We open the course with an overview of the major themes of the course. In small discussion groups, we connect these themes to our own past experience and to our existing priorities as educators. We examine several case studies of how computers currently shape learning and schooling. This provides the occasion for introducing the reading journal and technobiography assignments. We will conclude by reflecting on how our discussion of computers and schooling challenges our assumptions (e.g. where is a school? what are its boundaries?) and surfaces essential questions about education.

K-12 CS can't just mean hanging out online. Week 2 introduces CS disciplinary content knowledge as a priority in K-12 CS education, focusing on the effort to define computational thinking. We will spend the class doing several short lessons in Scratch designed to teach basic CS concepts, and then using this experience as the jumping-off point for a discussion of various tensions over what computational thinking ought to mean. (Don't worry! This activity will be differentiated to support students with any level of formal computer science experience.)

Building on Week 2, Week 3 focuses on the recent turn toward computational literacies as a framework for thinking about how and why we might teach K-12 Computer Science (CS). We will use the critical computational literacies framework to interpret several current K-12 CS education initiatives.

We will draw parallels between the disciplinary conversation within English/Language Arts and current debates within K-12 CS education in order to center questions of inclusion, representation, and power. We will identify several specific senses of "critical" education and make connections between the readings and our own experiences as students and teachers.

title: "Week 5: Computing and identity" week: 5 weight: 5 type: lessons layout: single mainMenuItem: Courses sidebar: right widgets:

• sectionNav readings:
• anthropy_2012_rise
• shaw_2020_charting
• brock_2020_distributed assignmentsOut:
• ccl_fieldnotes assignmentsDue:
• technobiography
• reading_journal

Week 5 introduces the second major theme of the course, identity. We will review several ways in which the construct of "identity" is used in educational research, constructing a situated, performative, and dialogic idea of identity we will use through this course. This week we will consider a diverse array of computer-mediated cultures and identities.

Even when people understand themselves to have identities as computer scientists, it is seldom their primary identity. This week we consider several ways in which computer science interacts with identity categories such as race, gender, sexuality, language, and ability.

No class: fall break.

Whereas Week 6 considered the ways in which computer science intersects broader identity categories in producing subject positions, Week 8 considers computation as a medium for literacy and identity practices. We will consider how computation mediates literacy practices at scales ranging from individual cognition to social and cultural processes.

Disciplinary identities are one way of thinking about learning in terms of identity. In Week 8 we will focus disciplinary identities within formal learning environments such as K-12 classrooms.

Student presentations of fieldnotes and analyses of communities of computational literacy practice.

Now that we have spent some time thinking about literacy and identity, it is clear that the question of what K-12 CS ought to be involves much more than content knowledge. In pursuit of this question we turn to the final theme of the course, education. In Week 10, we examine several efforts to define K-12 computer science. This is an opportunity to introduce the summative assessment of the class, the teaching statement.

How might teachers and schools support their students in understanding and resisting oppression?

The interdisciplinary potential of CS is a major motivation for framing K-12 CS education in terms of literacies. Building on Week 7's analysis of mediated identities and Week 11's exploration of how we can support critical action, Week 12 considers a transliteracies perspective, asking what happens when practices move across literacies.

Bringing our transliteracies focus back to the concrete context of schools in communities, our focus turns to connected learning. We will discuss schools as nodes within broad networks of learning, participation, and opportunity.