In this talk, Dr. Byrd presents findings from the third chapter of his book tentatively titled The Literacy Pivot: How Black Adults Learn Computer Programming in a Racist World. Coding bootcamps must grapple with the reality that race and racism determine how Black students and their instructors do and do not leverage coding literacy into social mobility. To understand how Clearwater Academy's curriculum and assessment practices rhetorically address this reality, I conducted focus group interviews with instructors and Black adults and year-long participant observations. Findings suggest that coding bootcamps are racial organizations whose curricula and assessment practices “program” racially marginalized people into viable bits of code called functions to assist in designing white software systems – the technologies that largely center white end users and uphold white supremacist policies and practices. Black adults proposed an alternative vision that uses their own knowledge and lived experiences to create a Black coding literacy.

Antonio Byrd is assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri Kansas City. He teaches technical communication, digital rhetoric, and qualitative research methods. Antonio serves on the Modern Language Association and Conference on College Composition and Communication Joint Task Force on Writing and AI. His forthcoming book The Literacy Pivot: How Black Adults Learn Computer Programming in a Racist World is under contract with The WAC Clearinghouse/University Press of Colorado.

Dr. Byrd’s visit is sponsored by the PNC Technology for Social Change speaker series in Pitt’s School of Computing and Information; the Pitt English Composition Program; Pitt English; the Humanities Center; Pitt Cyber; and the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences.