Restorying practices situated within a larger workshop wherein marginalized youth reimagined dominant narratives about computer science (CS). This was by creating interactive quilt patches using paper circuits and microcontrollers that challenged dominant narratives of white masculinity and misogynoir normalized throughout the field.

For Heather, the experience of not seeing stories with girls who look like her until high school shaped not only who she imagined existed in the CS field but also shaped her feelings about pursuing CS as a profession. Restorying through womanist storytelling methods allowed Heather to (1) deconstruct narratives of white masculinity and misogynoir throughout CS education by centering Black women’s ways of knowing and doing, and (2) restory the past to enact possible CS futures and identities through computing.

Restorying contextualizes present realities within historical practice, and most studies that have centered Black girls’ stories and writings toward reparative ends tend to be accompanied by mentor texts and stories from earlier generations of Black women. While we decided to focus on participants’ everyday stories in this study, allowing Black girls to listen to, collect and analyze the stories of Black women in CS throughout history could have provided girls with additional context and support for restorying alternate computing futures. The practice focuses on the experiences of one Black girl to analyze and illuminate how restorying through Black womanist storytelling methods can inform speculative methodologies in computing education

Womanist methodologies that think beyond traditional, normalized forms of learning can provide the learning sciences not only a historical but also a healingcentric approach for researchers imagining alternate outcomes about the field.

The workshop included marginalized youth that reimagined dominant narratives about computer science (CS).