The forgotten African American innovators of educational technology: stories of education, technology, and civil rights

ABSTRACT

The history of educational technology is replete with stories of mostly White men who have conducted some of the leading innovations in the field. The stories of educational technologists from minority backgrounds have largely gone untold, perhaps giving the false impression that such individuals were not involved in this field. This article recounts the stories of several leading African American innovators. These individuals did cutting-edge work and worked with well-known researchers from the 1960s to the present day, but their work has largely gone unnoticed by educational technology researchers and developers. These narratives provoke us to reconsider the meaning, scope, and purpose of educational technology as they collectively describe how the desire of a few individuals to use technology to educate and empower the underserved was intertwined with the African American struggle for civil rights.

KEYWORDS:

• History of educational technology
• Civil rights movement
• African American history
• Computer-assisted instruction
• Algebra Project

Eight months after his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and two months before the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a large audience of over 1800 individuals at Stanford University as part of a three-day Western States Civil Rights Conference (Steffen 1964). A major goal of this conference was to recruit mostly White students at Stanford to join the Freedom Summer, an effort to increase the voting registration and literacy of Black people in Mississippi (‘King to discuss’, 1964). The following day, Bob Moses, the African American director of the Freedom Summer movement, took the stage at a packed Cubberley Auditorium describing their on-the-ground efforts in Mississippi and what the summer project would entail (Moses R. P., Speech at Stanford University, 1964). As David Harris recalls ‘Every seat in the auditorium was taken. From the balcony, Bob Moses looked frail, generating an immense, almost Zen presence as he talked’ (Butcher 1996). Although Freedom Summer was part of the civil rights movement, it was also an educational movement with the establishment of 41 Freedom Schools to teach Black people of all ages basic literacy and math as well as ‘black history, the philosophy of the civil rights movement, and leadership skills that provided them with the intellectual and practical tools to carry on the struggle after the summer volunteers departed’ (The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, n.d.).

While Moses was gathering support for Freedom Summer, there was another historical education effort underway at Stanford. In 1964, researchers at the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford – led by Patrick Suppes, a polymathic philosophy professor – were given a grant by the United States Office of Education to explore the possibility of using computer-assisted instruction (CAI) to teach mathematics and reading in elementary schools (Suppes 1971). A year later, they selected Brentwood Elementary School, a school where 80% of the students were Black (Wilson and Atkinson 1967), as the first school site to test their CAI system. They built a 3200 square foot building at the Brentwood School to house ‘the terminal room, the off-line teaching room, the central computer room, and a group of offices for the Laboratory personnel’ (Atkinson and Suppes 1968, 6).

Although it has not been interpreted in this way before, the Stanford CAI program can also be seen as tying into the United States civil rights movement. Over the next few years, the program expanded to several other states and student populations, including a school of deaf students in Washington D.C. and schools in McComb, Mississippi (Suppes and Morningstar 1969), the very city where Bob Moses first began his voter registration work in 1961. During Freedom Summer, there was a series of at least 11 anti-Black bombings in McComb, leading some to call the city the ‘Bombing Capital of the World’ (Gordon 2018). While taking on the difficult task of desegregating the McComb School District – over a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court mandated the desegregation of schools across the United States in 1954 – the new superintendent of the district worked with Suppes¹ to bring computer-assisted instruction to McComb in the 1967–1968 school year (Suppes and Morningstar 1969).

Although the Freedom Schools and Stanford CAI movement had many differences, they also shared some similarities. Both can be seen as telling the stories of White people (whether college students in the case of Freedom Summer or researchers in the case of the Stanford CAI project) who tried to help empower and educate Black people during the civil rights movement. But what is less obvious is that both are the starting points for the stories of several African American innovators at the forefront of educational technology research and development – innovators who used technology alongside other tools, like activism and teaching, to empower the underserved in their own communities and beyond.

These stories have largely been forgotten, or at least not documented in histories of educational technology. For example, none of these individuals are mentioned in Paul Saettler’s 600-page volume on the history of educational technology (Saettler 2004) or other early and contemporary surveys of educational technology research and development (Ferster 2014; Sleeman and Brown 1982; Tatnall and Davey 2014; Wenger 1987). In contrast, these African American innovators worked with two White educational technology researchers (Patrick Suppes and Seymour Papert) who are widely regarded as early pioneers in the field of educational technology (Taylor 1980).

The goal of the present paper is to tell these untold stories. As Sanford (2020) has recently pointed out, ‘in our eagerness to honor [Black innovators], too often we privilege their inventions over their humanity. Imagine how much more we might gain from knowing them as fully realized individuals, not just as the sum of their inventions.’ Thus, in telling these stories, I not only focus on technological innovations and pioneering accomplishments but also on the interrelatedness of their technological innovation with their advocacy and desire to empower the underserved. In doing so, I hope to show that alongside more well-known educational technology movements, there was a history of African American academics, innovators, and activists developing educational technologies in ways meant to liberate and serve underserved populations. Moreover, the narratives of these Black scholars and activists provoke us to rethink the very meaning and scope of educational technology and how it can be used for empowerment and liberation. In recent years, there has been a push to study educational technology from the lenses of equity, race, and politics (Garcia and Lee 2020; Garcia and Philip 2018; Reich and Ito 2017); such efforts could benefit from a historical reflection on how the development of educational technology has been entangled with the African American movement for civil rights.

My interest in the questions posed here emerged over the course of other investigations in the history of educational technology. For example, I briefly came across the work of Dr. Roulette William Smith when investigating aspects of the Stanford CAI Program and I came across the work of Dr. Alan Shaw when investigating aspects of Seymour Papert’s work. My decision to more systematically investigate the lives of Black researchers in educational technology arose when reflecting on the fact that educational technology course I was teaching focused predominantly on White men. This reflection took place around May 2020, a time of racial reckoning in the United States, furthering my motivation to study the work of Black educational technologists. I subsequently reached out to each of the individuals discussed in this paper, with the exception of Bob Moses – who passed away during the course of this research – and his family. I had informal conversations with each of these individuals about their work, complementing information that I found in written sources. I initially wrote blog posts on each of these individuals and shared these posts with the individuals themselves in order to ensure the accuracy of the narrative and adjust the narratives based on feedback. I later shared a draft of this paper with each of the individuals and requested additional feedback as well as permission to use images they provided me. As a non-Black researcher, it was especially important to me that I seek the approval of the individuals involved (without compromising historical accuracy) in order to ensure that I authentically portrayed their narratives and the broader struggle for civil rights.

To construct the narratives, I made use of a variety of written sources, including the individuals’ academic dissertations and research publications, biographical and autobiographical sources, information on awarded grants, archival sources, and news articles. News articles published in the Stanford Daily and the Harvard Crimson were particularly useful in documenting some of the individuals’ involvement in civil rights causes.

In the next section, I begin with the stories of some of the earliest African American innovators in the history of educational technology who were working in the field from the 1960s. These were individuals who excelled academically and made contributions to educational technology when this field (and academia in general) were largely dominated by White men. In the subsequent section, I tell the stories of a second generation of educational technologists who were active in the field from the 1990s to the present day and whose stories are connected via family ties and intellectual ties to the earlier generation. For each story, I provide a chronological biography starting with formative educational experiences that influenced their career in educational technology and/or their civil rights activism. I focus on describing their contributions to educational technology and related fields in sufficient depth to show the significance of their work, their civil rights activism, how the two were intertwined in their work, and how their work and legacy evolved over time.

The early Black innovators in educational technology

Dr. Muata Weusi-Puryear

One month before Moses was giving his speech at Stanford in 1964, Stanley Puryear – now Dr. Muata Weusi-Puryear² – was organizing his own civil rights protest. The 28-year old Housing Chairman of the local NAACP branch was trying to recruit Stanford students and faculty to join a picketing of the California Real Estate Association (CREA) for its discriminatory housing practices (Todd 1964). Dr. Weusi-Puryear’s activism over housing began after enrolling in the PhD program in Symbolic Logic at UC Berkeley and getting a job at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company – both full-time positions. When looking for housing, ‘he discovered the local apartment owners did not rent to Black people’ (‘Muata Weusi-Puryear’ 2010). He then joined the Palo Alto-Stanford branch of the NAACP and ‘became the litigant in a case against a Sunnyvale apartment complex.’ His ‘precedent setting case proved that the housing industry was not exempt from a California law that outlawed racial discrimination in businesses.’ His focus on civil rights activism led him to drop out of his PhD program and become president of the Palo Alto-Stanford NAACP branch for seven years.

From 1966 to 1968, he was the general manager of the Stanford-Brentwood CAI Program led by Suppes; this served as his entry point into the world of educational technology. In 1972, he returned to completing a PhD, this time at the Stanford School of Education – although his advisor, Edward Begle, was at UC Berkeley where most of the work was completed. His dissertation assessed the educational benefits of an educational game that he developed. In particular, it sought to answer a very specific, but important question:

Can the game elements of a computerized tutorial/game motivate student involvement in the tutorial elements to a degree high enough to produce significantly greater achievement than the tutorial elements alone can produce? (Weusi-Puryear 1975, p. vi)

As Dr. Weusi-Puryear recalls, some of his dissertation committee members – including Suppes, who in 1973 had become the President of the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education – were skeptical that a game would have added benefits over standard tutorial software (M. Weusi-Puryear, personal communication, 30 October 2021). For some educational games, recent research would suggest that such skepticism is warranted (see e.g., Long and Aleven 2017). Nonetheless, in an experiment with 258 students – mostly Black students from majority-Black schools – Dr. Weusi-Puryear found that students who were randomly assigned to playing the game performed significantly better post-test performance than students who did not get to play the game ‘even though the game-playing students did fewer exercises’ (Weusi-Puryear 1975, viii).

This seems to suggest that the motivational benefits of an educational game can be more than added time-on-task. But surely it matters what the game is. The particular game that Dr. Weusi-Puryear made is a competitive game where the student competes against an opponent named Jody (Weusi-Puryear 1975). The student and Jody alternate turns where on each turn they each solve an arithmetic problem, and if they answer it correctly, they make a move on a Tic-Tac-Toe board. The student gets points for each correctly answered question, correctly evaluating the opponent’s answers, and winning each game of Tic-Tac-Toe. The game was later cleverly titled ‘Arithmetic-Tac-Toe.’

What makes the game particularly interesting is how Jody – the ‘AI’ opponent – was programed. Jody tries to match the student’s reaction time and the student’s arithmetic ability by answering questions correctly or incorrectly at a rate that matches the student’s prior performance. To make Jody appear more human-like, its typing rate was adjusted to be one character per second. This made students perceive Jody as a human opponent, not a computer opponent:

On several occasions the students remarked that “Jody is stupid,” or “Jody is trying to cheat,” or attributing other human characteristics to Jody. (Weusi-Puryear 1975, 19)

This dissertation was the beginning of Dr. Weusi-Puryear’s career in educational game design. In 1978, he founded Edutek Corporation, where he designed over 35 educational programs, many of which were games or had gamified elements. For ten years, the company had a successful run in selling educational games. Figure 1 shows pages from the 1983 catalog, including the philosophy behind the ‘Fun Drill’ approach they used and a sample of the educational software they created.

Figure 1. Images from the 1983 Edutek Corporation catalog. The top image shows the front cover of the catalog, while the bottom image shows a snippet from inside the catalog that describes the “Fun Drill” philosophy that underpins the collection of educational games described in their catalog. Images courtesy of Dr. Weusijana.

The top image shows the front cover of the 1983 Edutek Corporation catalog, which includes images of several children interacting with computers. At the center of this page is the text ‘FUN DRILL on the Apple II from Edutek Corporation’ followed by contact information for the corporation. The bottom image shows a snippet from inside the catalog that describes the “Fun Drill” philosophy, indicating that it involves adding game elements to educational drill exercises, making them more enjoyable while still placing ‘the emphasis on the learning process as opposed to placing it on entertainment’.

But in 1988, Edutek Corporation effectively stopped making games. Why? Unfortunately, as Dr. Weusi-Puryear recalls, when people found out he was Black, they stopped buying his games (M. Weusi-Puryear, personal communication, 30 October 2021). The discrimination that Dr. Weusi-Puryear witnessed could account for why he stopped working in the field of educational technology. From 1974 to 2007, Dr. Weusi-Puryear taught mathematics at DeAnza College, remaining committed to advancing the opportunities of youth (‘Muata Weusi-Puryear’ 2010). Figure 2 shows a recent picture of Dr. Weusi-Puryear.

Figure 2. Dr. Muata Weusi-Puryear in 2014 (left) and his son Dr. Baba Kofi Weusijana in 2017 (right). Photos courtesy of Dr. Weusijana.

A photograph of Dr. Muata Weusi-Puryear and a separate photograph of his son, Dr. Baba Kofi Weusijana.

Dr. Roulette William Smith

While Moses was giving his speech at Stanford in 1964, Roulette William Smith was finishing his Master’s in Mathematics at Stanford, which he began in 1961 at the young age of 19 (Smith 2009). This was a time were there very few Black students at Stanford; according to King (2018), before 1965, there were only two or three Black undergraduate students enrolled per year. The following year – the very year that Stanford’s Computer Science Department was formed – he also received his Master’s degree in Computer Science. By way of context, this was around the same time that Clarence ‘Skip’ Ellis – who became the first African American to receive a PhD in computer science in 1969 – enrolled in his PhD program after receiving his Bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics (Williams n.d.). From 1965 to 1966, Dr. Smith worked at the Advanced Systems Development Division of IBM, working on the user interface language for the IBM 1500 Instructional System – the system that was being developed in conjunction with IMSSS for the Stanford-Brentwood CAI Program. Smith then started his PhD at the Stanford School of Education continuing to work on the Stanford CAI effort with Suppes as his advisor. During his time at Stanford, he was also active in Stanford politics. He was one of five students (which included other activists such as Denis Hayes, who organized the first Earth Day) to serve on the University Advisory Committee, which advised the Stanford Board of Trustees (‘Tripartite committee’, 1969).

He obtained his PhD in 1973 with a dissertation titled ‘Modeling Instruction Using Computer Generated Dialogue’ (Smith 2009). It was one of the earliest applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to education, predating the first conference on AI and education by over a decade and being practically contemporaneous with what is often said to be the first intelligent tutoring system – SCHOLAR, developed by Jaime R. Carbonell in 1970.

In 1970, prior to finishing his dissertation, Dr. Smith began teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he became an assistant professor in Education and Psychology in 1973. He was one of only three Black faculty at UCSB at the time (R. W. Smith, personal communication, 22 February 2022). In 1973, he taught an undergraduate class on the applications of AI to psychology and education, perhaps one of the first classes of its kind (Marquis Who's Who 2021). In 1972, he became one of the inaugural Executive Editors (and the leading editor for US-based submissions) of the Elsevier-published journal Instructional Science, and he remained an editor until 1983. With this journal, Dr. Smith and his co-editors looked towards a broadening what is typically considered as educational; as mentioned in the journal’s opening editors’ address, ‘the word “instruction” will be construed in a very liberal fashion to consider the whole gamut of processes by which people self-consciously seek to make themselves understood to others’ (Brieske et al. 1972). To this day, the journal remains a premier journal in what is now the learning sciences, featuring many established learning scientists as editors over the decades. Yet I suspect few recognize the names of the inaugural editors, including Dr. Roulette William Smith.

In 1973, he published a paper called ‘The Ombudsman: A Computer Model of Dialogue in Instruction and Conflict Mediation’ (Smith 1973) which was one of the earliest investigations of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) – before the CSCL field formally emerged. In this paper, he described computer programs that could be used to model dialogue between goal-directed participants conversing in an artificial language (chosen for simplicity of modeling); the goals of this project simultaneously included passing ‘a modified Turing test in the sense that the computer model remains undistinguished from man,’ and acting ‘as a simple model of a classroom teacher … to engage the students in dialogues in order to avoid or resolve social and curricular conflicts’ (Smith 1973, 117). A year later, he pursued the idea of completing a sabbatical in one of two groups: Newell and Simon's group at Carnegie Mellon University or Seymour Papert's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Smith 1974) – these were two of the most prominent AI labs in the world at the time. Ultimately, he decided to go to Carnegie Mellon to continue his work on group computer-assisted instruction. Not only were Newell and Simon leading AI researchers and psychologists, they were also beginning to explore the educational applications of their work at the time (Doroudi 2022). As Dr. Smith described in his letter to Allen Newell about the possibility of a sabbatical, ‘My goal is the formulation of a CAI system embodying group instructional principles, including automatic note recording and editing, problem and homework generation, and dialogues among students and teachers’ (Smith 1974).

Interestingly, a chance encounter in Pittsburgh led Dr. Smith to decide he wanted to pivot to a career in medical education, and upon his return to California, he left his academic position to go to medical school in University of California, San Francisco. More broadly, at this time, he decided to try ‘to formulate the most difficult problem that [he] could imagine,’ which was to find out people who need help but don’t know it, and to then help these ‘unknowingly needy’ (Rolle and Smith 1993). Given the multifaceted nature of this broad problem, his plan was to study medicine for 10 years, followed by law for 10 years, followed by theology – all in addition to his existing background in psychology and education. He never ended up pursuing law and theology formally, but his career was seemingly dedicated to this broad problem of helping the unknowingly needy.

Although he was at medical school from 1976 to 1980, he left and began conducting his own medical research on viruses. In 1979, he became the inaugural Associate Editor of another Elsevier journal that reflected his interdisciplinary interests: Health Policy and Education (which is now just Health Policy). Just as Instructional Science broadened traditional conceptions of education, this journal, broadened conceptions of healthcare to include educational and policy aspects. He then went on to hold various visitng scholar positions in different departments at Stanford as well as positions in interdisciplinary psychology institutions. Eventually, he formed his own interdisciplinary institute to pursue his innovative research, aptly called the Institute for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Studies (Smith 2009). Figure 3 shows a recent photo of Dr. Smith.

Figure 3. Dr. Roulette William Smith in 2021. Photo courtesy of Dr. Smith.

A photograph of Dr. Roulette William Smith.

To summarize, in the 1970s, Dr. Smith was a faculty member at an R1 institution studying educational technology, specifically doing pioneering work at the intersection of AI and education as well as computer-supported collaborative learning before the fields devoted to these areas had yet formed. Yet as a polymath, he sought broader approaches to tackling the question of how to help people; education was one dimension of helping the unknowingly needy and technology was merely a powerful tool. Despite the multifaceted nature of Dr. Smith’s career, there was a consistent theme of understanding human psychology from a holistic perspective to improve the human condition. In this sense, Dr. Smith himself considers his work to have continued to be under the auspices of educational technology, if we are willing to broaden our definitions of those terms – just as the journals Instructional Science and Health Policy and Education broadened traditional notions of instruction and healthcare (R. W. Smith, personal communication, 28 February 2022). But unfortunately, his style of multidisciplinary work is not the kind that is typically valued, understood, or incentivized by the Academy, and as such Dr. Smith had to forge his own path at various institutions, including his own, leaving behind a tenure-track position at an R1 institution.

Bob Moses revisited

In 1958, Robert Parris Moses had to cut his PhD in philosophy short as he left Harvard for New York City for family reasons. He had just received his Master’s degree in Philosophy at Harvard. In New York, he began teaching math at the elite Horace Mann School. To put this into context, in 1982, there were only four teachers of color in the whole school (Sweet 2019) – one can only imagine the ethos in 1958! ‘Then, visiting a cousin in Virginia, he witnessed a sit-in and decided to devote his life to the African American cause’ (Hodgson 2021).

In 1960, he became the first field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi. His approach was at the grassroots level, meeting with Mississippi sharecroppers to encourage them to vote. Like many civil rights activists, he was faced with violence and imprisonment, but he persisted. He is now remembered by some as a major force in the Civil Rights Movement, yet at the same time, perhaps he is not remembered enough – according to historian Taylor Branch who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr., ‘I think his influence is almost on par with Martin Luther King, and yet he's almost totally unknown.’ (Jones and Bowman 2021).

After leaving SNCC due to a difference in approach, Moses spent some years teaching mathematics in Tanzania. He then returned to Harvard in 1976 and tried to start his PhD in philosophy of mathematics – but again, he left the program as a new opportunity opened up (Russell 2009). In 1982, he won a MacArthur Fellowship (colloquially known as the ‘Genius Grant’), which fueled the second stage of his influential career – the Algebra Project. The project began when Moses was disappointed that his eldest child’s school did not offer algebra, so the teacher invited him to teach her and several of her classmates (Wilgoren 2001).

The Algebra Project blended Moses’ commitment to teaching mathematics, his understanding of philosophy of mathematics and language – influenced by the famous philosopher and his Harvard professor Willard Van Orman Quine – and his grassroots approach to civil rights activism. He met with students where they were and showed them the value of mathematics literacy, just as he did with the sharecroppers and voting literacy. According to Moses,

In today’s world, economic access and full citizenship depend crucially on math and science literacy … I believe that solving the problem requires exactly the kind of community organizing that changed the South in the 1960s. (Moses and Cobb 2001, 5)

Moses came up with a five-step process for teaching algebra that would gradually move students from concrete physical events to abstract symbolic representations (Moses et al. 1989, 433). This approach would make algebra appear more concrete and avoid the common ‘misapprehension that mathematics is the manipulation of a collection of mysterious symbols and signs’ (Moses et al. 1989, 433).

The Algebra Project continues to this day. Although Moses is known for his Civil Rights activism and math education work, he is not known as an educational technology innovator and he is probably not known by many educational technology researchers. After all, where is the technology in all this? First, in a broad sense, The Algebra Project is an educational technology according to many of the definitions that have been proposed by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) over the years, such as the 1994 definition: ‘Instructional Technology is the theory and practice of design, development, utilization, management, and evaluation of processes and resources for learning’ (Reiser 2012, 3). The Algebra Project is a new process (or set of processes) for teaching mathematics, for organizing students, and for getting students to talk about mathematics. In the more common usage of the term ‘educational technology’, technology is part of the Algebra Project. Moses, who had experimented with the use of programed instruction in Freedom Schools in 1964 was no stranger to educational technology (Watters 2021). In the 1990s, he developed manipulatives and math games for the Algebra Project, most prominently the Flagway game, which he had patented in 1996 (Moses, Moses, and Moses 1998; The Young People's Project n.d.). The Flagway game, depicted in Figure 4, has students categorize numbers using the Mobius function (where numbers are categorized into three categories based on the number of prime factors). Flagway can be used in various ways, but it typically involves students working in teams, factoring numbers, and running around on the Flagway lattice, while competing with other teams to win (Moses, Moses, and Moses 1998). Thus, Flagway acts as a kind of competitive sport that encourages students to learn foundational mathematics concepts and skills. Flagway continues to be played in several middle schools across the United States today with an annual National Flagway Tournament (The Young People's Project n.d.). Although it is typically a physical game, ever since they proposed the game, Moses, Moses, and Moses (1998) emphasized that ‘The methods of playing the various embodiments of the games preferably employ computer generated graphics and computer programs.’

Figure 4. Images depicting the Flagway game, reproduced from the patent (Moses, Moses, and Moses 1998). The FLAGWAY™ lattice is depicted in (a) and its use in the classroom is depicted in (b) where it “is placed on the floor of the classroom … and duplicates of which are distributed to students as worksheets” (Moses, Moses, and Moses 1998).

Hand-drawn images from the Flagway patent. The image on the left (a) depicts the Flagway lattice, which has three branches, each of which has three branches, each of which has three branches, for a total of 27 branches. The image on the right (b) shows a drawing of a classroom where students are either working in their seats around one of two tables, standing on top of the lattice on the ground, or standing next to one of two wall posters labeled ‘Inputs’ and ‘Outputs.’ The teacher is standing by one of the tables.

Thus, in a sense, Moses is a forgotten Black innovator in educational technology, and educational technologists can learn from Moses’ integration of grassroots civil rights efforts (which has parallels to design thinking), philosophy of mathematics, and reform in math education. But Moses’ work has also left a legacy that inspired future work on the kinds of digital educational technologies that this paper has focused on. We now turn to this legacy.

Figure 5. Dr. Alan Shaw (left), Bob Moses (center), and Michelle Shaw (right) in 2016. Photo courtesy of Dr. Shaw.

A photograph of Dr. Alan Shaw, Bob Moses, and Michelle Shaw embracing each other and smiling.

A second generation of Black educational technologists

Dr. Alan Shaw

Alan Clinton Shaw was born in 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and just as Moses was in the field getting sharecroppers to execute their right to vote. He was the son of Earl Shaw, who earned his PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1969 and was a prominent physicist. Dr. Earl Shaw was politically active in his youth and became the president of the Black Student Union at UC Berkeley. From his father, Alan Shaw was inspired to be both an activist and a scientist. He went to Harvard University in the 1980s to get his Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics and became the President of the Black Student Association (BSA) at Harvard in 1983. At the very meeting where he was voted in as president (although he was the only one running for the position), ‘Robert Moses, a well-known Black activist, also spoke briefly … Moses, who was active with the influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s, said he wanted to work with the several issue-oriented BSA subcommittees’ (The Harvard Crimson 1983). Perhaps this was Shaw’s first encounter with Moses. Soon thereafter, Shaw began tutoring for the Algebra Project in its first school, and eventually he and his wife, Michelle Shaw, became the website managers for the Algebra Project (Wilgoren 2001); Figure 5 shows a recent picture of Dr. Alan Shaw, Michelle Shaw, and Bob Moses. As a Black activist and president of the BSA, Shaw was engaged in anti-apartheid activities, such as organizing a hunger strike ‘in support of Harvard divestiture from companies that do business in South Africa.’ (Ideison 1983).

Figure 6. Images of the MUSIC interface. Reproduced with permission from http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~acs/interface.html.

Screenshots of the graphic user interface of the MUSIC program running on Macintosh. The upper left image shows a drawing of a street intersection with drawings of four buildings (e.g., ‘Library’ and ‘Four Corners’), one in each corner of the intersection. The upper right image shows a pop-up window overlaid over the street intersection with drawings of faces above the names of the different individuals in MUSIC that a user can send a message to. The bottom image is labeled ‘Map Room in the Four Corners Building’ and depicts a map showing the streets in a small Boston neighborhood.

Remaining in Cambridge, Shaw got his Master’s degree in Computer Science from MIT in 1988, and went on to complete his PhD in Media Arts and Sciences (at the recently established MIT Media Lab) in 1995, under the direction of Seymour Papert. When he enrolled in his PhD program, he was apparently one of only two students (out of 24 total) from a minority background in the MIT Media Lab. Dr. Shaw’s career was very much influenced by both Papert and Moses; indeed his work in many ways was a bridge between that of Papert and that of Moses. In the acknowledgements of his dissertation, Dr. Shaw acknowledged the significance of Papert’s mentorship and support for his work:

In many conversations I can remember Seymour telling me that he was quite confident that my work would be significant and socially relevant. I cannot express how important it was for me to hear those words. Seymour, you have been an intellectual mentor as well as a friend. (A. Shaw 1995, 5–6)

Interestingly, Papert, a South African Jew, was also engaged in anti-apartheid activism in his youth when the apartheid first started, around 35 years before Shaw’s activism (Ivry 2016); his activism resulted in him being banned from leaving South Africa for some time (Stager 2016). His own passion for advocacy and serving the underserved, which he continued to pursue in his own research (Stager 2016), likely contributed to his emphatic support for Dr. Shaw’s work. In his dissertation acknowledgements, Dr. Shaw also thanked Bob Moses and his wife, Janet Moses, for their constant support and suggested that they were like parents to him and that they had ‘passed on to [him] a legacy of hope and belief in our people's future’ (A. Shaw 1995, 8).

His dissertation was titled ‘Social Constructionism and the Inner City: Designing Environments for Social Development and Urban Renewal’ and introduced a new version of Papert’s notion of constructionism, which states that the best way to construct knowledge in one's head is by (socially) constructing external artifacts. Social constructionism suggests that not only does constructing artifacts aid the cognitive development of the individuals involved, but ‘that the social setting is also enhanced by the developmental activity of the individual’ (A. Shaw 1995, 38). In addition to introducing social constructionism as a new theoretical lens, Dr. Shaw’s dissertation described a technology that embodied the principles of this theory: MUSIC (Multi-User Sessions In Community), a virtual platform that brings the members of a physical neighborhood together ‘to foster social development and urban renewal’ (A. Shaw 1995, 2). As shown in Figure 6, MUSIC is a digital representation of the participants’ actual physical neighborhood; participants can enter various buildings to engage one another and work on projects. After implementing MUSIC in his Boston neighborhood, MUSIC was implemented in Newark, New Jersey, where it saw over 20,000 pieces of email exchanged in its first year on discussions around a diversity of topics on neighborhood and social issues, which in turn led to many neighborhood project and events, including a community garden, a recycling project, a talent show, and a Thanksgiving drive to feed the homeless (Russell 2009).

MUSIC networks were being built in several other cities in the 1990s, including Cincinnati, Harlem, and San Francisco. Through their connection to Moses, Dr. Shaw and his wife also started to implement MUSIC into the Algebra Project in various cities, including Baltimore, San Francisco, and Jackson, Mississippi. As Moses recalls their work in implementing MUSIC in Mississippi, ‘The computer provides an opening for the active participation of both students and teachers in the ongoing process of developing materials. So it’s not just receiving something, but there’s a real creation back and forth’ (Russell 2009, 343).

MUSIC has been forgotten in history. But the basic ideas are still prevalent in Dr. Shaw’s work today. In the early 2000s, he was a Co-PI on two National Science Foundation (NSF) grants on the Algebra Project with Bob Moses as PI.³ He then moved on to teaching computer science at Kennesaw State University. But recently, he has received two NSF-funded grants where he has tried to blend computer science ideas into the Algebra Project. Continuing to take inspiration from his mentors, in the most recent grant, Dr. Shaw blends the computational thinking ideas of Papert and the liberatory math education of Moses.

Like the other innovators discussed in this paper, Dr. Shaw did not maintain a steady career in educational technology and the learning sciences; perhaps, for this reason, his work has not remained influential in these fields. However, he did influence other students of Papert during his time at MIT and he served on the thesis committee of two other Black scholars at MIT: Dr. Paula Hooper, who has continued working as a learning scientist and is now an assistant professor at Northwestern University, and Dr. Randal Pinkett, who is now a prominent business consultant, public speaker, and media personality. Moreover, through various implementations of MUSIC, his work for the Algebra Project, and other community organizing work that he led, Dr. Shaw has surely positively impacted the lives of many Black and underserved youth.

Dr. Baba Kofi Weusijana

As a young boy homeschooled in a house of educators, Kofi Weusi-Puryear – now Dr. Baba Kofi Weusijana – grew up playing with his father’s educational software, as shown on the front cover of the Edutek Corporation catalog (Figure 1, top image, upper left picture). As a teenager in 1986–1987, he conducted an internship at Edutek Corporation, where he helped develop some of the programs (Weusijana n.d.). As he recalls, ‘Exposure to Dr. Muata Weusi-Puryear’s educational software written for Apple IIe put me on the path towards becoming an educational software engineer and a learning scientist’ (Weusijana 2006, 5). Indeed, he completed his PhD in 2006 at Northwestern University’s Learning Sciences program, advised by Chris Riesbeck and working with other noted learning scientists such as Allan Collins and Uri Wilensky, a former student of Papert who created the NetLogo software. His dissertation described the creation of a Socratic mentoring software and Web-based authoring tool so that educators could design their own digital Socratic mentors. After completing his dissertation, he conducted further innovative educational technology research at the prominent NSF LIFE Science of Learning Center at the University of Washington, under the supervision of John Bransford, and collaborated with individuals at the also prominent Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center.

Like his father, Dr. Weusijana shifted his career to teaching computer programming and Web development at various community colleges, ultimately becoming a tenured instructor at his own alma mater of Foothill College in 2017 – part of the same Foothill-DeAnza district his father taught at for three decades. In recent years, Dr. Weusijana has continued his work on the learning sciences through the Foothill College AstroSims project, which is working on reimplementing older Web-based astronomy simulations in JavaScript and implementing new simulations that were previously not used in astronomy education (Foothill College AstroSims n.d.). Incidentally, this project is done in collaboration with an astronomy professor at Foothill College, Dr. Geoff Mathews, who happened to be part of NetLogo’s HubNet project. Through these simulations, they are making concepts often only accessible to astronomy graduate students now accessible to astronomy undergraduates without advanced math skills (B. K. Weusijana, personal communication, 20 February 2022). Figure 2 shows a recent photo of Dr. Weusijana, alongside a photo of his father.

The Moses family

Bob and Janet Moses had two daughters and two sons; all of them were involved as teachers in the Algebra Project from a young age. Their son, Omowale ‘Omo’ Moses co-founded the Young People’s Project (YPP) in 1996 when he was in his mid-20s, along with some eighth-grade Algebra Project students. Their daughter, Maisha Moses, who got her Bachelor’s in psychology at Harvard, has been involved with the YPP from its early days and currently serves as its Executive Director. Maisha and her brother, Tabasuri, were both listed on Flagway patent as co-inventors of the game along with their father. The YPP, which was inspired by the civil rights movement and the Algebra Project, had teenagers act as ‘Math Literacy Workers’ for younger students. In 2010, the YPP received a million-dollar grant from NSF, with Maisha Moses as Co-PI, to pursue a project where high school students teach mathematics and computer programming to middle school students; in particular, the middle school students learned to create Scratch programs that implemented Flagway or another YPP math game.

In 2015, Omo Moses founded MathTalk, a company that ‘creates unique opportunities for young children and their families, particularly those in economically distressed communities, to discover and enjoy math anywhere’ (MathTalk, n.d.). MathTalk is working to embed playful math learning experiences in the local community through technologies like augmented reality. Like the work of Alan Shaw, MathTalk explores the possibility of using digital technologies to connect people in physical neighborhoods. If there was any doubt that Bob Moses’ work qualifies as educational technology, surely his son’s does.

Conclusion

The technologies that these innovators have worked on span the gamut of educational technologies: computer-assisted instruction, educational games, community-centered microworlds, Socratic tutoring systems, and even curricular processes and physical games. Yet, despite the differences in technologies and approaches, there are striking parallels across the stories told here. Nearly all of these individuals were activists, typically fighting for the civil rights of Black people. Perhaps more strikingly, nearly all of these individuals (in addition to their mentors, Suppes and Papert) started out studying mathematics and many of them made their way to computer science and thereby to educational technology. Mathematics has always been a field that has been inaccessible to many; as Bob Moses puts it ‘In effect, math instruction weeds out people and you wind up with what amounts to a priesthood, masters of the arcane secrets of math through what appears to be some God-given talent or magic’ (Moses and Cobb 2001, 9–10). The individuals whose stories are told here rose to the top, getting degrees in mathematics from institutions like Stanford and Harvard when others in their communities struggled with elementary mathematics. Their interest in activism and the opportunity to put their technical skills to use led them to explore the use of technology to improve education – often math education – for the underserved.

Moreover, the stories told here are more than a collection of stories about individuals; they are stories about families. Dr. Weusijana, Dr. Alan Shaw, and Moses’ children were all inspired by their parents and followed in their footsteps, in terms of their work in educational technology and/or activism. Dr. Shaw in particular found a way to combine the two by building computer programs that promote networked learning and activism in Black neighborhoods, making his father proud by doing something his father wished he could have done but was not able to do in the field of physics (Russell 2009). While African Americans have been greatly underserved by the education system, these stories also show the privileges associated with being part of highly educated families. However, in each of these cases, the children not only took advantage of educational opportunities afforded to them, but they also used those opportunities (like their parents) to give back to their communities through activism, teaching, and developing educational technologies.

Even more forgotten than these innovators are their wives who played important, but even less visible, roles in their careers. Dr. Weusi-Puryear’s wife, Omonike Weusi-Puryear, helped run the Edutek Corporation and was also a community college instructor at DeAnza College for over 15 years. Dr. Alan Shaw’s wife, Michelle Shaw, who also graduated from Harvard in 1985 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1989, worked with her husband to disseminate MUSIC to different neighborhoods (M. Shaw n.d.) and also tutored for the Algebra Project. As mentioned above, Dr. Shaw acknowledged the support of not only Bob Moses, but also his wife, Dr. Janet Moses, who was also a civil rights activist and a field secretary in Mississippi before marrying her husband. She later became an advisor to the Young People’s Project (SNCC Digital Gateway n.d.).

More broadly, becoming an innovator or an educator goes beyond the support and needs of one’s immediate family. In his dissertation, Dr. Alan Shaw reminds us of the African proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ (A. Shaw 1995, 157). While villages are needed for raising children, perhaps we can say they are needed for anyone’s education and development, regardless of age. The innovators highlighted in this series were part of broader networks or villages, which included family, friends, supportive communities, and teachers and mentors. Through the inspiration and support of their villages, these innovators constructed new innovations to empower others. But there is a duality to social constructionism: through their work, these innovators also enacted social change for their villages and those around them – whether this was by using technology to create more enjoyable and relatable learning experiences, to help the unknowingly needy, to empower individuals to become literate in math and then teach it to others, or to connect members of their village to one another. While the work and legacy of these individuals may have been forgotten in the field of educational technology, they live on in the villages that have been touched by them.

This paper joins other recent scholarship (Clark-Stallkamp, Johnson, and Lockee 2022; Young 2001) in suggesting the need for broadening the historiography of educational technology by paying consideration to the role of individuals from historically marginalized groups and the ways in which they have used educational technology as a tool for liberation and challenging the status quo. Future scholarship could advance this agenda in several ways. The stories of the wives of some of the innovators discussed above point to the oft-forgotten (and sometimes invisible) role that women have played in the history of educational technology. Recent scholarship has discussed the role of early female innovators in the history of educational technology (Butler and Lockee 2016) and the intersection of that history with the U.S. women’s rights movement (Doyle 2016), but these works mainly focus on the early history of audiovisual communications rather than computer technologies. Moreover, future scholarship could attend to the nuanced ways in which gender and race likely intersect in this history. Finally, while I have focused on African Americans and the American civil rights movement, future work could attend to the role of Black educational technology innovators more broadly – as well as innovators from other marginalized groups – and the ways in which their contributions to educational technology might have intersected with liberation movements worldwide.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Baba Kofi Weusijana, Dr. Muata Weusi-Puryear, Dr. Roulette William Smith, and Dr. Alan Shaw for sharing their stories with me, helping me in constructing the narrative presented here, and sharing the images used in this paper. I hope that my description of their life and work is adequate.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As brought to my attention by Dr. Roulette William Smith, it is interesting to note that Suppes was born in Tusla, Oklahoma less than a year after the infamous Tulsa race massacre which at least one historian has called ‘the single worst incident of racial violence in American history’ (Ellsworth n.d.).

2 In this paper, I use the title ‘Dr.’ for the Black scholars who had PhDs given the challenges that scholars from minority backgrounds continue to face in being recognized for their academic accomplishments (Freeman and& Douglas, 2020; Grohowski, 2018). This is in no way meant to disrespect Bob Moses, who chose twice not to continue in a PhD program in order to prioritize serving the African American community, or the non-Black scholars who have PhDs.

3 References to NSF grants here and elsewhere can be verified by searching for PI/Co-PI names in NSF’s Award Search (e.g., https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch).