This aspect of the program was important to allow the students to hear the stories of young professional women who had decided on an IT career. A conscious effort was made to bring in speakers who had different roles in the computing industry. There was a business information systems university graduate working for a large corporation, a network administration expert who had gained a technical computing diploma qualification after a Health Science Bachelor’s degree, and a software programmer who worked in a well-known multinational company that the students were all familiar with.
All our speakers gave their time willingly to come to the schools and present to the girls. All felt passionately about encouraging more women into the profession.
The speakers were encouraged to talk about their secondary school ex-periences and what influenced their career choices. The sessions were held informally in the classroom, and in some schools the girls captured the talks on hand-held digital cameras. The videos were then placed on the Digital Divas portal to be used later as a reference tool for the ‘A day in the life’ unit.
We were aware that a report on the UK girls’ computer club programs (e.g. CC4G) found that while their club had been beneficial, students did not appear to build a connection between the use of various computing applications and future careers (Fuller et al., 2009). In designing this aspect of the Digital Divas program, we specifically linked the guest speakers with the research project around ‘A day in the life’, to further emphasise careers
and applications. Student comments on the unit survey reflect the benefit of the invited guest speakers, for example:
She was talking about her experience in IT, and obviously how she’s become successful. She’s on channel 7, channel 9? She does the morning show, and does all the related IT work. And just her coming and speaking to us, like … Even though some people say there are not a lot of jobs in IT, she actually made us realise there’s heaps, and heaps, and heaps. And that you can be really successful out of it one day. That’s what I liked. [Student]
That women can do IT and we can do it well. [Student when asked what she had learnt from the speakers]
Like we’ve had a lot of speakers and the stuff they’ve been saying was really interesting, but imagine going there and watching it happen, that would be even better. [Student]
… the speakers were fantastic, really got some of the girls engaged which was wonderful. [Classroom Teacher]
When the unit was taught for the first time at Bartik Secondary College two-thirds of the class commented that they would now consider an IT career, and when asked why wrote comments such as: ‘Every day is different apparently. I love fixing things and helping people’; ‘the travelling’; ‘being creative and every day would be different’; ‘Programming games or animation’; ‘Just learning about and using computers for many different things’. These comments confirm that this aspect of the program had succeeded to some extent in changing student perceptions about the career path.
Feedback from both teachers and girls following the presentations clearly demonstrate that these women fulfilled a vital role in our program and provided a crucial link between what happens in the classroom and what happens in the workforce. As well as showcasing the breadth of possibilities relating to IT careers, it appears that these women were successful in dispelling persistent myths and stereotypes associated with IT. In addition, many of these women described the experience in positive terms, and felt encouraged to volunteer for future presentations.
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3. Normalising the IT Environment Sphere
During the three years of conducting the program the third sphere of
‘influence’ underwent a number of name changes. Initially it was called
‘showcase/celebration’ (Lang, Craig, Fisher & Forgasz, 2010) but it has now morphed in to ‘Normalising the IT environment’ as we recognized exactly what we set out to do with the ‘celebrations’; showing girls that it is acceptable and normal to be interested in computing and allowing the girls to claim ownership of the space.
Our purpose was to enable students to own the Digital Divas program within their school setting. The girls were able to make the decisions about aspects of the program such as the ‘bling’ (key rings, lanyards, t-shirts, posters featuring their logo design) as visible outcomes of the program. They created, printed and displayed colourful posters to identify Digital Divas in the computer classroom, a space normally not decorated with these types of images. One student commented ‘I liked that we all got to design our own logo, how the symbol of Digital Divas was created by the Digital Divas’. We encouraged teachers to put student designs up in different parts of the school including the computer rooms, to normalise the space as female. A ‘club’
atmosphere was reinforced with cooperation, collaboration and discussion encouraged as we attempted to make the class a positive and welcoming experience.
In one school we conducted an end-of-semester celebration with the school principal, media and, of course, parents. This enabled the students to showcase their work and celebrate being part of the Digital Divas program.
Unfortunately this type of celebration did not become the norm in the other schools, with too many obstacles preventing it from being conducted.
The other two influences supported the concept of normalising the IT space. The engagement of students in creative and interesting activities was achieved through a curriculum that spanned multimedia applications, research, and spreadsheet applications, and was designed in a purposeful manner to create activities that were perceived as engaging by the majority of the students. Our overriding objective was not to teach IT through applications but demonstrate how it can be taught through interest (food, image, creativity). The programming language focused on storytelling using a tool that was created specifically to capture the imagination of young girls. A comment on the feedback survey reflected the positive aspect of using Alice; when asked what was the best aspect of the course one student wrote, ‘Doing the Alice project, I feel that I have found something that I am good at’.
Conclusion
Through their relationships with the Expert Divas girls heard true stories of
‘real’ women in technology and gained a sense of increasing the visibility of young women in IT. This was further reinforced through the ‘a day in the life’ as part of module 5. These initiatives helped make IT ‘normal’ for girls and help them visualise themselves and other women in an IT career.
In this chapter we have provided insight into our design thinking when we created the Digital Divas program, our three spheres of influence. The centre point of these three spheres, as displayed in Figure 5.1, is putting
‘Careers in IT’ onto the possible future career options for these students because evidence from earlier research clearly indicated that IT is often not considered in future career choices (Lang, 2012). From the outcomes of previous research we know that to have success a multifaceted approach was needed and this is validated by our results. Whether this approach was successful is presented in Chapter 6.
Images of the girls’ work and other photographs taken during our program are presented in the final report and can be found online at
http://digitaldivasclub.org/vic/webfm_send/8.
http://digitaldivasclub.org/vic/sites/default/files/2010-Digital-Divas-Presentation-VITTA-conference.pdf
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