SuperQuest Eugene wrapped Friday, August 5, but not before we got a great talk from Joanna Goode, one of the co-authors of the Exploring Computer Science Curriculum, and her occasional colleague and co-champion of inclusive pedagogy, Jane Krauss. They talked about Equity and Inclusion in Computer Science.

Joanna, from the University of Oregon’s School of Education, is a co-author of the NSF-funded ExploringCS curriculum (curricular units, assessments, computational practices, PD).  The book Stuck in the Shallow End, Education, Race and Computing (Margolis et al., 2008)  documents that “CS Education” for students of color often meant keyboarding and word processing, while white middle- and upper-class boys were programming.

Joanna showed a great diagram showing Broadening Participation in High School CS requires more than a curriculum and a Teacher Champion:

• Access: Availability of Course to All Students
• Diversity: Attracting and Enrolling Students Into Course
• Equity: Effectively Teaching All Students

Culturally relevant pedagogy in CS includes:

• Situating CS in the local Community
• Integration of EthnoComputing (calling out Ron Eglash’s resources such as the Culturally Situated Design Tools)
• Allowing for Student Choice
• Power and Civic Participation.

ExploringCS is being used in multiple districts in multiple states.

They also told us about

• CSPDWeek, likely to happen again next year, in Golden, CO.
• MobileCSP, an AP CS Principles course based on mobile app development.

Jane Krauss also showed us code.org data by state! And here is Counselors for Computing, the NCWIT program Jane spearheads. NCWIT has a rich, searchable collection of resources for Pre-K to career.

Respectfully submitted,
Jo Oshiro
jo@oregoncsta.org

Update: presentation summary.