Sowing the Seeds of Algorithmic Literacy: K-4 Practices for Studying If-Then Structures, Perspective, and Persuasion

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A kindergartner using ‘Scratch Junior’ block programming helps a digital cat navigate a maze and causes construction vehicles to dance across a digital stage. Three years later, she encounters a social studies curriculum in which she studies how and why a student’s dressing traditionally for a religious holiday differs from his wearing a costume, as she and her peers might do at Halloween. As a fourth grader, in an English/Language Arts unit about persuasive writing, she considers what genre of prose will be most effective for communicating with her chosen audience.

On the one hand, these endeavors take place in different curricular spaces, none of which is specifically labeled as “media literacy,” let alone as “the human algorithmic question.”

On the other hand, a student whose grades K-4 experience includes the units of study named above is learning the habits of mind necessary to recognize, evaluate, and respond to algorithmic bias when the time comes in her education to consider such questions.

Obviously, algorithmic bias per se only becomes a developmentally-appropriate topic of formal study at some given point in a young person’s educational journey. A teacher cannot, for example, ask a first-grade class, “In what ways might the algorithms that determine your social media feeds reflect baked-in racial bias?” And yet the ways of thinking that will prepare a student not just to understand such a question, but to be prepared to delve into answers to it, can be developed from the start of a child’s PK-12 education.

At La Jolla Country Day School (LJCDS), there are at least three key learning threads that help students toward this kind of understanding: algorithmic thinking regarding inputs and outputs in a system, including, but not limited to, coding per se; repeated forays into the realm of perspective/point of view; and studying of the concept and process of persuasion, and how persuading both differs from and overlaps with informing.

After all, a media literate citizen, ready not just to interact with but to interrogate the algorithms that have ever-growing influence in our daily lives, needs to understand how algorithms work, to be able to consider with empathy how machine learning affects not just herself but those around her, and to recognize when and how media artifacts and messages are striving to inform (to “tell”), and to persuade (to “sell”).

Inputs, outputs, and if-then-else logic in K-4 Design & Innovation (D&I)

A clear first step toward algorithmic literacy is to have a citizenry that knows what algorithms are and how they work. The most obvious way to embed such learning in elementary school education is to teach coding starting early in a child’s education. At LJCDS, students work with block coding in Scratch Junior as early as kindergarten, as described above. First graders then learn to work with Blue-Bot, a bluetooth-controlled floor robot needing programmed motion inputs to navigate a maze. As LJCDS Lower School Design & Innovation educator Andrea Flagiello explains, if Blue-Bot does not manage to reach the end of the maze, the “feedback is instant and sequential.” Students go back to their iPads and check the block coding (in this case, using code.org’s block language), little realizing that they are learning an early version of if-then logic.

By grade three, students are using Lego WeDo to drive a model car with built-in tilt and light sensors, again troubleshooting failures in any given part of the mechanism. Flagiello notes that while the block code used in grades two and three is largely “linear,” the Microsoft MakeCode used in grade four requires more complex arrangements in order to make the parts of a given code fit together. Indeed, by this time, some students have progressed to coding in text-based, as opposed to shape-based, languages. And by this time the tasks students are doing have of course ramped up in terms of complexity. For example, during the pandemic, when LJCDS’s San Diego campus had moved classes outdoors, students in grades three and four were working with temperature sensors to gauge outdoor learning conditions.

If-then/if-then-else modes of thought in the D&I classroom are not relegated to screen interfaces and digital learning. As Flagiello explains, students consider input-output structures in arenas ranging from physically manipulating geometric-shape toys to studying books like How to Code a Rollercoaster and How to Code a Sandcastle (both “Girls Who Code” titles). In those two texts, characters work through processes of logic that are not just amusing stories of leisure activities–they are representations of algorithmic thinking that can be enacted without a computer or tablet anywhere in sight.

In other words, a key goal of the K-4 D&I curriculum is the development of habits of mind. Coding is one means among many to help students to learn that the inputs they enter into a system affect outputs from the system–and that, therefore, there is power in learning how to change the inputs in order to effect desired outcomes.

Perspective/point of view in 3rd grade social studies

Of course, developing habits of mind that aid in understanding what algorithms are and how they function does not automatically mean developing the ways of thinking and seeing that will later lead to a recognition that algorithms reflect the biases of the people and cultures that create them. Yes, that overt lesson can be addressed formally in the PK-12 classroom, in media literacy lessons or even units of study. But, again, the necessary ways of thinking can be modeled earlier than one might try to teach algorithmic bias directly.

It is clear exactly how Design and Innovation programs, “maker spaces,” and other engineering and multimedia-rich environments are arenas of formal media literacy education. What might be less obvious is that young students often learn media literacy-related intellectual and empathetic skills in what are sometimes called “traditional” academic subjects, like social studies.

The third grade social studies curriculum at LJCDS grounds learning related to perspective and point of view in culturally responsive practices that foreground social emotional learning (SEL). Before any lessons arise naming perspective per se, the school year begins with a deep dive into class members’ backgrounds and identities: cultural practices, belief systems, family structures, etc. The walls of educator Lisa Bennet’s classroom are covered with artifacts created in the early weeks of the school year: colorful, vivid representations of food, clothing, and architecture indigenous to cultures around the world, including the cultures represented by members of the class. As Bennet explains, this “trip around the world” unit involves students using those three lenses to learn about one another and about themselves, while studying the cultural, intellectual, and technological innovations of world cultures. In the process, they are laying the groundwork for the formal study of perspective that is part of the Pollyanna racial literacy curriculum, a free K-12 curriculum focused on racial justice and equity that has been adopted in K-12 schools and districts across the country.

So, in the fall students learn the difference between, say, dressing up in a *costume* for an occasion like Halloween, and wearing traditional clothing for a religious or cultural celebration. It certainly requires a shift in perspective to learn for the first time that what might appear to you to be dressing up for fun is, from the point of view of the person wearing traditional or ceremonial garb, an act of honoring one’s heritage. Bennet’s students discuss such mindset shifts overtly, recognizing similarities across cultures and “celebrating differences.” This foundational work in considering one’s peers’ value systems and experiences prepares students for what Bennet acknowledges are sometimes “difficult” topics of study and discussion, including prejudice and stereotyping based on race.

After all, it is one thing to study the abstract idea that colonization of the Americas involved people from one continent arriving at another continent on which there were thriving, long-established cultures. It is another thing to encounter a text like the picture book Encounter, in which Columbus’ arrival in Hispaniola is told from the point of view of an individual living on one of the islands when the ships arrive.

The illustrations alone, with the ships looking like massive birds of prey, enact important shifts in perspective for students who are studying the fact that Indigenous People’s Day exists in a space shared with the longstanding history of the Columbus Day holiday. The book’s narrator tells a story that overlaps in some ways with a Columbus-centered narrative, while being radically different in vital ways. When Bennet’s students later consider, for example, the history of the 20th century Civil Rights movement, again the stories they read are specifically chosen to invite shifts in perspective. Rather than simply reading about Ruby Bridges, they study The Story of Ruby Bridges, by Ruby Bridges, as part of a larger discussion of who gets to tell the stories that comprise history.

Even units of study that are not directly related to the Pollyanna curriculum focus from the start on questions of perspective. Works of fiction like Despereaux and The Lemonade Crime (from the “Lemonade War” series) involve characters whose actions seem very different once their motivations and back stories are considered. On the one hand, reading about an anthropomorphic mouse might seem far removed from studying algorithmic bias; on the other hand, media literacy requires an ingrained, long-practiced ability to ask, “Whose point of view is being presented and/or privileged here?”

Persuasion vs. information in 4th grade English/language arts

Although this might oversimplify things a bit, the kinds of social studies and Design & Innovation work described above might be seen as dealing with the “how” and the “what,” respectively, of algorithmic bias. Students can learn from a young age exactly *what* bias is, starting with the concept of perspective/point of view; in order to be able later on to understand *how* bias can be baked into algorithms, students can begin early in their education to study if-then/if-then-else systems.

Anyone studying algorithmic bias, or any other element of formal critical media literacy, will of course eventually face the question of “why.” In cases of intentional, directed bias, to what end might algorithms be programmed to push thinking in any given direction? And when bias ends up unconsciously or indirectly reflecting larger cultural patterns, why are those biases there, and why are they so powerful?

One answer to these questions has to do with the fact that our consumer culture is driven by attempts at persuasion. Money, influence, and power flow from being able to convince people to see things in a given way. Students can definitely learn from a young age to identify when, where, how, and why media are trying to persuade them, and to consider questions regarding who is behind media messages and artifacts, and for whom those messages are intended.

In fourth grade English/Language Arts (ELA), La Jolla Country Day School students study the difference between informational communication and persuasive communication. Understanding persuasion begins with a consideration of exactly what a claim is. As educators Samantha Hemphill and Josephine Shieh explain, discussions of what one might want to persuade someone else of lead to conversations about what form of communication one might use to deliver a given message, and then to the question of what kinds of text will help to get that message across. In other words, students in grade four begin to consider how one’s goals inform both the choice of medium and decisions about content.

Hemphill notes that at first, students make claims with little or no evidence of any kind, and that when students do begin to introduce evidence, initial attempts are “not convincing,” because, as Shieh puts it, the arguments are “emotional and personal,” devolving to an “I like this, therefore” logic. Learning to move from such arguments to ones that are based on evidence from beyond one’s own experience is by itself a vital leap; Hemphill explains that students have to grapple with the question, “What kinds of evidence will actually persuade the audience I have in mind?”

And that overt consideration of audience, so central to all media literacy education, is one key to fourth grade units on persuasion at LJCDS. At the macro level, students consider what genre of message might fit a given target audience (a letter? an email? a formal speech? a multimedia presentation?); at the micro level, they weigh, for example, individual word choices in order to gauge what tone might work on the intended audience. In Shieh’s words, “How do you choose words that will not be objectionable” to those you are trying to persuade?

As early as fourth grade, LJCDS students study these concepts of evidence and audience through examples that fit smoothly with texts they might later encounter in formal media literacy units or courses, perhaps in high school or college. They work on document-based questions (DBQs) of the sort that have long been the hallmark of advanced placement history courses, and they consider classic misinformation texts like the legendary “tree octopus” website, which purports to present all kinds of evidence-based reasons why we must band together to save the (non-existent) endangered tree octopus.

Obvious, Radical, or Both?

It is likely that some elementary school educators reading this essay find themselves thinking something like, “Of course we do all of this. These kinds of lessons and units are how students learn to think.”

In fact, the mere existence of if-then/if-then-else thinking, shifts in perspective/point of view, and persuasive argumentation in elementary school education, as not-radical as it may be, is a good sign for media literacy education in the 21st century. And I think that there are vital considerations here that suggest that in some ways, these kinds of learning and teaching are, and can be, radical indeed. The more often students encounter, in such units of study, examples that require that they study multiple media forms, and the more they hear the message that they are learning literacies when they do so, the more deeply will be ingrained the ways of thinking that they will need to be media literate in the long run.

If media literacy educators can identify, name, and explore the connections that already exist between what and how students learn before their preteens and what and how they learn in middle school, then high school, then post-secondary education, we will be able to deepen the work we do at all levels, and to create structures of study that are ready to evolve as media continue to evolve. After all, the most powerful communication tool on the internet in the year 2030 likely doesn’t even exist yet. So, young people need to learn ways of thinking that will prepare them not just to approach the human-algorithmic question as it exists in 2022, but the human-algorithmic question as it will exist five or ten or twenty years from now.

Selected free resources discussed above:

Microsoft MakeCode: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode

Pollyanna Racial Literacy Curriculum: https://pollyannainc.org/rlc-curriculum/

Scratch Junior: https://www.scratchjr.org/