Community-Based Design of a Computer Science Teacher Preparation Program (Poster 7)

• In Event: Practice and Positionality: Critical Instantiations of STEAM Education and Research

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on the initial process of developing a teacher residency partnership with a local school district, and theorize the positionality I ought to take as we go forward. Building on decades of policy work by the K12 computing education community, it is finally possible in many states to become certified as a primary or secondary computer science (CS) teacher. As graduate schools begin to offer CS teacher preparation programs, they have the potential to address longstanding issues of exclusion and inequity in CS education (Yadav et al., 2021).
The process of designing a teacher residency partnership is guided by Penuel’s (2019) call for infrastructuring, “activities that aim to redesign components, relations, and routines of schools and districts that influence what takes place in classrooms” (p. 659). Infrastructuring is particularly relevant for CS education because computing technologies are now vital, though often unrecognized infrastructure underlying many aspects of our lives. Increasingly-urgent calls to consider social and political impacts of computing (e.g., Vakil, 2018) underscore the need for community-based decision-making around CS education. The term equity implies partial ownership: having a stake and having a say.
However, substantial outreach and education needs to be done to create the conditions for meaningful community participation in a design process, especially when so many power hierarchies already exist between the stakeholders in a public school, and when knowledge about what CS is and why it might matter is so unevenly distributed. There are many examples of processes in which community participation was only superficial or in which a community’s vision for change has been subverted through institutional domestication (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). This project’s strategies for theorizing and enacting the community design processes will draw heavily on decades of experience in equitable community-based processes in the field of urban planning. Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation is a taxonomy of the extent to which participants in participatory design have real power, ranging from nonparticipation (e.g. manipulation) to tokenism (e.g. placation; consultation) to degrees of power (e.g. direct control; delegation; partnership). This project frames equity in terms of participant power to be heard, to have needs met, to build situated understandings of what CS and why it matters, and to design educational infrastructure to broaden participation in CS according to these understandings.
As the founding director of the University at Buffalo’s CS teacher preparation program and a computer scientist with degrees from Stanford and work experience in Silicon Valley, it would be easy for me to occupy a position of privileged authority. The central challenge of this project will be to decenter such authority while building community capacity. This is complicated by local intersectional politics. The K12 CS education community’s long-overdue emphasis on equity has tended to emphasize race and gender. The project site, an economically-divested rust-belt city, has important inequities on these terms, but no equity-focused proposal will gain broad support without also offering futures to the economically-marginalized white families who make up the majority of the population.

Author

• Chris Proctor, University at Buffalo - SUNY
  Presenting Author