Designing toward justice: Making space for Black and Latine parent involvement in youth OST computing and STEAM education

Given the renewed interest in understanding the role of parent involvement in youth education, out-of-school (OST) learning offers alternatives to allow families multiple ways to engage in their children’s learning, as well as to cultivate community with one another. Prior research suggests that parent engagement is especially important for Black and brown youth, who have been historically marginalized and who, at high rates, live in communities that have faced historical and current systemic inequity. We created Digital Youth Divas (DYD), an OST computing and STEAM educational program from a transformative justice perspective that seeks to serve as a broker of relationships and OST opportunities as well as a community for Black and Latina girls and their families to advocate for the opportunities they want to see and counter harms computing education has historically enacted. We ask the following research questions: How do parents and caring adults navigate systems and relationships in cultivating out-of-school STEAM and non-STEAM experiences for their children? What supports should program providers design to allow for parent and caring adult involvement in their children’s OST activities? Using a case study approach, we interviewed 10 families in our program to understand their experiences in the program, how they manage their youth’s OST activities and interests, and how they navigate the local OST ecosystem. Through an iterative qualitative analysis process, three trends emerged from the interview data: for parents and caring adults to engage with OST computing programs that aim to leverage a transformative justice approach, programs must design in ways that: (1) attend to historicity of parent relationships to both community and computing, (2) make space for multiple parenting styles and situations, and (3) are intentionally designed for parent ownership. While there is still much to be done to repair harms enacted by computing and STEAM educational programs and provide space for parents and educators together to seek justice for our youth, our findings provide implications regarding ways that future programs and interventions can effectively engage Black and Latine families.