Informed by the rich methodological work around humanizing and community-based research, this article unpacks our journey of understanding and conceptualizing community-driven design research in partnership with Tribal Nations. Through a multi-year critical ethnographic approach, we identified four pivots necessary to enact community-driven design research that each require a shift in current research infrastructure and systems, especially those located within universities. The pivots include shifting from power and equity to Tribal sovereignty and self-determination, from ownership to stewardship, from objectivity to relationality, and from product to process. Each pivot is an invitation to researchers to build and (re)build infrastructure that aligns with the values of community-driven design research. We join qualitative researchers who seek to center values in research by specifically discussing how this move toward community values demands a restructuring of the very foundation on which our research is built.

Indigenous community research partnerships face challenges when integrating technology into their infrastructure, and risk compromising the community’s cultural, technological, and rhetorical sovereignty. In this paper, we explore the practices that help mitigate this challenge, including making visible the technology itself and technology practices embedded in dominant research processes. We consider how technologies mediate community research partnerships and question how we overlook our understanding of and creation of technologies as designers. Drawing on empirical insights of community research across Indigenous communities, we provide guidance on technology use with values of transparency, accessibility, and relationality. From a lens of place and power, we unpack the question: How can we cultivate technology in our research practices with Indigenous communities to honor their sovereignties? By reflecting on technology in the context of community research partnerships, we acknowledge Indigenous people’s sovereignty and self-determination, heal from harmful systemic research practices through critical questioning and reflection, and rebuild relationships among multiple rich ways of knowing and being.

Educational innovations with emerging technologies often disregard the potential historical and cultural damage of those technologies, which further disenfranchises Indigenous communities from a fruitful relationship with them. This is especially true for narrative-based digital technologies, because storytelling is held as a sacred practice of knowledge sharing among Indigenous communities. In response, we wondered how we could create technologies (digital and non-digital) that support Indigenous ways of knowing, especially through storytelling. This is a process we call (re)presentation. Specifically, our work is centered on building culturally sustaining and revitalizing models for (re) presenting stories. Our team engaged in an iterative and reflexive design process with Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members, educators, designers, and researchers. We present a single design case of (re)presenting an Indigenous story across interactions and share four ethical tensions that we encountered throughout our process. Our (re)presentation of each tension includes a critical reflection as well as our shared journey navigating the ethical tensions in practice and what that means for how we approach learning design

OBJECTIVES:Native American youth need educational experiences that promote positive, healthy development, which requires decolonizing current educational experiences. Konaway Nika Tillicum Native Youth Academy (KNT) offers a holistic approach to education, incorporating Tribal cultures and values along with valuing higher education. Across two complementary studies, we seek to understand how the Medicine Wheel framework supports the design of educational experiences and the effectiveness of this design on positive development factors, including cultural identity development, self-esteem, and academic optimism. METHOD:To address our research questions, we first share an ethnographic study including participant observations and interviews with five KNT staff to investigate how the educators of KNT enact the Medicine Wheel in designing educational experiences for Native youth. We then examined the effectiveness of this Medicine Wheel framework on positive development factors across two summers of the academy with youth ages 11-18 (23 boys, 38 girls) representing diverse tribal affiliations. RESULTS:Findings from our first research question reveal a Medicine Wheel Educational Framework that offers holistic and culturally sustaining/revitalizing education experiences for Native youth. Findings from our second research question indicate that Native youth experienced significant increases in their cultural identity and academic optimism directly and indirectly via increasing self-esteem through engaging in the KNT. CONCLUSIONS:Implications of findings show that when educated in a learning space that promotes Native students' culture, youth show healthy development in factors valued across Indigenous and Western perspectives, including cultural identity, self-esteem, and academic optimism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Although education is framed as a future- oriented enterprise, we often fail to serve the diverse futurities of youth, particularly in formal learning envi-ronments. The cultural norms of formal learning en-vironments are rooted in dominant ways of being and knowing and this shapes how learning environments and learning technologies can be designed. As a re-sult, the futures youth can envision for themselves in these spaces are often static and limited by the domi-nant culture. As a move toward supporting youths' diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences, we ask how youth develop relationship with culture through creating culturally centred multimedia pro-jects. Guided by a case study approach, we collected thirty-six remixing multimedia projects from twelve sixth graders, who created these projects for three culturally centred learning activities over a school year. Findings share one case from each learning activity to demonstrate how students represent their relationships with culture through three forms of sym-bolising. Implications from this work reject the settled expectations of dominant culture in formal learning environments and, instead, invite youths' knowledges and experiences through remixing with multimedia.

The news media is an important force shaping societal views of the socio-politics of climate change. International scholarship finds it not uncommon for Indigenous cultures, communities, and perspectives to be underrepresented and misrepresented in Western media, especially on climate change issues. Research also indicates that accurate Indigenous representation occurs when Indigenous peoples are the authors of news articles themselves. We developed a Holistic Media Coding Protocol informed by Indigenous and Western perspectives to guide our content analysis of media coverage of climate change, environmental issues, and Indigenous peoples. We examined news articles from two Indigenous news publications, Indian Country Today and Navajo Times, and two Western news publications, The New York Times and The Salt Lake Tribune. Our findings indicate that creating and utilizing a theory-informed Holistic Media Coding Protocol challenges the recurrent Western gaze on Indigenous peoples. This Holistic Media Coding Protocol contributes to our understandings of the media, settler colonialism, and climate change from Indigenous and Western perspectives. Overall, this research responds to a critical call for sociologists to engage more deeply with settler colonialism, Indigenous issues, and intersectional environmental justice.

Developing knowledge of others' cultures is essential to cultural competence.To join scholars and educators who have varied approaches to engaging students with culture in formal learning settings, as a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, educators, and designers, we designed a series of interdisciplinary, land-based curricular units to bring Native cultural perspectives into sixth-grade classrooms.This short paper focuses on the research question: how does sixth graders' knowledge of Native cultures and Native Americans change through engaging with culturally centered curricular units throughout a school year?We share three learning paths that illustrate sixth graders' movements in understanding.The learning paths provide insights into how sixth graders develop a closer psychological distance to culture, particularly Native cultures, as they actively negotiated their prior understandings with their culturally centered classroom experiences.This work contributes new insights into how youth learn in a culturally centered context.

The recent pandemics and social movements call for the need to pause and rethink our relationship with more-than-human worlds, particularly our activities in relation to the land. In our work as a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, educators, and designers, we explored how land-based pedagogy can contribute to a transformative learning experience for sixth graders through disrupting the dominant ways of knowing and relating to the land. Specifically, our work is guided by the research question: how do learners express relationship with the land in the restorying of their river trip experience? We share data from thirty-nine sixth-grader participants who completed a restorying project about their cross-cultural river trip and reflected on these experiences through interviews. Our findings present three cases that illustrate how sixth graders demonstrate different forms of interacting and relating with the land. We discuss insights regarding students' land-based experiences as well as restorying as a practice to restore relationships with the land-based pedagogical approach.

Design is not neutral.Making explicit the design assumptions that drive our work is essential toward designing for culturally sustaining/revitalizing futures.In this short paper, we share our development of a community-driven design process that supports our collaborative work of inviting Tribal families to share and preserve cultural knowledge through building relationships with the land.Specifically, we present a case study to illustrate the design process and reciprocal relationship that we cultivated between Tribal Elders and University designers.As a team, we collaboratively designed a series of learning guides to share the Tribe's culture with families.We characterize the community-driven design process with four design waves: sharing, interpreting, learning, and reflecting.This design process invites a slow, rhythmic, and intentional knowledge exchange.Our work contributes theoretical and practical understandings of community-driven design as a process to sustain/revitalize culture. ObjectiveDesigners hold exceptional power to invite or disinvite certain knowledge and values.Thus, who designs matters, what is designed matters, how it is designed matters, why it is designed matters, and when it is designed matters, especially in the context of designing for culturally sustaining/revitalizing goals (McCarty & Lee, 2014).Scholar, who labor in this area, highlight the importance of making explicit the assumptions driving our design work; for example, Bang and colleagues explicate the reality that "what is good, right, true, and beautiful" (Bang et al., 2016, p. 29) is rooted in cultural, historical, and political knowledge and values.Therefore, it is necessary to disrupt who designs learning environments and technologies by redistributing power from education researchers and designers to local communities.As designers, Indigenous peoples have been actively reclaiming who designs by centering the uses of digital and original technologies on "meaningful community-driven goals" (Bang et al., 2013, p. 707).These goals disrupt colonizing purposes of technologies and repurpose them to assert self-determination through language revitalization and cultural preservation.By pursuing meaningful community-driven goals, communities become designers and redefine what it means to create with technology through rich innovations at the intersection of learning and culture (Bang et al., 2013).In this paper, our team explores our development of a collaborative design process that supports the goal of sharing and preserving knowledge between and within Indigenous communities and families.As Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, designers, and educators, we specifically investigate: how do we employ a community-driven design process to create learning guides for Indigenous families to build relationships with the land?Specifically, we share our collective analysis and reflection on our design process, which led to the identification of four design waves: sharing, learning, interpreting, and reflecting.Our work contributes practical and theoretical understandings of community-driven design led by a Tribal Nation.

To address pressing issues of bias and black boxing embedded in technologies and their underlying computational models, scholars call for inventing and employing design processes that invite participation from those whose lives are shaped by these technologies. In response, we reimagine not only how technologies and their models are designed, but also who designs them. We present our work toward developing the concept of gathering as a design process that invites physical prototyping as an important mechanism in developing culturally sustaining technologies. Gathering is inspired by “Hui,” an ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i Hawaiian language word translated as: to band together, assemble, organize. We share our ongoing journey of inventing and engaging in gathering and present four characteristics of gathering as a design process. Our work has implications for how we design new forms of technology toward more equitable futures, especially by making visible decision making and sensemaking that occurs throughout the design process.

Public critiques of technologies and the algorithms that power them have pushed designers to critically consider for whom they design and who they include in design processes.In education, similar critiques highlight how computational technologies designed for novice learners commonly privilege certain ways of knowing and being.In response, this poster explores how the cultural construct of time is represented across computational platforms for novices and what this means, particularly for Indigenous learners and designers.

Inequities in the healthcare system are a persistent issue and disproportionately harm minoritized groups.There are movements in the healthcare community toward providing culturally centered care where healthcare professionals are cognizant of their own and the patients' personal cultures.Our team of university researchers and healthcare professionals codeveloped a trauma-informed cultural competence training (TICCT) and investigated how this training shifted the healthcare professionals' interactions with colleagues, care for patients, and self-perceptions.

As researchers focus more on engaging youth with advanced technologies to build computational skills, there is a need to develop tools that support youth to become creators of digital content rather than consumers of these technologies. Scholars refer to this shift in becoming creators of technology as computational making, which enables new forms of learning and thinking at the intersection of the physical and the digital. The interdisciplinary and multidimensional nature of computational making design processes means learners must negotiate their design idea across space, time, mode, and expertise. In this paper, we draw on multiple iterations of design and implementation work with wearable and locative technologies to investigate the affordances and challenges of design scaffolds in youths’ computational making design processes. We present examples from learning with electronic textiles and locative game design to illustrate the unique problem spaces of materiality and spatiality specific to computational making. Our insights highlight a significant need for sharing scholarship and design work on implementing design scaffolds in computational making contexts toward the collective goal of developing a system of design scaffolds to effectively support learners’ thinking across the interdisciplinary, multimodal problem spaces unique to computational making.

Given the increased need for broadening participation in computing, there must be a focus not just on providing culturally relevant content but also on building accessible and inclusive computational tools. Most efforts to design culturally responsive computational tools redesign surface features, often through making nominal changes to add cultural meaning, yet the deeper structural design remains largely intact. We take a critical perspective towards novice programming environments to elucidate how the underlying structure privileges particular epistemologies and cultures. In this paper, we examine how the cultural practice of storytelling is supported and/or inhibited within novice programming tools. We draw upon the experiences of 38 Native American youth, who worked in teams to create place-based, interactive stories and games for their community. Findings offer insights to the embedded cultural biases that exist in the structures of computational tools. We discuss insights for how to address cultural biases and promote deeper integration of cultural practices in future designs of culturally responsive computational tools. Practitioner Notes What is already known about this topic? Culturally responsive computing connects computing content heritage and vernacular cultural practices. "Black boxing," or lack of transparency in how it works, in computational tools makes it difficult for novices to enter computing cultures. Design tools are embedded with particular ways of being, knowing, valuing and doing. What this paper adds? Thirty-eight novice learners' computational designs were shaped by the ways in which a computational tool privileged particular knowledge systems. Storytelling, as a critical cultural practice, especially in Indigenous cultures, is heavily constrained by the design structure of computational tools. Computational tools are cultural artifacts with deeply embedded epistemological, ontological and axiological biases, which directly frame what learners can do with these tools. Implications for practice Collaborative, community-based design processes could mitigate the cultural biases that persist in computational tools. Transparency in computation tools in critical to broadening participation in computing cultures. Culturally responsive design of computational tools at the structural level is required to build inclusive computing cultures.

Given the increased need for broadening participation in computing, there must be a focus not just on providing culturally relevant content but also on building accessible and inclusive computational tools. Most efforts to design culturally responsive computational tools redesign surface features, often through making nominal changes to add cultural meaning, yet the deeper structural design remains largely intact. We take a critical perspective towards novice programming environments to elucidate how the underlying structure privileges particular epistemologies and cultures. In this paper, we examine how the cultural practice of storytelling is supported and/or inhibited within novice programming tools. We draw upon the experiences of 38 Native American youth, who worked in teams to create place-based, interactive stories and games for their community. Findings offer insights to the embedded cultural biases that exist in the structures of computational tools. We discuss insights for how to address cultural biases and promote deeper integration of cultural practices in future designs of culturally responsive computational tools. What is already known about this topic? What this paper adds? Implications for practice

Immersive technology is increasingly recognized for its rhetoric potentials. Similar to traditional genres such as text and image, immersive technology such as Augmented Reality (AR) is also context dependent and can be used to conduct persuasive ends, based on the advantages of their input/output affordances. AR provides new opportunities to represent human-nonhuman relationship rhetorically, which is central to the concept of the Anthropocene. In this study, we reviewed 14 AR applications that are designed for the understanding of the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch where human influence is the driving force. Our purpose is to understand what affordances of AR can help to create the rhetoric for the Anthropocene. We identified three major rhetorical affordances of AR in conveying the message of the Anthropocene: virtual objects, point of view, and the input-output link. We argue that the design of these applications can generate a local and personalized understanding of the Anthropocene. Such design is also a part of the posthuman endeavor as they can be used as a reflective tool of anthropocentric perceptions supported by the development of technology. We also discuss how AR differs from Virtual Reality (VR) when serving the rhetorical ends. The rhetoric effects can be implicit in AR, but it adds to the layers of meaning when we try to understand the make meaning-processes of AR

ABSTRACT There is considerable debate and ambiguity around what constitutes “computational thinking” (CT). In contrast to Computer Science which is generally treated as a distinct field of study, CT as a construct highlights the integral relationship between computing and other fields. Many recent efforts seek to map computational thinking by making high-level connections to other school disciplines. We argue that while these efforts may help identify specific curricular areas in which computing is likely to take place, they do not sufficiently capture the specificity and dynamism that is characteristic of meaningful computational integration. Worse, they exclude generative examples of computing integration that exist outside of the traditional STEM context or researcher-led efforts. In this special issue, we offer a counterproposal to one-size-fits-all frameworks of CT by exploring in detail how local, emergent definitions of CT develop across a diversity of spaces of learning. Reflecting on these examples can help researchers and educators alike cultivate an awareness of the ways in which learners and educators leverage computing to think, create, and participate across a variety of spaces.