Mobile applications and decolonization: Cautionary notes about the curriculum of code

ABSTRACT

The current generation of students live and learn within a pedagogical milieu saturated by digital technologies. Curriculum scholars have not ignored this, theorizing and critiquing the ways that technology both affords and limits opportunities for students. Notably absent from this conversation, however, is a consideration of how the technologies themselves are designed and the implications that this design process has on the role and use of technology in our classroom spaces. In this article, I use the development of a decolonizing mobile application designed to teach students and educators about the history of residential schools in Canada, as an example, offering a nascent theorization of computer code. In particular, I argue that the exploration of computer code is an important avenue for critical scholarship. In so doing, I suggest that there are three important considerations—obfuscated representation, translation, and the engendering of technocracy—that need to be considered when doing curriculum work about/with computer technologies. While I do not argue that curriculum scholars need to become proficient in the programming languages central to the design of computer applications, I provide this exploration as a means of gesturing toward that which is often not considered but is central to the 21st century classroom.

Contributor

Bryan Smith is at York University in Toronto where he teaches courses on social studies, race/racism/anti-racism and curriculum. His research explores social studies theory and practice with a specific focus on history and geography pedagogy. As part of this research, he explores the (im)possibilities of using custom web and mobile technologies to facilitate critical conversations about place, history and subjectivities within and outside of the social studies classroom.

Notes

1. The word “colonial” is used, for example, in the social studies curriculum for my home province of Ontario (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2013). However, it is used as an adjective to describe Canada prior to the 20th century, a description that relegates colonialism to the past.

2. This piece of code is intentionally designed to be illegible. As a consequence, I am unable to describe how this piece of code works.

3. This is not to idealize the world of computer programming. As recent studies from major tech corporations have demonstrated (Facebook, 2014; Google, 2014; Yahoo, 2014), there is certainly a racialized and gendered pattern of dominance.

4. A tool was used to obfuscate the code for the purpose of this article.

5. It is worth recognizing that the use of a Mercator map projection is itself colonizing in that there is an imposition of a European derived understanding of mapping onto colonized lands.

6. I am aware that the only supported language of the application, English, is itself colonizing.

7. It is worth troubling this idea of a “digital native” given the contentious etymological origins of the word. In the 15th century, the word native meant “person born in bondage” (Harper, 2014a, para. 2), a term whose “ideological work,” Barker (2011) argued, “is about its political utility” (p. 17). While its political or scholarly utility here is not explicitly pejorative or colonial in its intention, one cannot help but point out that there is a distressingly uncritical approach to the essence of the words used to describe the phenomenon of growing up as a citizen/subject of the 21st century.