Maria Knobelsdorf, University of Dortmund, Germany - Didaktik der ...

explain and anticipate learning difficulties. Today's students
come
Figure 1. A schematic representation of a cognitiveapprenticeship
viewpoint on schooling
to school with a wealth of informal knowledge that includes
learning practices which have proved useful in out-of-school
learning experiences, such as their interaction with the Internet
as consumers and producers of knowledge as well as their
gaming experiences (for further discussion of the impact of
students' computer experience on their cognitive skills, see Gee,
[6]. As our expectations of schooling sociology shift so that we
no longer assume that the teacher is the “knowledge authority”
and instead expect students to assume responsibility for creating
knowledge, our metaphors for educational milieus should reflect
this change.
Figure 2. A schematic representation of a cultural encounter
viewpoint on schooling
I suggest using the metaphor of a cultural encounter. This
metaphor faithfully maintains students' “newcomerness” to the
culture represented by the instructional setting but, at the same
time, regards students as longstanding members of other,
intertwined cultures. Moreover, this metaphor also enables us to
regard school goals and practices as being driven from multiple,
not necessarily overlapping cultures, thereby adding to the
picture by emphasizing the multicultural nature of the sociology
of schooling today. Figure 2 is a schematic representation of this
viewpoint.
92
3. COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION AS
A CULTURAL ENCOUNTER
In any domain, the teacher and the student are active in two
cultures simultaneously, or metaphorically, each of them wears
two hats simultaneously. The first hat is the hat of the target
community of practice. The teacher, like the entire instructional
setting, represents the community of the studied practice, and the
student is the newcomer to that community of practice. Indeed,
the CS curriculum is oriented toward the academic community
whose understanding of the computer world involves the
abstraction, solution, and proof of algorithmic problems.
The second hat is the hat of participants in a school milieu.
School is a cultural environment in itself. Brousseau [3] defines
school activity as creating and playing didactical milieus,
designed by the teachers according to the knowledge they want to
devolve, with consideration of the students they teach. Learning
is achieved when the student develops strategies to make sense
of the milieu.
CS students wear a third hat, that of a computer user or local
developer. Their viewpoint regarding the CS world—what
constitutes a good problem, an accountable approach to a
solution, and a satisfactory solution of the problem—were shaped
without much interaction with the other two "professional" CS
cultures: the CS academia and industry [1]. A user is defined by
Turkle [18] as someone who is “involved in the machine in a
hands-on way, but is not interested in the technology except as it
enables an application” [18, p.32]. Many students, thus, are
veterans in the world of computers; this shapes their
understanding of and interests in this world. Furthermore, as oldtimers
in this world, they might delegitimize the CS curriculum
as relevant to their CS life, which ultimately leads to a culture
clash.
Often the borderline between users and programmers is not
clear-cut [7, 12]. In fact, it is all a matter of the context. Students
might mistakenly mis-contextualize educational computer-related
situations and approach them “wearing” the user hat rather than
the programmer’s hat. For example, in previous work, it was
evident that both the user culture and school culture nurtured
students (mis)conceptions of correctness as relative and partial.
“Relatively correct” meant that that the program “worked,” i.e.
produced the desired output with additional irrelevant output.
Relative correctness meant that there was a “grain of
correctness” in the program, that is, something in the code was
written correctly. In fact, students referred to program correctness
as the sum of the correctness of the code constituents, as teachers
would grade their programs. Moreover, some attributed the
teacher’s judgment that the program was incorrect to
‘‘pettiness’’ [1, 2].
4. EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGES IN THE
DIGITAL AGE
4.1 The change in school culture
Traditional schooling is characterized by its focus on information
and teacher-centered practices. Resnick [16] and other scholars
contend that these schooling foci are unsuitable for current times
and should therefore change, moving beyond information and