Schedule
Overview
The course is organized around three themes: literacy, identity, and education. Weeks 1-4 focus on literacy as a way of thinking about an academic discipline. Week 1 contextualizes computer science education in the digitally-mediated worlds of today's youth. Then Week 2 traces the development of computational thinking as an effort to name the relationship between computer science and everyday life and therefore the basis for K12 CS education. Week 3 examines the shortcomings of this project and reframes computational thinking in terms of computational literacies. Finally, Week 4's focus on critical computational literacies explores the role of computation in power and oppression, and how critical literacy practices can produce strategies for resistance.
Weeks 5-8 take up the second major theme of the course, identity, considering how people author identities within worlds of literacy practice. Week 5 considers identity authorship as a primary form of learning and examines various computational identities. Week 6 examines the relationship between identity and culture: how existing identities are reenacted and transformed in digital media and the ways in which computing cultures constrain possible selves. Week 8 considers the relationship between identities and the computational media upon which they rely. Finally, Week 7 explores disciplinary identities with a focus on the relationship between identity and the acquisition of disciplinary content knowledge.
Week 9 is devoted to student presentations sharing and interpreting communities of computational literacy practice.
Weeks 10-13 consider education as an intervention in the processes of literacy and identity. Week 10 examines the implications of designing and defining CS in a school community. Week 11 considers how teachers and schools can support critical action. Week 12 considers how pedagogy can connect across literacies. And Week 13 puts school-based CS education into its broader context, considering how schools might function as nodes in a network of connected learning.
The course concludes in Week 14 with sharing of participants' teaching statements: syntheses of the ideas explored during the course and statements of their own positionality: how they locate themselves and their work within these ideas and their intentions for future work.
| Week | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8/28 |
1. Schooling in the age of computers.
Course overview and structure. We start with an ethnographic video on how youth engage with computing: not what we think they should be doing or learning, but what they are doing. |
| 2 | 9/4 |
2: Computational thinking.
Week 2 introduces CS disciplinary content knowledge as a priority in K-12 CS education, focusing on the effort to define computational thinking. |
| 3 | 9/11 |
3: Computational literacies.
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). Assigned: A. Technobiography |
| 4 | 9/18 |
4: Critical computational literacies.
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. Due: A. Technobiography |
| 5 | 9/25 |
5: Computing and identity.
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. |
| 6 | 10/2 |
6: Mediated identities.
What is the relationship between our identities and the technological infrastructure which mediates them? How might learning about that infrastructure or playing with it in school create new possibilities for freedom? |
| 7 | 10/16 | 7: Identity and culture. |
| 8 | 10/23 |
8: Disciplinary identities.
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. |
| 9 | 10/30 |
9: Designing and defining computer science.
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 9, 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. |
| 10 | 11/6 |
10: Supporting critical action.
How might teachers and schools support their students in understanding and resisting oppression? |
| 11 | 11/13 |
11: Connecting across literacies.
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. |
| 12 | 11/20 |
12: Connected learning.
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. |
| 13 | 11/27 |
13: Designing computational futures.
Pedagogy is an act of design. Computing is a powerful medium for shaping our beings and our worlds. What kinds of worlds are designs for computing education oriented towards? |
| 14 | 12/4 |
14: Computational futures.
Presentation and analysis of case studies. Due: C. Case study |