Learn How To Code Alongside Black Feminism
How Seeda School’s Code Coaching Program Works
Coding is Worlding
Last week I invited you into my dreams with this invocation, “My wildest dream is that you never abandon yourself to learn how to code”. It’s true, on the surface, this dream might not seem very wild but when I speak about coding it’s never just about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. “Coding” is also about the stories we tell and how those stories inform our relationships to each other and the planet. Code, after all, is language and language has always shaped our imagination which shapes our world. What’s wild, emergent, and exciting for me are the ways in which “coding” as a verb and worlding practice allows us to straddle parallel universes: the world we’re currently living in where basic human needs such as water, housing, food, healthcare, and education are often traded for capital or labor and the world we’re collectively imagining and building where almost everything is unknown besides the imperative that care must be at the center. Seeda School is a container for powerfully riding the two worlds by learning the skill of coding to expand your interdisciplinary creative toolkit and earning potential while helping write new possibilities into being.
I only have the capacity for 12 more learners in the Seeda School Code Coaching Program so I wanted to answer any open questions and invite you to enroll while there’s still room.
In this newsletter I want to answer the following questions:
What is Seeda School’s Code Coaching Program?
How Does Seeda School’s Code Coaching Program Work?
Why Might You Need A Coding Coach?
Why Teach Coding Alongside Black Feminism?
What’s The First Step to Enrolling in the Seeda School Code Coaching Program?
What is Seeda School’s Code Coaching Program?
Seeda School’s Code Coaching Program leverages the freeCodeCamp curriculum and the worldbuilding teachings of black feminism to empower you to build a coding project in one month rooted in care and curiosity. You have the option to purchase one month of coaching and build one project or participate in the full program by building 5 projects in 15 weeks and earning the freeCodeCamp Responsive Web Design certification. Coaching is purchased monthly and you receive guidance working through the freeCodeCamp courses, access to an emerging video library of Seeda School coding tutorials, and four weekly one-on-ones via Zoom where we focus on designing, building, and launching your black feminist web projects.
How Does Seeda School’s Code Coaching Program Work?
STEP 1
Book a free 30 minute discovery call. Here we will talk about your curiosity in code, your coding goals, your vision for your coding skills, and how Seeda School might be able to support all three.
STEP 2
Commit to investing $300 for one month of enrollment which grants you access to the Seeda School coaching learning portal and four virtual, 60 minute, 1:1 coaching calls dedicated to building your projects.
STEP 3
Attend your four coaching calls each month of enrollment. The Seeda School coaching program follows the schedule outlined in our Responsive Web Design Syllabus and the majority of each call is dedicated to pair programming on a certification project for your coding portfolio.
Why Might You Need A Coding Coach?
Self-teaching coding is hard. You don’t know what you don’t know and oftentimes you’re learning things in the wrong order. When I was self-teaching I was trying to learn React before I learned JavaScript. This caused a lot of frustration and wasted time. As your coach I will help you learn what you need to know, when you need to know it based on your coding goals.
Imposter syndrome is real. This is probably the biggest reason I started Seeda School. While teaching at a coding bootcamp for years I noticed the folks who struggled with imposter syndrome the most were often the most marginalized. This is no accident. It’s not enough to focus only on the code. So much of our progress can be attributed to how we’re caring for our body, our mindset, and external factors like white supremacy. As your coach I will help you cultivate an empowered mindset and remind you to tend to your body and spirit as you embark on learning what is a creative and delightful but sometimes challenging skill called web development.
Accountability works. Teaching yourself consistently for two weeks and then falling off to return a month later having forgotten everything you learned keeps you in a cycle of stunted progress and frustration. This ends up fueling imposter syndrome and lack of motivation. Lack of accountability is the most common reason I see people give up on learning how to code. Learning any new skill is harder when you go at it alone, let’s do it together.
Why Teach Coding Alongside Black Feminism?
“It is not simply that design thinking wrongly claims newness, but in doing so it erases the insights and agency of those who are discounted because they are not designers, capitalizing on the demand for novelty across numerous fields of action and coaxing everyone who dons the cloak of design into being seen and heard through the dominant aesthetic of innovation.”
— Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Like design, I believe it is imperative that software development is taught outside the “dominant aesthetic of innovation” and instead through an aesthetic of black feminism. This is not about trading one “dominant aesthetic” for another, it’s about trading an aesthetic of domination for one rooted in curiosity and care. There are countless black feminist scholars, researchers, and artists providing visions and questions for technologies that don’t power surveillance capitalism. I have only scratched the surface by citing roughly 50 of them in Seeda School’s Responsive Web Design Syllabus. These visionaries are contributing to our collective imagination toward building for each other and not the carceral system or consumerism. These cultural workers are presenting proposals for platforms rooted in care for our data, social lives, and ecosystems. I didn’t see a coding school teaching alongside black feminism so I created it. I hope you’ll join me in attempting to contribute to this intellectual and political lineage of liberatory worlding.
What’s The First Step to Enrolling in the Seeda School Program?
If any part of this newsletter piqued your curiosity in coding, I’d love to meet you and talk about how Seeda School might be able to help with your coding goals and questions. I only have the capacity for 12 more learners to join the coaching program. Please click the button below to book a free, 30 minute discovery call.
If you got this far, I hope you have a better idea of the intention behind Seeda School and how the Code Coaching Program works. If you still have questions I invite you to listen to episode 008 of the Soft, Where? Podcast, visit the FAQs page on the website, or shoot me an email at info@seedaschool.com.
Until next time,
Ayana