Section 0005.b ended with knowing what students bring, and this section is about using it. The guiding framework is culturally relevant pedagogy, a theory of teaching developed by Gloria Ladson-Billings, which has three components: it builds on students' cultural knowledge and experiences, it maintains high expectations, and it develops critical awareness of societal issues. The practices in this section can be read as ways of carrying out those components. Drawing on funds of knowledge and activating prior knowledge build on what students already know. Personally meaningful projects connect the goal to students' identities while keeping the expectations in place. Work on community issues develops the critical awareness. The section first looks more closely at the framework, since it is easy to adopt in name and miss in practice, and then takes up each practice.

What culturally relevant pedagogy asks#

All three components have to be present together, and each rules out a common imitation. Building on students' experiences means building on these students' actual experiences, so it draws on knowledge of the students in the room, not on assumptions about a group they belong to. A teacher who designs a unit around a music genre because of students' ethnicity, without asking them, is drawing on assumptions, and the remedy is to learn from the students what matters to them. Relevance also isn't decoration: putting students' neighborhood on a worksheet, or theming a lesson around a cultural holiday, doesn't by itself build on anything students know. The second component, high expectations, means that building on students' experiences happens alongside rigor. A suggestion to drop the technical criteria from a project because students from a particular background will find it more relevant without them works against the approach, which treats lowered demands as a failure of respect. The third component, critical awareness, asks students to examine who is affected by a system and why. A lesson in which students analyze local housing data using rigorous criteria and then discuss whom the patterns affect shows all three components at work. So does a project in which students apply what they know about algorithms to their own experience, asking whom a ranking algorithm might help or harm in their community and why, and asking critical questions about how people like them are represented, with evidence, not the teacher's opinion, driving the inquiry. In each case, technical knowledge is linked both to students' experiences and to questions of power.

Building on what students know#

The first component becomes concrete through funds of knowledge, a term from the research of Luis Moll and colleagues for the skills and knowledge students bring from their families and communities, which teachers can treat as resources for learning computer science. Family work such as budgeting, repair, and cooking involves procedures and data that are useful in computing. A student who helps diagnose car faults in a family repair shop has learned a systematic fault-tracing procedure, which connects directly to debugging. A student whose family weaves knows patterns built from repetition and structure, which connect naturally to loops, for instance by modeling a repeating row of the weave in code. These connections don't happen on their own, though, so the teacher has to make them explicit. Giving the car-repair student a car-themed programming assignment uses her topic but leaves her expertise untouched, while connecting her fault-tracing procedure to debugging lets her apply it in code. Finding these funds of knowledge requires asking students and family members directly what they do and know. Student profiles, demographic data, or a teacher's own history lead to assumptions, the very thing the framework warns against.

Prior knowledge can also be activated with everyday analogies, which give every student a way into a new idea. Following a recipe illustrates sequencing, the idea that steps must happen in order, and a group routine that repeats until some condition is met, such as passing out papers until everyone has one, illustrates loops. For conditionals, a question such as "What decisions do you make each morning, and what do they depend on?" works for every student, unlike questions that depend on experience novices may not have. A familiar photo filter can introduce how a program changes the values of pixels, after which students write a filter of their own. As with funds of knowledge, transfer isn't automatic, so the teacher must connect the analogy explicitly to code, for example by mapping the parts of the routine onto a loop's body and its condition. Analogies also break down, and it helps to discuss where. The common picture of a variable as a "box" can suggest that a variable holds many values at once, the misconception described under 0005.b. After x = 1 and then x = 2, the program outputs 2, because assignment replaces the earlier value, so a teacher using the box analogy should show that the box holds only one value at a time.

Connecting to identity through projects#

The second component, high expectations, is easiest to keep when students care about the work. Letting students choose the topics and contexts of their projects, such as a game about their community, connects CS goals to their interests and identities.¹² The choice concerns the topic, not the learning goal, so the required skills stay in place. An assignment to build a game or story on a topic students choose, required to use both loops and conditionals, does both. A student who builds an animation about her family's traditions has connected the goal to her interests and identity, and the programming demands and the grading criteria haven't changed. If her project repeats the same code many times, the right response is to keep the topic and have her revise the repeated code using loops, so that she keeps ownership and still meets the goal. The same reasoning applies to evaluating project proposals: the question is whether a proposal lets the student use the target skills on a topic of personal interest, not how ambitious it is or which tools it uses, and steering students away from topics in their own communities works against the aim. Novices may need support to take on an open-ended project, and starter code with structured choices, which students then make their own, supports them without removing personal meaning. A fixed template would give support but take away students' ownership.

Connecting to community issues#

The third component, critical awareness, comes into focus when students use computing on questions that matter where they live. Analyzing local data or building tools for local needs shows students that computer science can be used to pursue their own and their community's goals.³ Students might collect and map reports of broken streetlights or unsafe crossings and then share their findings with local officials. Data informs public discussion in such a project, though it doesn't settle it. Building a tool for a real need, such as an app for a community organization, and testing it with real users gives the design and programming work an authentic purpose and real feedback. Such projects work best when they start from students' own questions, with the teacher helping students form questions and find data to answer them, since a distant data set or a conclusion fixed in advance removes the connection that makes the work matter. Local data carries a responsibility of its own. Data about a community is data about identifiable people, and a home's address can identify a family even when the name is removed, so the class should discuss privacy and aggregate sensitive data, for example by neighborhood, so that no household can be identified. Making these connections is a matter of strategy, and 0005.d surveys the research-based strategies a teacher can draw on.

• culturally relevant pedagogy: teaching that builds on students' cultural knowledge and experiences, maintains high expectations, and develops critical awareness of societal issues
• critical awareness: examining who is affected by a system and why
• funds of knowledge: the skills and knowledge students bring from their families and communities
• activating prior knowledge: connecting a new idea to something students already know, such as an everyday routine
• sequencing: carrying out steps in a set order
• aggregating data: combining records into groups so that individuals can't be identified

Practice: practice questions for 0005.c

1. MWC1, Drawing project: planning, milestones, debugging, and version control through mwc submit. ↩

2. MWC1, Game project: proposing, building, and revising a personally meaningful game. ↩

3. MWC1, Argument project: collecting and using data to make a claim. ↩