9: Designing and defining computer science

Week 9 (October 30)

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.

Weekly video

Readings

Denning, P. J. (2017). Remaining trouble spots with computational thinking. Communications of the ACM, 60(6), 33–39. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998438

Proctor, C., Bigman, M., & Blikstein, P. (2019). Defining and designing computer science education in a K12 public school district. Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 314–320. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3287440

Notes

Logistics
- Ethnographic fieldnotes
  - Check with me if you have questions.
  - Slide presentation
  - Example posted on UBLearns.
- Cross-course collaboration
  - New section on website
  - One minute videos
    - Laura: Immigrant farm workers who needed to use a website to complete a government transaction.
    - Rebecca: Technological barriers are just one more barrier.
    - Lauren: Grades. Communication with the school.
  - Invitation to participate in in-person meetings
  - Case study with student stories.
- What else should we be talking about?
- Course schedule is updated for the rest of the semester!
Discussion reports
- Disciplinary communities of CS practice
  - Lave & Wenger. Trajectories of participation; legitimate peripheral participation.
    - Andrew: "It was a small class where we developed a community quickly, and the community helped keep it going."
  - Connection to identity.
    - Danielle: "I initially felt more invited because I had a head start." Varun: "it felt nice to have a head start and it invited me further into the space."
    - "However, besides for one other girl, the class was filled with senior/junior year boys who would goof off and make jokes that created a more unwelcoming environment."
  - Coordinating situated identities
    - Muhammad: "teachers in ESL / EFL context should make the classroom a place where students' unique languages and cultures are valued. For example, teachers could use activities that help students connect their personal experiences to language learning. They could also give their students the opportunity to talk about festivals or traditions from their own countries."
      - How could this connect to disciplinary identities in other subjects? What's the relationship between language ideologies and technological ideologies? (e.g. translanguaging)
    - Muhammad: "Schools can create a sense of belonging and empower families by inviting them to participate in school activities." (Would this be challenging in CS?)
  - Learning can be fundamentally viewed as “the development of self in relation to others, through complex processes of identification with domains, and as evidenced by deepening participation in social practice” (Barron et al., 2010).
    - Broad agreement. But what might this look like in practice?
    - Is there a fundamental tension between assessment and learning?
- Questions and claritications
  - What exactly is a frame? ("Frames (Goffman, 1974) serve as available scenes and storylines that organize our understanding of and predictions about what is happening in a given situation. Like interactional roadmaps, they mark a path for the activity to follow if everyone is playing their part correctly. The concept of frames helps specify how broader narratives come to have meaning in local spaces.")
Readings
- Proctor, Bigman, and Blikstein
- Denning