Picking Up the Mantle of “Expert”: Assigned Roles, Assertion of Identity, and Peer Recognition Within a Programming Class

Abstract

Changing an established role in a classroom is difficult. It involves constructing a new set of relations within a community. In this article we investigate how students with newly developed interest and experience in programming developed outside the classroom pick up and establish their roles as experts in programming within the classroom community. More specifically, we focus on how two 11-year-old software designers shifted their established roles in their classroom to gain status as expert programmers. We use an identity lens to understand how peer expertise was established in the context of a classroom community, adopting a multifaceted perspective of identity by focusing on an individual's narrativization of self, full, or peripheral participation among a group of people, and individuals' social recognition by others. Our findings point to the importance of both positive positioning by authority figures in the classroom and activities and roles that provide opportunities to establish intersubjectivity among peers in facilitating students' identities as experts in the classroom. Students' willingness to take up a new position in the established activity system also played a role. We consider implications of how making roles flexible within classroom stratification may provide opportunities for more students see themselves as experts.

Acknowledgements

The work reported in this article was supported by a UCLA mentorship fellowship to the first author and a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF-0325828) to Yasmin Kafai. A prior version of this article was presented at the 2011 Computer Supported Collaborative Learning conference. We thank Andy Blunden and three blind reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. In addition we thank Yasmin Kafai for her prior readings and feedback on the article and William Q. Burke for his assistance with data reduction.

Notes

¹“Hide” is a script in Scratch that causes a sprite (object) to disappear from view. If one wants an object to appear sometimes after the program is started, then one must put “hide [sprite]” at the beginning of the project and “show [object]” when one wants it to appear. The “hide” command that Tyrone pointed to was probably misplaced and caused the sprite to be invisible.

²“Stamp” is a script that causes the sprite to stamp its image onto the screen.

³“Repeat” is one kind of loop in Scratch, allowing a set of scripts to be repeated for a set number of times.