Arising of Informal Women's Learn-to-Code Communities: Activity Systems as Incubators

Autor/inn/en	Lyon, Louise Ann; Clayton, Chelsea
Titel	Arising of Informal Women's Learn-to-Code Communities: Activity Systems as Incubators
Quelle	In: ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 21 (2021) 2, Artikel 12 (24 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1946-6226
Schlagwörter	Females; Coding; Communities of Practice; Womens Education; Coaching (Performance); Computer Software; Program Effectiveness; Educational Environment + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Weibliches Geschlecht; Codierung; Programmierung; Community; 'Women''s education'; Frauenbildung; Lernumgebung; Pädagogische Umwelt; Schulumwelt
Abstract	Female-focused, grassroots communities purporting to help women learn to code are popping up in a variety of settings, indicating the motivation on the part of the participants to evade male-dominated settings while learning. However, little is known about how these groups function as an activity system. With current technology enabling the forming of virtual communities and the meteoric rise in use of the Salesforce CRM (customer relationship management) platform, a group of women have formed a coaching and learning community designed to help women move from Salesforce administrators to software developers through learning to code. We used activity systems analysis (ASA) to investigate this real-world instance of the larger phenomenon using an ethnographic approach. We used ASA to organize and make sense of the data by first creating a table listing the points on the activity system triangle (subject, rules, object, etc.) and filling in the points of the triangle based on the design of the coaching and learning group as described by participants; this gave us a high-level view of the activity system. To understand the subjects' point of view of the system, we then created a new column in the table to fill in themes that emerged from our qualitative data analysis organized by dimension of the activity system. This process enabled us to capture the activity and the voices of participants as well as tensions that had emerged in the system. Findings show a range of outcomes, from participants crediting the group as a kickstart to the journey to successfully landing a job as a developer to members stalling in their progress after involvement. Results also show that purposeful tensions of welcoming novice questions and offering unsolicited verbal encouragement built into the activity system create a welcoming, safe environment for women learning to code. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	Association for Computing Machinery. 2 Penn Plaza Suite 701, New York, NY 10121. Tel: 800-342-6626; Tel: 212-626-0500; Fax: 212-944-1318; e-mail: acmhelp@acm.org; Web site: http://toce.acm.org/
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01