Posts by Collection

Archive of a SIGCSE poster about the iCT project. You can see some examples of computational thinking integration in ELA, Arts, and Social Studies.

As demand for K-12 computer science (CS) education grows, we argue that most students would be best served by CS classes that not only teach computational thinking/programming, but also challenge them to critically analyze the role of technology in society. One of the main barriers to implementing this into K-12 classrooms is a lack of research on how in-service CS teachers can integrate critical pedagogy into their school context and existing curricula. This lightning talk presents a proposed method to co-design lessons with current K-12 CS teachers to integrate critical perspectives into their classrooms. Teacher participants will join a synchronous summer professional development where we will teach them critical computing content drawn from relevant books and frameworks, and collaborate with them to design or modify lessons that will engage their students in critical analysis. Teachers will be encouraged to include content relevant to their communities. For example, a teacher in Detroit might teach facial recognition in the context of continued use of the technology by police, despite wrongful arrests. Results from this work will inform future sociocultural content integration into K-12 CS courses (e.g. “ethics content”). Feedback from the audience will be used to improve the methods and literature review of the study.

With the rise of generative AI tools like chatGPT, the implications for education and the need to prepare teachers for its use have become paramount. This exploratory study delves into teacher education faculty’s perspectives on AI’s role in education, its potential to support teaching and learning, and the importance of fostering critical perspectives and ethical awareness among future educators. The findings underscore the belief among faculty that AI education should be integrated into teacher training that could enhance teaching and learning process. The faculty also believe the importance of equipping teachers to think critically and understand the ethical dimensions of AI.

Why does education need artificial intelligence (AI), and what does AI mean for educational justice? While optimism surrounds the growing use of AI in education, we challenge this uncritical embrace. As yet, education researchers have not fully examined the potential and documented harms AI poses—particularly to minoritized students, their schools, and communities. This presidential session aims to open a research-based dialogue on the risks and potential benefits of AI in education, given what our limited evidence tells us thus far. Framed through a lens of rigorous skepticism, we question whether AI is truly necessary for advancing education or educational justice. We will explore both the well-documented harms from interdisciplinary research and engage in thoughtful speculation about future risks.

I worked on this project as an undergrad, applying skills from compilers in a computational biology context.

Part of my undergrad research in Amy Ko’s Lab

Opinion piece in CACM about equity in CS education influenced by social studies education

Background: While advocates for integrating Computational Thinking (CT) into existing K12 classrooms have acknowledged and aimed to address various barriers to implementation, we contend that a more foundational issue—tensions between the epistemology of computing and those of existing disciplines—has largely been overlooked. Studies of contact between heterogeneous disciplinary perspectives in both pedagogical and real world professional settings point to other risks, and harms, that educators may need to consider as they attempt to integrate CT into their teaching. As such, designing for integrated CT pedagogies does not simply require addressing functional problems such as teacher professional learning and limited classroom time, but rather implicates complex epistemological navigations.
Objective: This manuscript explores potential epistemic tensions between Computational Thinking (CT) and K12 humanities and arts disciplines and possibilities for their resolution.
Method: Based on a Delphi study with 43 experts from three disciplines—language arts, social studies, and arts—as they engaged in 20 hours of focus group conversations exploring potential approaches to integrating CT these disciplines, analysis focused on identifying potential epistemic tensions that can arise in the context of instruction and directions for their resolution.
Findings: We found 5 epistemic tensions that are explored in detail: contextual reductionism, procedural reductionism, epistemic chauvinism, threats to epistemic identities, and epistemic convergence, as well as a number of potential directions for navigating them.
Implications: The study’s findings provide insights that bear on both scholarship and pedagogical design aimed at promoting substantive interdisciplinary learning with CT, and, critically, navigating potential tensions that can arise within it.

While computer science is widely recognized as crucial for all U.S. high school students, challenges persist for teachers’ pedagogical content and culturally responsive-sustaining knowledge. In this paper we explore how a co-teaching method shaped three teachers’ understandings of their knowledge while implementing Advanced Placement Computer Science Principle courses. Using a multi-case study methodology, we analyzed semi-structured interviews, pre- and post-surveys for content knowledge, and teachers created artifacts from the three co-teachers to compare their knowledge and experiences. We found that the teachers perceived the co-teaching model as valuable professional development, used pedagogical strategies to fill in content knowledge gaps, and struggled with culturally responsive education. We discuss the implications of these findings for supporting novice CS teachers.

This is a collaboration between MSU and CUNY to help prepare teacher educators in the CUNY system to use computational and digital literacies.

As issues of ethics, criticality, and social impact become more important in computer science, so does the need to teach them in CS classes. Despite the recent growth of academic writing around ethics in CS and a push for teaching ethics in post-secondary CS classes, the K-12 space has largely been ignored. To explore integrating ethics into K-12 CS classes, we interviewed a diverse group of current US K-12 CS teachers and conducted a thematic analysis to understand how they conceptualize ethics in CS and see potential opportunities and barriers to ethics integration in their classroom context. We found that teachers initially associated ethics with digital citizenship and gender/race imbalances, but were largely unfamiliar with issues of algorithmic bias, injustice, and techno-solutionism. After being introduced to these ideas and presented with examples, the teachers started to broaden their perspective of CS ethics. However, there are still barriers to teachers integrating ethics into their classroom (e.g. curriculum, time constraints). We discuss potential future for K-12 CS ethics including through integrating ethics into digital citizenship.

I shared my perspective, focusing on critical theory and scholars who have been questioning language models for a long time, like Emily Bender who was recently profiled in this great article. It uses very accessible language, while also retaining a lot of the nuance in Bender’s stance. I ended by incorporating a technoskeptical perspective, taken from Civics of Technology’s curriculum. I wanted to build on a question that came up in a breakout room along these lines of “Who is harmed and who benefits from the technology?” In this case, who benefits and is harmed by chatbots like ChatGPT?

Me and two other PhD candidates in our program were invited to speak about the process of planning and executing our practicum projects. The panel was a part of the class CEP 955, which is a required class where students plan their first independent research projects. I talked about the challenges I encountered in my practicum (which was eventually published at SIGCSE), and offered some advice to the class of mostly 2nd year PhD students.

Many Indigenous languages are endangered, and revitalizing them is a major part of decolonization. Educational technology may be able to help, but the unique needs of Indigenous communities need to be taken into account. In this talk, I describe my experience with the Lushootseed language as a case study to explore these challenges and opportunities. Lushootseed is a Coast Salish language from the territory around the modern city of Seattle.

As the tech industry has exploded in the 21st century, so has K-12 computer science education. However, I argue that instead of teaching kids how to code, we need to teach them how to understand how computing influences their lives. Computers and algorithms are reshaping society, for better and for worse, but all the focus in CS education has gone into teaching programming. Our students need to be informed about how computational systems profile us using our data, invade every aspect of our lives, and exacerbate existing injustices. Instead of worrying about Terminator-like AI, I want young people to analyze how technology is already exploiting marginalized communities and what they can do to help. I want computing curriculum to draw upon the work of women and scholars of color who have been sounding the alarm for years about algorithmic bias that reinforces racism and sexism. My research aims to make this a reality by collaborating with K-12 computer science teachers to integrate these concepts into their teaching using real world examples. More kids would like CS class, if only it was less about writing code and more about building a better world.

This was a course I co-taught to local high school students over summer as a part of a program called Upward Bound. Our goal was to teach culturally responsive computing by connecting computing to students’ self-expressed interests.

I taught a guest lecture on buffer overflow in addition to TA’ing.

I taught a guest lecture on concurrency with fork() in addition to TA’ing. I also designed a research-based debugging component on their homework to encourage metacognition. This intervention has since been used in future iterations of the course.

I revamped the course, adding exercises that check understanding from lecture and modified the homework assignments. Portfolio is available upon request.

I taught two special topic classes this semester: asset-based teaching in the context of English Language Learners and the school to prison pipeline

The shooting on February 13th devastated everyone, including me and my students. Myself and some other TE 150 instructors decided to facilitate an optional class the week after the shooting where we discussed how we are processing it. This class was informed by a seminar held by Professor Alyssa Hadley Dunn who is an MSU alumn at UConn who studies trauma in educational settings.

I also designed a lesson connecting Wikipedia to the course content by conceptualizing Wikipedia as a social constructivist tool. Students engaged in Wikipedia editing during class and reflected on how editor bias affects the world.

I made several important additions to the curriculum this semester, in addition to onboarding Olamide Ogungbemi as a co-teacher.

• Week 1
  • Freedom of speech
  • Land acknolwedgements and their role in education
  • Exploring data on segregation in the US
• Week 2
  • Added identity wheel activity
• Week 3
  • Added content on non-binary gender and gender performativity/Judith Butler
    • “How does schooling influence our gender performance? To what extent should teachers teach students differently based on their gender? Under what circumstances? Why?”
  • Added mood meter based on RULER approach
• Week 4
  • Integrated Harro’s Cycle of Socialization into discussion of Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory.
• Week 5
  • Added readings on asset-based pedagogy and the school-to-prison pipeline
  • Added clip from Katrina Babies documentary (timestamp 0:59-1:08) to class on trauma-informed teaching
• Week 6
  • Added reading about controversial classroom discussions in higher ed. Choice of reading between Bérubé or Crespo.