and the importance of equity and access to resources.”

It is important work. Graham believes the research can contribute new knowledge about social adaptation during times of social change and uncertainty. Given the political climate in our nation, it is a critical time to be studying policies and practices that promote tolerance for youth who differ from one another along multiple social identities, including ethnicity. Cross-ethnic friendships can be a powerful antidote to the divisiveness confronting our nation that sometimes gets enacted in our K-12 schools.

“When people form friendships with people of different races and ethnicities, they form better attitudes about those groups, and are more tolerant. We want to show that diversity benefits everybody,” Graham says. “A more diverse population is the future. If we can’t help people to understand and be less afraid of it, we are sunk.”

To read the full report, “When and How Do Students Benefit From Ethnic Diversity in Middle School?” Authors: Jaana Juvonen, Kara Kogachi, and Sandra Graham, University of California, Los Angeles. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cdev.12834 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 29

POWER-CONSCIOUS A P P R OAC H E S TO C A M P U S

S E X UA L V I O L E N C E

JESSICA C. HARRIS ANDÂ CHRIS LINDER

Reprinted from Inside Higher Ed 30 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

Illustration: Brian Stauffer

F

eminists have long advocated that sexual violence is more about power than about sex, yet few people understand what this means. Further, when mainstream feminist movements (i.e., white, middle-class, educated, cisgender women) highlight that power is integral to understanding sexual ­violence, that usually (re)centers power connected with only sexist oppression. While misogyny, patriarchy and sexism contribute to sexual violence, we argue that the root of sexual violence is deeper than the sum of these sexist systems.

The root cause of sexual violence is oppression, in all of its manifestations, including racism, cissexism, heterosexism, ableism and sexism. Oppression results from people abusing power or lacking consciousness about how power influences their own and others’ experiences. For these reasons, we advocate a power-conscious approach to addressing sexual violence.

What does “power conscious” mean? Simply put, it means paying attention to power dynamics at work in individual, institutional and cultural systems of oppression. Developing power consciousness means that we ask:  Who is missing in this discussion? Who is centered? Why?  Who has the power—both formal and informal—in this system?  How do social identities influence who is heard and who is ignored and silenced?  Who benefits from this system? Who does not?

For example, how do social identities influence people’s experiences in the criminal justice system? The cases of Cory Batey and Brock Turner illustrate how racism and classism show up in sentencing processes. Cory Batey was a black football player at Vanderbilt University; Brock Turner was a white swimmer at Stanford University. Both men were convicted of committing sexual violence.

Batey was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and Turner was sentenced to six months in jail. Although state law and specific contexts make up for some of the discrepancy in sentencing, they cannot account for the drastic differences in the sentencing in these cases.

HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO OUR CAMPUSES? College campuses are mostly made up of the same people who make up our larger communities, so racism and classism are showing up in our campus accountability systems, as well. Campus police, campus judicial systems and even victim advocacy services are not immune from failing to consider the ways people from historically minoritized communities may not experience campus systems the same as students with mostly dominant identities.

So, what do we do? Below, we offer three specific recommendations for approaching sexual violence from a power-conscious perspective.

Learn the history of rape and racism. Ahistoricism, or failing to understand or account for the history and context of an issue or topic, leads to incomplete and ineffective strategies for dealing with sexual violence. For example, sexual violence law is fundamentally racialized.

Early sexual violence laws in America were rooted in property law. White men were the only people who could file charges of rape, as rape was considered a property crime—something that reduced the value of a man’s daughter, essentially his “property.” Additionally, in the time period after the Civil War, white men falsely accused black men as perpetrators of sexual violence directed toward white women to maintain white men’s power and dominance.

More recent sexual violence laws, specifically, the Violence Against Women Act, emerged during the “tough on crime” era of the 1980s and ’90s, which was also highly racialized. People in that era sought to address drug abuse, but drug laws and enforcement focused primarily on poor communities and communities of color, contributing to the continuation of portraying men of color as criminals.

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 31



Given the racialized history of sexual violence law and the current context of racism in legal and policy systems, administrators and educators on college campuses should consider community accountability processes as an option for addressing sexual violence.

32 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018

Given the racialized history of sexual violence law and the current context of racism in legal and policy systems, administrators and educators on college campuses should consider community accountability processes as an option for addressing sexual violence.

Community accountability, as described by the INCITE! women of color against violence collective, means that communities stop relying on systems that perpetuate violence toward them and start relying on each other to hold perpetrators of violence accountable and work to transform perpetrator behavior.

Community accountability is not appropriate in all cases and must be carefully implemented under the leadership of people with a significant understanding of it (specifically, women of color, who created it).

Further, in cases where campus adjudication systems are used, people involved in those systems must be educated about the role of oppression in legal and policy response, as well as the history of the intersections of oppression and sexual violence. A deeper understanding of history may lead to more equitable outcomes in campus adjudication systems.

Employ an intersectional, identityconscious perspective. Foundational intersectionality scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw provides a number of examples to illustrate centering women

of color and poor women in interpersonal-violence work. Crenshaw helps us understand that, by centering the most marginalized people in efforts to address interpersonal violence, no one is left out. When white, cisgender, heterosexual women at elite institutions of higher education are centered in sexual violence work (as they are now), they are the only ones to benefit. However, when marginalized populations are at the center of antioppression work, strategies are more comprehensive, resulting in more effectively dealing with interpersonal violence.

That being said, incorporating intersectionality into student affairs practice does not mean that every program has to be for every student. There is no such thing as an “all-inclusive” program. In fact, this is dangerously close to the concept of “color blindness,” or the notion that one does not “see” color when discussing race. In addition to the ableist nature of the term “color blindness,” using an “identity-neutral” approach to any issue effectively (re)centers people with dominant identities, who are treated as the norm or default.

Related to campus sexual violence, seemingly identity-neutral approaches effectively make the experiences of any victim who is not a white, cisgender, heterosexual woman invisible. Designing programs that specifically center the experiences of men survivors, trans and queer survivors, survivors of color, and survivors with disabilities (re)centers their experiences in the conversation.

Doing so will result in better-informed providers and more empowered survivors. This also frees up space to develop programs specifically for white, cis, hetero women, whose e ­ xperiences are distinct in and of their own—just not the only experiences, as currently portrayed.

Focus on perpetrators. We are working on a research project examining the ways sexual violence is portrayed in campus newspapers. An initial review of the data reveals that perpetrators are invisible in most articles about sexual violence. Language used throughout newspaper articles often implies that sexual violence just “happens,” as though there is no actor or ­explanation for it.



Campus administrators and educators should work to ensure that perpetrators are made more visible in discussions of sexual violence prevention.

By making perpetrators invisible, we ignore important power dynamics at play. Perpetrators—not alcohol, not being at the wrong place at the wrong time, not miscommunication—are solely responsible for sexual violence. Failing to acknowledge this ignores the power that perpetrators wield, placing responsibility for ending sexual violence on the wrong people: potential victims, bystanders and advocates.

Campus administrators and educators should work to ensure that perpetrators are made more visible in discussions of sexual violence prevention.

For example, rather than only focusing on teaching potential victims how to avoid being assaulted, we should spend more resources teaching people not to rape. Focusing on perpetrators as the cause of sexual violence may contribute to increased community accountability for their actions. People will begin to see the perpetrator—not alcohol or miscommunication—as the key problem.

WHAT DOES POWER-CONSCIOUS MEAN? Simply put, it means paying attention to power dynamics at work in individual, institutional and cultural systems of oppression. Developing power consciousness means that we ask:  Who is missing in this discussion? Who is centered? Why?  Who has the power—both formal and informal—in this system?  How do social identities influence who is heard and who is ignored and silenced?  Who benefits from this system? Who does not?

Jessica Harris, an assistant professor in the division of Higher Education & Organizational Change, has been selected as a recipient of the 2017–19 Emerging Scholar Award from the American College Personnel Association—College Educators International (ACPA). The twoyear award will support Harris’ research on campus sexual violence from the perspective of women of color.

Harris recently published “Intersections of Identity and Sexual Violence on Campus: Centering Minoritized Students’ Experiences” (With Linder, C., co-ed. Sterling: Stylus Publishing, 2017). Chris Linder is an associate professor of college student affairs administration at the University of Georgia. In the book, Linder and Harris explore how the violent history of U.S. colonization continues to influence the campus lives of women of color. This article is a response to questions that have arisen from that publication.

UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2018 33

NON-PROFIT ORG US POSTAGE PAID UCLA

UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies 405 Hilgard Avenue, Box 951521 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1521