Welcome Back to ANova!
General Meeting #1 Recap
Power versus empowerment: what’s the difference?
Power is a “disindividualized” social control that emerges from an unclear source; it lies in systems, not people. The four main criteria to consider when thinking about power are that it is without intent and not possessed, that it permeates throughout all aspects of life, that it emerges from our institutions and norms, and our main focus is the last criterion: that it influences and limits individuals’ actions. An example of a power system is gender bias. Gender bias is present in all aspects of a woman’s life; it was generated from patriarchal norms, supported by pseudoscientific institutions; it is non-intentional (for the most part) and enacted; and, it limits women!
At ANova, however, we strive to stray away from creating power systems; rather, we aim to instead empower our students. We follow two main lines of empowerment:
How do we help individuals reclaim their identities?
How do we help individuals increase their sense of agency?
Beyond teaching computer science, we aspire to be mentors to the students. Our mission is to empower all students from all backgrounds to enhance their self-esteem and inspire the students to believe they can achieve any and all future endeavors.
Small Group #1 Recap
In addition to our general meetings, we also have biweekly small group meetings with around fourteen other members to reinforce the topics we discuss during our general meetings, and dive deeper into concepts relevant to the students we work with. During our first small group meeting, we covered diversity and had discussions on how to make students feel more welcome in a computer science classroom. We also discussed the change in the UC requirements for computer science: computer science used to be an elective, but now it counts as a physical science, thinking about the possible effects this will have on high school systems and on students’ accessibility to computer science classes. Will this change cause more high schools to implement computer science curriculums? We ended our small groups by looking at the essay written by Stuart Reges, a computer science professor for introductory classes at UW, titled “Why Women Don’t Code.” As mentors, we do all we can to make sure all students — regardless of background, gender, race, etc — feel comfortable and included; during our small group discussion, we talked about how to ensure that this is the impact we have on each and every one of our students.
Site Recap: DCA
At all of our sites during the first week, we played ice breaker games to kickstart our relationships with our students, but we linked our fun games to computer science, of course! This week’s site highlight is DCA (Downtown Charter Academy) in Oakland. Eight mentors go to DCA on Mondays and Thursdays each week, since it is one of the largest sites. There are two classrooms per day, with four mentors and around fifteen students per classroom. At DCA during the first week, they played two games: zipline and rock-paper-scissors cheerleader. In zipline, everyone stands in a circle, and one person will point to another and yell “zip!” The person who is pointed at bends down, and the two people next to them have to point at each other and say the other person’s name. Whoever says the other’s name first stays in, while the other has to sit down. The mentors used this game to segue into pointers, comparing it to the way that computers point to variables. In rock-paper-scissors cheerleader, two people play rock-paper-scissors, and the loser of the match becomes the “train” for the winner and has to cheer them on while they continue challenging the rest of the room. By the end of the game, there are two people left with their own respective cheerleader trains cheering them on. The mentors related this game to trees; after the winner was declared, they drew a tree that represented the progression of the game, and the students were able to easily identify who got out in each round and who the final winner was!
