Plays and Scripts: How Integrating Computational Thinking into Literacy Lessons Promotes Student and Professional Learning

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Educating Futures: Culture, Code, and Creativity in Transformative Pedagogies

Abstract

This qualitative case study investigates how co-design and professional learning processes support pre-service teachers (PSTs) in implementing computational thinking (CT) principles during literacy instruction and the impacts of their designs with multilingual learners in a fifth-grade classroom. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives (Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky,1978), the study focuses on how a PST organized social interactions and tools around CT to mediate meaning-making and language acquisition during language arts lessons on plays and readers theater. Findings reveal CT lessons designed by the PST, enhanced students’ learning, agency, and language development through multimodal approaches. In addition, PSTs developed deeper confidence in facilitating learning experiences when given the opportunity to design lessons using CT showing the transformative potential of co-design in teacher education.

Authors

• Robert Macias, Northern Arizona University

• Samuel Severance, Northern Arizona University