Situating computational empowerment in formal education: A multi-perspective view

Digital literacy and respective education are of growing interest in our increasingly digitalized world. Recent works stress the importance of aiming beyond the acquisition of corresponding technical competences and call for fostering children’s empowerment and participation in digitalization. Computational Empowerment (CE) pursues that goal through a creative and reflexive participatory design approach. However, remaining conceptual vagueness with regard to what CE entails may hinder its implementation in formal education.

This paper addresses this gap, with the aim to demonstrate what is needed to advance CE’s position in this context. To this end, we elaborate on our understanding of CE’s vision, approach and impact. We then examine CE in the context of formal education, and contrast it with selected contemporary educational theory and practice. Specifically, we position CE in relation to an established learning framework (Bloom’s revised taxonomy), educational policy (DigComp) and practices in the classroom. This is complemented by an analysis of four different projects: we present lessons learned in the context of pedagogical interventions and take a closer look at the accompanying empowerment processes. As a result, this paper provides a foundation to make CE’s ideas more tangible and, thus, actionable, for researchers, policy makers and educators.