Episode 148: Using Technology for Social Good with Jean Ryoo

Jean Ryoo is the Director of Research of the Computer Science Equity Project at UCLA. She is also the lead author of the graphic novel Power On!, published by MIT Press, which was recently translated into Spanish under the title Conectados.

Enjoy this fantastic conversation about Jean’s journey and her mission to create more equitable and humanizing educational experiences. We also get into the challenges of traditional learning methods and how she came to write a graphic novel. It’s a good one (apologies in advance for some of the noises in the background).

 
 
 
 
 

Read the transcript for this episode:

Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.


Jean Ryoo is the Director of Research of the computer science equity project at UCLA. She is also the lead author of the graphic novel “Power On,” published by MIT Press, which was recently translated into Spanish under the title “Conectados.” Welcome Jean, so nice to have you here. 


Jean Ryoo  0:15  

Thanks for having me, Lily. It's so exciting to meet you and be here with you. 


Lily Jones  0:20  

Yeah, same, well, I would love to take a tip for you to take us through your professional journey. Sure.


Jean Ryoo  0:29  

I would say that my professional journey has been very windy, windy roads, lots of different pit stops along the way. But I think what ultimately landed me in education is I love teaching. I love working with students and other teachers and really around the focus on, how do we make educational experiences and schooling experiences more humanizing, more meaningful, more joyful and less oppressive, as is the case in a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of contexts, and many in which I worked as well as a teacher and as a researcher, whereas just sometimes, the structures that we have in place are not built for all people.


Lily Jones  1:22  

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think I absolutely agree, and that can be one of the most challenging things about teaching, is that you are, are part of the structure, right? And like, part of the structure, and trying to work in an anti oppressive way, or trying to work in a way that humanizes students more, and it's hard in a structure that isn't built for that. So I'm curious a little bit just about your experience of being able to, like, keep the mission and resilience amidst outside forces.


Jean Ryoo  1:55  

Yeah, definitely. Well, it's funny because, you know, initially, teaching was something that I did as a volunteer, right? Like it was I would volunteer in after school programs or as a docent in different museum contexts and out of school spaces. And then after college, I was like, wait, I should teach as a job, because I love it so much as a volunteer, right? And and so I was lucky enough to get to teach abroad, and then I also got to teach in Hawaii. I was teaching middle school and high school and the public school system at the same time as getting my masters. And at that time, I was like beginning to read a lot of work by Frere and around critical pedagogy and all of these sort of like approaches that challenged the sort of what he calls the banking method, right where, like a top down teacher tells the Student What to memorize them, and the student has to spit that back to the teacher to prove that they've learned and and how can we change that? And while I was teaching, I saw a lot of discrimination against young women, a lot of racism, a lot of also, like class challenges, like in terms of socioeconomic status and and I was like, Oh my gosh, how can, how can we I love being in the classroom, but you know, everything we do within this 50 minutes that I get to hang out with these amazing people, these young people, I feel like sometimes gets undone When they go to the next class. And it's like a teacher who's on their way to retirement and just shows videos, you know. And so it's like, how do we and and not to, you know, discount all of the great work that retiring teacher probably did at earlier times when they had more energy. But, you know, it's just like, what, you know, what can we do? And so I think, what and and I don't have the answers, and I've messed up a lot as a teacher, I'm in no way like a perfect human being, but I think that the experience of trying to work in collaboration with people towards these larger goals has been so inspirational. And it's, you know, it's from working with young people to working with teachers when we have, like, a shared vision of, like, how to make the learning experience more equitable, more meaningful. You know, it just and like we're all at the table to design that has been, that's been what's kept me going, and sort of finding hope and feeling like, okay, things can be done differently. That being said, how to sustain that can be very difficult too.


Lily Jones  4:56  

Yeah. 


Jean Ryoo  4:56  

Like, a great year starting out, and then it's like, the next year is like, Ah!! Things change, and like, people leave or people move, and yeah.


Lily Jones  5:09  

Constant challenges are, for sure, a reality. Can you talk to us a little bit more about, like, what's your work like now?


Jean Ryoo  5:17  

Yeah, so when I was teaching and I was like, oh, we need to do something more. That's when I was like, Oh, Wow, so cool that there are these people who working in universities who do these amazing projects like and research. Maybe I want to do that. And that's when I went and got a PhD at UCLA, and also learned that, oh, some of these people who looked great in their books actually haven't stepped into a classroom in years, right? And then also, on the flip side, met, like amazing professors and researchers who super work super closely with teachers and students, and those served as my role models. So like, Okay, how do we do that moving forward? And so in my current work, I work a lot in what we often call research practice partnerships, but it's essentially, you know, instead of having researchers come in and be like the fly on the wall that observes everything and then leaves, or the researcher who comes in and says, we have these questions we need to  answer. So I'm going to watch you and see if you're doing things right or wrong. You know, like trying to change that and change the power dynamics that historically have existed between researchers and teachers and students and communities. Instead, think about, how can we design projects together? How can the questions be formed together and mutually? How can we think about data collection and analysis is something that's also like benefits everyone and isn't done in ways that are harmful. And you know, just really trying to rethink, what does it mean to engage and learn together, which I still have a lot to learn from too. You know, I try, but there's like real unlearning past practices that we've historically been taught are the correct ways to do research can be difficult and and so in my work and, and as you've seen, probably in that graphic novel which focuses on computer science education, I actually, I'm not a computer scientist, but I have seen and also in my work with Jane Margolis, who's my co author of the graphic novel, just how powerful computer science can be as a window into how inequalities get reproduced, right? If we think about in school contexts, the people who have access to technology, the most recent technological tools, and also computer science classes and great teachers oftentimes are not students and communities in low income schools that don't have a lot of resources or don't have a lot of capacity to train teachers and support teachers in teaching computer Science, right? Or we see how a lot of young women, students of color, get pushed out of tracks in their schools that are geared towards eventually learning with computer science, and they're often placed in remedial courses because they have to do better on their English and Math standardized tests, right? Versus like, being given opportunities to learn computer science, which could very well support their math and English learning work, you know? So they're all of these like ways that computer science serves as this like way to understand how people get tracked into certain directions and pathways based on different identity markers or immigration markers, right and and that also when we see in today's society, how when we think about like generative AI and the algorithms that are used in applications in healthcare or in banking systems and deciding like who to give a loan to and what that loan should look like, or in terms of processes for choosing who to interview for a job application that are all that have all become automated by computers. We begin to see that, oh, a lot of these tools are biased in favor of certain racial groups and certain gender identities, certain class, socioeconomic class statuses, and that's not by. By accident. That's because humans made those things and have built their biases into them, whether they realize it or not. And so if and so I've turned my attention to these things because I think that's very much what we need to be supporting all of our families and young people to learn about is like, how do these tools work? How is computing impacting our daily lives? How do we shape computing, and how can we center these issues of ethics and social responsibility in our engagements with technology, which we use every day, and this see everywhere. And so that's sort of like a lot of the focus of my work with teachers and students, and also with our team at UCLA, we've been zooming in on that when it comes to doing research and engaging with communities,


Lily Jones  10:58  

That's so powerful. And I appreciate how you focus not only on kind of what drew you to this work, but also just the broader impact of it, that it is about access, but it's also about so much more, right? Like, it's not just having the access to take computer science classes, which, like, is super important and everybody deserves, but also how that impacts all these other things that then impact us in various stages of our lives, too, and so I appreciate just the impeccable basis that you set there.


Jean Ryoo  11:28  

Thanks, Lily, yeah, I think too it's, it's, it's crazy, because there has in the past been so much focus on we just need access, right? Like you're saying, like we need to go beyond that. But then, if you get access to a really uninspiring computer science class that can, like, also ruin your prospects for the future, right? Because it's like, Oh God, this is boring or horrible, and I don't want to learn anymore, right? So...


Lily Jones  11:57  

Yeah, absolutely. So tell us about your book. I know that you co wrote power on. Can you tell us about it and kind of how it got got in your heads, or how you started it, you know? Why did you write it? 


Jean Ryoo  12:14  

So power on is really it was just such a joy and pleasure and an honor to get to write this piece. So what happened was, my dear friend and co author, Jane Margolis, she had previously written a book called Stuck in the Shallow End, and what that book was about was she and her research team had followed the experiences of students and teachers across three different schools in a very large urban school district to understand what are the computer science education experiences of students, and why is it that there are so few Women and students of color in the field of computing or taking computer science classes, and what they uncovered was what I described earlier around like the ways students get tracked in or out of classes based on stereotypes about who adults or even students themselves think will excel with technology, right? So like the boy wonders, the people who like the white faces of men who've created things like Microsoft and Apple, you know, and so that, as well as the lack of equal distribution of resources and lack of access to engaging computer science classes that aren't just programming for programming sake, you know, all of these different factors. And she had published that book with MIT Press, and MIT Press was like, You know what? We need to change the cover of your book because it has a mouse on it, and people don't really know what that is anymore. And then, and then they were like, by the way, have you ever thought of writing this book for a younger audience? And Jane was like, that's interesting. Hold that thought. Let me talk to Jean, because we work very closely together. Jane has now retired, but you know, we're family. And she was like, Jean, what do you think of this idea? And I was like, Oh, brilliant idea. Of course, of course, this should happen, and it should be a graphic novel. And Jane was like, I don't really know what a graphic novel is. And she was like, you know, how about this? Would you be interested in writing it? And, you know, and I'll support you along the way, but like, you know, I think it'd be great for you to get you, to get you involved. And so she invited me to be the lead author of this book, and but I also put her under a study regime of reading some. Great graphic novels together to inspire our experience around writing power on and so then I it's funny, like, I wrote the initial storyline within like, a week or something, and but I had never written a graphic novel before, and so I didn't realize like, oh, how similar it is to writing like a script, right? And then, but I had brought together a student advisory council council to give me input on the story along the way. And you know, the immediate response was like, What? What is this like? Why should we care about these characters, and who are they? And like, great, they have these different experiences computer science, but so what? And I was like, right? No duh. Like, I should have, like, I should have been, you know, building out these storylines and these characters just the way, like I love reading in my favorite graphic novels or in manga and manhwa. And so then I started reading examples of graphic novels before they'd been drawn, you know, and drew inspiration from that style and rewrote the graphic novel into a format, a better format that could be engaged with, you know, describing every single image and expression and, you know, as well as dialog and and then the students were like, Oh, this is great. But why is this character so happy and like, do they, like, only go to school? Like, obviously, they probably have jobs and other things they're doing. So it was really great engaging with young people around the book and and all of the characters are based on real people who I've been working with in our research, because we have one project that's been following students experiences since, like, ninth grade their first time taking a computer science class, and now many of them are in college or just graduated this year. So it's been really special, you know, being able to share some of their stories in the book too. And so, and then Jane and I also brought together an advisory board of researchers, teachers, you know, adults who engage a lot with computer science education to also give input and feedback on the piece. And so it was a very like community effort. Shared some of the research findings from Jane's book, as well as built in the ones from our student research that's really focused on student perspectives, and in particular, one of the key things we've learned from working with students is how much they really care about issues of ethics and current sociopolitical issues in society, and how much they want their computer science education experiences to intersect with these issues, rather than be treated as just like a subject that you learn divorced from the real world, right? Which, obviously, like technology, is so deeply embedded in our everyday lives, so it would make sense to teach it as such, but and so that's also why the graphic novel took this form of really trying to center these topics and issues and show these connections between why learning computer science is important regardless of one's personal interests, career pathways, age, you know, and, and life directions.


Lily Jones  18:43  

Fantastic. I love how you got real student feedback, too. And I love having the characters based on actual students that you've studied. That's so cool.


Jean Ryoo  18:52  

Yeah, yeah. It was really, really important to make sure that this is a book that be interesting and engaging and and, like, rooted in reality, especially because, you know, I think I always envisioned it more as, like a conversation starter. Like, what we need in our classrooms are more tools to be able to enter into dialog around, like, why is racism showing up in AI, right? Like, why is it that there are so few women in computing, you know, like, and that it's worse today than it used to be like in the 1950s Why were there more women then, you know, like, then, so, so really thinking about, how can we open up opportunities to talk about it and, you Know, and in a way that lets people then explore and and guide the conversation and whatever is most meaningful to them. But that was what I was really hoping for the book, and what we're also really excited about is just this year, the Spanish translation came out. It's called connectado. And it's also really we feel really strongly about, as soon as the English version was published in 2022 we started conversations with MIT Press about like, how can we get this translated into Spanish and other languages? In general, there's actually a Korean version of the book that was published a couple years ago by a Korean publishing company. But then MIT Press decided they would try taking on having the book translated into Spanish, which is which is rare, because usually it's like a publishing company will publish a book, and then other companies publishing companies that are interested in translating it to other languages, will buy the rights to the book to be able to do so, and then they go from there, and it's a separate project, but MIT Press was like, why don't we just do it ourselves in house, which we feel very honored that they were willing to do that with us, and we learned a lot along the way. It was a really cool experience. Mariana ya knows was the trans translator, and she was amazing to work with. But again, like once again, making these ideas accessible and connected to everyday, real experiences was really important to us. And, you know, so important to reach the Spanish speaking communities all around the world, but especially in the United States, where there's so many immigrant communities and Spanish speaking communities currently under attack, who we really feel like, you know, in solidarity with our Latino Latina community in the US, and also trying to make sure that everyone has access to this important information about like how all of these, these forms of oppression, are getting built into the technologies that we're using, and how that can impact our safety in daily lives. 


Lily Jones  22:02  

So important, so important. And so I'd love to kind of shift to thinking about teachers. A lot of our audience are in the classroom or have been in the classroom. And so I'm wondering if you can give any advice about either using power on in the classroom or just more generally, teaching about computer science and technology?


Lily Jones  22:24  

Sure. Yeah. So I think there have been some really cool programs, for example, across the state of California, which I know you're located in, as an example, there are different universities that offer programs for like in service teachers who are currently in classrooms to take different classes, to prepare them to be able to teach computer science and integrate it, either into elementary school classrooms or as a single subject in high school. So there are these different kinds of opportunities and programs. Sometimes they're subsidized. Sometimes you can get your school district to help you pay for it, you know, but opportunities to to engage. There are also like ways to access online classes and and different ideas there, as well as different programs. Some programs are slowing down or closing down because of the lack of funding. A lot of the Computer Science for All movement was initially funded by the federal government and are no longer funded because of their focus on equity and ensuring everybody has access to computing education and so but there have been courses like Exploring Computer Science where teachers could get professional development and learning how to teach the course, And even if you, you know aren't able to access professional development, that a lot of times there's some really interesting curricula online. Or you could start getting involved by starting an after school club in your school with like groups, like Girls Who Code, who we've worked with closely, and they're wonderful, but like some teachers who start a club. They actually don't know much computer science yet, but they might find students who already do are interested in learning more, and they could help, like, the students can help them start a club, and they could, like, teach it together, and Girls Who Code will provide a lot of support in terms of curriculum and workshops and on how to engage with the material. So there, there are different kinds of opportunities like that. There's also a really great organization called the Computer Science Teachers Association, and that is like a wealth of. Resources for teachers across the nation. They also create computer science teaching standards to help guide what should be taught in different areas of computer science and and through that, like very wonderful network of educators who belong to that organization, you can find more information and support about how to bring computer science into your school or into your classroom and and they also, yeah, they're some phenomenal people there who are just like, always willing to share resources and information and guidance. Yeah. And then for the graphic novel, it's been cool seeing like, for example, in New York City public schools, there have been teachers who've taken up the book and written their own kind of like lessons for everything, every grade, from like, fourth grade to high school and and we also, I was actually Computer Science Teachers Association equity fellows who were educators themselves, created an educator resource for the book that we have for free online, on our book website that has like suggestions for different activities you can do that are computer science see related to the topic areas of each chapter of the graphic novel, and also like discussion questions and vocabulary and things that often are useful for teachers in and this during the school day. So there are resources like that that could be helpful for teachers.


Lily Jones  26:42  

That's great. Yeah, those are all super helpful. And I love all the different ideas of both inside the classroom and outside resources that teachers can turn to. So Jean, it's been so nice talking to you and getting to know more about your work. Can you tell people where they can connect with you?


Jean Ryoo  26:58  

Sure. Yeah, we definitely. We have our book website, which is power on book.com and we're also on social media. I must say, I personally don't have any social media and and, but if you know you're on social media, you can find us there, and it'll eventually reach me. There's also, feel free to email me at my UCLA email, which is just my name@ucla.edu and so, and I'd be happy to connect and discuss more. There's, yeah, a lot of I love meeting new people. So, yeah,


Lily Jones  27:39  

Wonderful. Well, we'll put all of that in the show notes, and really appreciate you taking the time to share with us.


Jean Ryoo  27:44  

Thank you so much. Lily. Bye. 


Transcribed by https://otter.ai



Lily Jones