Red-Eared Sliders and Neighborhood Dogs: Creating Third Spaces to Support Ethhnic Girls’ Interests in Technological and Scientific Experitise

Girls and women, especially if they are people of color, supposedly do not like computer technology or science. Myriad reports and studies document their limited interest and participation in these fields, both in school and at work. This article reports some preliminary results from an after-school intervention intended to increase urban, African-American middle school girls' interest and participation in computer technology and science. The intervention program was designed by university researchers, community developers, and local residents to correspond to state curriculum content standards and to be flexible enough to accommodate the girls' own interests and values. Participant observation and interview data about the course of the intervention and the girls' responses to it were collected and analyzed for the 2000-2001 school year. Using semantic domain analysis and case examples, the authors indicate the kinds of technological activities these girls wanted to pursue and some of the ways they appropriated school-based technology and science to contribute to "third spaces" of productive hybridity (after Bhabha 1994; Moje et al. 2004) in which they were motivated to develop and display new skills and competencies.