Who Decides What Is True in and About Computer Science?

• In Event: Co-Constructing Systemic Support for Sustaining Humanizing and Inclusive Computer Science Teacher Education

Abstract

Objectives:
Computer science (CS), as a discipline, has strong logistical positivist perspectives about what is true in CS, what CS is, and what CS is not. These are often in direct tension with youth, teacher, and parent perspectives on what computer science is, creating a complex web of epistemic tensions that can interfere with learning or teaching. The purpose of this panel presentation is to identify these tensions and discuss one set of rhetorical approaches to unpacking them in secondary pre-service CS teacher education.


Perspective:

This position builds upon Freire’s notion of critical consciousness and Ladson-Billings’ (Ladson-Billings, 1995) notion of culturally relevant pedagogy to imagine teacher education that starts with teacher perspectives on CS as assets, but also make space to question those perspectives through shared dialog, offering alternative views of CS in search of oppressive ideas about CS.

Methods/Data:

The core source of experiences are two fold: a book, titled Critically Conscious Computing: Methods for Secondary Education (Ko et al., 2021), which takes a critical consciousness frame of both CS content knowledge and CS pedagogical content knowledge, building a counternarrative perspective on CS for teachers to consider. This is coupled with dialog in a pre-service classroom of teachers with mixed CS teaching experiences, creating contexts for constructing new narratives built upon teacher experiences with CS, but also political narratives about the role of computing technologies in inequity and injustice.

Results/Findings:

Our experiences using this book in pre-service CS teacher education suggest that over ten weeks of dialog, teachers shift from dominant narratives about CS being technical, logical, hard, inaccessible to something that has room for play, discovery, persistence, and politics.

Scholarly Significance:

Pre-service efforts in CS are new, and critical CS pedagogy is exceptionally rare in general. These perspectives chart one path for making space for both, while revealing potential research opportunities to understand how teachers’ disciplinary perspectives might be reshaped to make room for their assets and their students’.

Conference theme:

This panel presentation is fundamentally about the epistemic positions of disciplines, teachers, CS education research, and how they interact. The presentation should help unpack these interactions in a way that raises new questions.

Author

• Amy J. Ko, University of Washington
  Presenting Author