Peer-Reviewed Study

Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture

Jan 1990 🇺🇸 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (University of Chicago Press) PEER-REVIEWED PAYWALLED — LINKED, NOT HOSTED

In this 1990 journal article, Sherry Turkle and computer scientist Seymour Papert examined how children and adult programmers approach computing in different personal styles — some through structured, top-down planning and others through a more improvisational, trial-and-error approach the authors called 'bricolage.' Drawing on classroom observation, they argued that programming education of the era implicitly rewarded one style over the other, which they associated with some students, disproportionately girls, feeling pushed out of computer science despite being capable programmers. The paper is widely cited in education research on learning styles and gender gaps in computing. TechKids Foundation includes it as an early, peer-reviewed look at how the design of tech education itself can be associated with which students end up comfortable with computers and which do not.

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CITATION

Turkle, Sherry, and Seymour Papert. "Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1990): 128–157. https://doi.org/10.1086/494648

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