Into the Digital Future: What Black Feminism Can Teach Us About Children’s Media Experiences with Amanda LaTasha Armstrong

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the series here. 

 

Amanda LaTasha Armstrong earned her MS in Child Development with an administration specialization from Erikson Institute and is a doctoral candidate in New Mexico State University (NMSU)’s Curriculum and Instruction Department. Her work includes the intersection of early childhood, learning design and technology, and multicultural education. She is NMSU’s Learning Games Lab coordinator, where she leads user-testing and teaches summer sessions on game design and evaluation with youth. Amanda is also a research fellow with New America’s Education Policy Program, contributing writer for Edutopia and Britannica for Parents, and member of Britannica’s Early Learning Advisory Council. She was a member of the Technical Working Group to refresh the 2017 STE Standards for Educators, a 2020 NSF CADRE Fellow, and founding member of KidMap.

Jordan Shapiro: Today we’re going to talk to Amanda LaTasha Armstrong. I don’t know anyone who’s asking the questions as well as Amanda about representation in games and online platforms. We have so many fascinating moments with her here. We talk about representation and the question of choosing skins and avatars. We talk about what it means for people to see people who reflect themselves in games.

Laura Higgins: In terms of representation we branched into what that looks like as women, and feminism. We also talked about the digital divide. It’s one thing to see yourself represented on a screen, but that also assumes that you have access to screens and time to see these things and be involved in the creation. It was a really broad and interesting conversation.

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Amanda LaTasha Armstrong: So I currently am a doctoral candidate at New Mexico State University, where I have two lives, I like to say. I have one life where I work at the Learning Games Lab, as the Games Lab Coordinator. We create games, animations, other digital interactives, educational interactives for schools, for home, and with different audiences ranging from preschoolers to young adults. I do our user testing of all those products as well as teaching our summer sessions that focus on design with children and youth.

Then I have my other life, which is in the College of Education, where I am a doctoral candidate, and I’m focusing on looking at preschool apps, character representation within those apps through a lens that combines together both child computer interaction as well as Black feminism. And I really enjoy that within the College of Education, there is a program where I could merge a focus on early childhood, technology, and multicultural critical pedagogies within that framework.

Laura: What do you think are really good resources you’d recommend for both parents, educators, anyone who’s trying to work with young people at the moment?

Amanda: This question is always tricky for me because it really does depend on the families. A lot of the articles that I particularly write for Britannica really speak to families and just give them resources and ideas of tools of what to use. And so those are ways in which I express the different ways that families can have resources that speak to them.

So, for instance, I recently did a piece that was talking about looking at diversity in children’s apps and where they can go. I referenced places like Common Sense Media and I also reference museums that people can look for as well. So thinking about how we have apps, we have different forms of media like Netflix or YouTube or places like Roblox or Fortnite. And so those are all different places that they can go to, but they’re also these sorts of informal educational spaces that have resources available online that if parents can’t necessarily access them physically, they can go to the spaces digitally.

Jordan: You said from the beginning that your work is really this intersection of education and Black feminism. I’ve been in this digital learning play for a long time, and this doesn’t come up nearly enough.

Amanda: Well, I would say that the journey started unexpectedly. I didn’t expect to be including Black feminism. I really came to New Mexico State to explore their critical pedagogies in multicultural education, which is where I started as a lens. Before I came, I was at the TEC Center at the Erikson Institute, where I was working with Chip Donohue and doing a lot of work in early childhood and technology and specifically looking at how it’s integrated in informal settings—informal classroom settings, as well as at home with families. I noticed that there wasn’t as much conversation from a strength-based perspective of working with diverse communities, nor really speaking to issues that resonated with me and my experience as a Black American growing up in America and using these digital tools with my family and things that I was noticing and looking at and how I wanted to further examine them.

When I started working specifically with the early childhood part in these studies, there’s a faculty, who isn’t there anymore [currently at UT Austin], Michelle Salazar Pérez, who does work that looks at Black feminism in early childhood. I gravitated to her work and how she was articulating these ideas about how do you shift the perspective from how we always look at young children to really thinking about narrative, thinking about communities, thinking about how do we get the children’s perspective into it? How do we also look at these larger systems that impact families and communities, that sometimes we don’t look at?

What I noticed that wasn’t really being talked about, that I wanted to talk about, were these structural issues. When children, even if they’re in an environment where they’re learning about technology, there are still these power dynamics, there are still these social structures that we need to consider. Even if we want to make a classroom neutral, it isn’t, because we live in a world that has these inequities, that has these forms of oppression, and children bring that and experience that in a classroom setting. And they experience that when they’re engaging with technology, and they experience it even with the technology they consume.

Thinking about media and analyzing who’s represented, who gets to talk more often, not only is the environment that children are experiencing in the classroom having these power dynamics and social issues, but also the technology and the media itself also can perpetuate that. There wasn’t enough conversation, and I wanted to figure out, how can I articulate that?

Sometimes I think that’s also a part of Black feminism that isn’t talked about often, which is solidarity amongst other communities. And how, for me, when I have a Black feminist lens, yes, I do look at it from a perspective of people of the African diasporic experience’s with technology, if they’re seen or not. But then it also goes to these larger questions about who else isn’t seen, what other sub-identities within our group, within our cultural group aren’t seen. So thinking about gender, thinking about class…

Jordan: We often hear the term intersectionality used to describe where all those things cross, or we just talk about critical theory as a blanket for all of it. But it seems to me that you’ve picked the word Black feminism, and I’m assuming that’s intentional. So I wonder if you could speak to why that’s what you’re saying.

Amanda: I understood Black feminism because of my own lived experience of growing up in St. Louis. I went to a predominantly white institution for my undergrad and had some experiences, specifically centered on technology, and mostly on how Black people were represented in mainstream media. And those who may not have experienced being around Black people or people of African descent, that that media gave them their interpretation of what it meant.

So then when they met me or my peers, they had an idea of what we were like. I remember not meeting that expectation, them misidentifying me. Often not believing that I was fully Black or African-American, arguing with me about what I should be like. Those were very distinctive experiences. I remember crying from the amount of stereotyping I experienced.

Growing up in St. Louis, you have a sense about yourself. As a Black person, growing up, you learn how the system is structured, places to go that aren’t safe. I learned how to navigate the world so that I could at least be in safe spaces and be around people where I felt safe. And then I went to an institution where I couldn’t cocoon myself in the same way. I did have a lot of friends who were of the African diaspora there, but I didn’t have the same kind of luxury of going to a neighborhood and community and isolating myself from being stereotyped, and so it was in front of my face. And that, for me, was a distinctive experience.

When I came to the PhD, I realized that [Black feminism] was kind of this connecting piece and people were articulating things I had experienced. And also what I was seeing as a professional, when I was at these conferences and meetings, I wanted to say that there are these other larger systemic issues or larger structural experiences that impact children’s experiences when they come to school. Or that when we think about how we design curriculum or when we think about what technology is designed that impacts their experiences. And I didn’t have a way to articulate that. And what Black feminism allowed me to do was find a way to both connect to something as well as to say, “This is why this is important, and this is how it impacts and influences children.”

Jordan: Can you speak to some examples? For those parents who are listening, for those educators who are listening, say a bit about how these structural power dynamics get embedded into the technology.

Amanda: What the research has shown is how media tend to not have equal representation of different racial groups or different gender groups. That’s pretty apparent.

Black feminism helped me to be more critical in how I looked at [specific traits], or how I even grouped them, to not be subjective, but to be really obvious and say here are the traits that are associated with these sorts of groups and then to see who is seen. What that means, or how that shows up for families is that knowing who is seen and who is erased.

People may not be aware that is even an issue to even think about because they’re trying to produce something that appeals to multiple children. So you may either use a blanket character that represents a general population or maybe you have an animal or some form.

The main thing is that we have to think about how media is a part of a larger system. I found it really important to use Black feminism to interrogate and say we’re not just looking at this one experience children are having with this one particular thing at this one particular time, we’re thinking about how it is a part of a larger ecosystem that may show only certain groups in limited and narrow ways or that may not even show the specific group at all.

Laura: I wanted to talk a little bit about particularly about how firstly, we need more representation *everywhere*! But actually, on Roblox for example, we don’t have real images. It’s all avatar-based, and we very much encourage people to be whoever they want to be. And we speak to lots of young people all the time, in real life, who tell us they feel confident and safe because they can express themselves.

What do you think about being able to be yourself in the real world, but also, how important is it that you can express yourself online in different ways?

Amanda: This is a larger conversation. But what we really need in a larger way, [is to be] having these conversations about nuances within different cultural groups, that we’re careful about the groups that are presented in different pieces and we’re not perpetuating stereotypes within them. Like I think about my experience of people taking on the identity of Black people. I’m just speaking frankly of an experience I had – where they had this idea of people wearing chains. They have this only one specific narrow view of what people are, so when they are being something or someone, then they’re being this very narrow, stereotypical view.

I think it’s being mindful of when people are developing products — are we perpetuating typecasting? or [having a] conversation about cultural appropriation—what does that look like and how we are doing that?

I think that that isn’t something that happens once. But consistently to have these critical kinds of conversation, and to also be aware of what’s happening socially, so that you’re in tune with ‘these are concerns, or these are topics that people are talking about. Are we contributing to the topic and making and trying to move it forward, or are we harming…?’

I think we need to continue to have these sorts of conversations and we need people to take them seriously and make serious choices around how we can do less harm. Because I think if you have a good intention, that shows and then you consistently iterate on that and get better either with the product itself or maybe with the next product, you get better. But if we don’t have these conversations because people are worried about doing something wrong, then we’re going to continue to do the same thing.

Laura: So I always like to ask this one: your crystal ball moment. What sorts of things are coming up in the next couple of years? Where do you think we’re going to go with EdTech? And also, how do you think we can really improve young people’s lives right now, looking towards the next year?

Amanda: Well, I guess if I want to think about what I would like to be different, like what would be a reimagining for me, for a year from now, what would I like to see? I would like to see that we’ve created policies that help support early childhood centers and programs, schools, and having access to quality materials and to broadband. And to not only think about urban communities, but to also remember to think about rural communities as well. And to also have materials in which people are culturally responsive – [to have] a lot of conversations about what is culturally responsive and how to create those sorts of learning environments.

The other thing is we can revisit some of these pedagogies that look at technology or something like SAMR [the Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition Model] and then think about what does that mean when you’re applying something like Universal Design for Learning [UDL] and what does that look like with technology? I think maybe we can also learn about what types of assistive technologies are out there that have been working. Maybe those can also be modified and adopted. I think UDL is one approach that is not as common as it could be. And I think that that is something that speaks to me, even with my lens of Black feminism and child computer action, because it really centers it around the learner and how we create experiences that support different ways in which children and youth obtain information, relate to information, and express information.

Jordan: So if there was one thing you would say to parents and educators who feel uncertain about technology – what are the things they should pay attention to?

Amanda: I would say thinking about intentionality and thinking about the content itself. For families, I always ask them, what are your values? What is important to you? What do you want to pass on to the next generation? And how can you use digital materials to cultivate that?

So if your family really loves science and the solar system, use the tools that are available, whether it’s through public-funded institutions or maybe other sorts of resources to foster that. I think thinking about technology and media as another tool and another way in which you can have communication, learn about a specific area, and build a family connection and also learn historical and *her*storical information.

I would like to say that, yes, I have a Black feminist lens, but I do feel like sometimes the pedagogy of care and love— that really is the centering of a lot of the work that I do. It is really from a space of no matter who the children are, from whatever community they come from, I feel that children know when you are interested and when you care about them. And as an educator, as a researcher, as a family member, I feel that it’s important for me to always make children feel that I care about them and that they’re valuable. And that comes in so many different forms, depending on the child and depending on the family. And I feel like technology and media is another space where that has to be illustrated as well.