A carnival learning party: crossing cultural borders through coding literacy

Abstract

This experience report aims to describe the conceptual and logistical features of Coding Carnival, a Brazilian-American collaboration on teaching computer programming as literacy. It is a descriptive study, with a qualitative inquiry into the Eisner methodology approach (2017). In the fall of 2019, through a sponsorship from the Brazilian government, Corrêa came to study concepts of coding literacy with Vee, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh. They elected to design a reading group focused on teaching coding in K12[1] contexts. Readings included Brazilian and American scholars of literacy and coding, alongside hands-on activities. The culmination of the reading group was a "Coding Carnival," two public all-ages events with a theme of Brazilian carnival to demonstrate hands-on coding activities and to help families learn coding literacy together.   The power and identity relationships inherent to literacy, as well as its symbolic and technological features, connected "coding literacy" with Brazilian literacy theory--in particular, the potential of individual transformation and emancipation described by P. Freire (1981). D’Ambrosio's "ethnomathematics" helped us to see how cultural, physical, and social conditions shape the mathematical thinking embedded in coding practices (D’Ambrosio, 2002). The coding literacy theory, presented by Vee (2017), in conversation with Bers’ ideas of teaching coding as a second language, helped us to bridge the gap between teaching in the humanities and understanding technical concepts in programming through a carnival learning party.[2]   [1] K–12 is an abbreviation of kindergarten (K) for 5– 6-year-olds through twelfth grade (12) for 17–18-year-olds, corresponding to the first and last grades, respectively, of free basic education in the USA. [2] This study was approved by the University of Pittsburgh Institutional Review Board under the number STUDY19100176.