Problematizing Deficits with Sara Vogel

In this interview with Sara Vogel, we discuss changes in CS education since Sara was last on the podcast, the impact of COVID on learning, some of the problems with computational thinking, the importance of modifying curricula to make it more culturally and historically responsive, deficit language and racism around bilingual students, the importance of understanding translanguaging pedagogies, what apprenticeship and joint work can look like in education, and much more.

Welcome back to another episode of the CSK8 podcast.
My name is Jared O'Leary.
Each week of this podcast
is either a solo episode where I unpack some scholarship in relation to computer
science education or an episode with a guest or multiple guests.
In this week's particular episode, I am interviewing Sara Bogle,
who previously
joined this podcast with Raffy Santo to discuss the paper that they wrote.
And this was back before COVID and this week's particular episode.
We discussed changes in
computer science education since Sara was last on the podcast,
the impact of COVID on learning some of the problems
with computational thinking, the importance of modifying curricula
to make it more culturally and historically responsive
deficit language and racism around bilingual students.
The importance of understanding trans language in pedagogy what apprenticeship
and joint work can look like in education and so much more.
As always, the show notes at Jared Salary.com include links to other podcasts
and resources mentioned in this particular episode,
and you can quickly jump to that
by clicking the link in the app that you're listening to this on.
While you're checking out the show notes,
make sure you check out the other podcast. There's over 100 of them.
There's some really awesome guests and some really cool papers
that are discussed, and there's a bunch of other resources.
Hundreds, if not thousands related to computer science education.
But with all that being said, we will now begin with an introduction by Sarah.
My name is Sarah Vogel.
I use her pronouns and I am a researcher, teacher, educator and educator.
I wear a lot of different hats these days.
I'm a research scientist at New York University, where I work
with a project called Participating in Literacies and Computer Science,
and we are a research practice partnership that supports this
for all in New York City, specifically to ensure
bilingual students are meaningfully participating.
And also, I am now an advisor and instructor
with the faculty at Bank Street College, which is a teacher preparation college
and graduate school in New York City.
And I work with teachers who are learning to become
teachers English to speakers of other languages.
So basically folks becoming teachers and classrooms that serve multilingual kids.
So lots of different hats.
Like I said, some in the CAC world,
some in the world of educating and supporting multilingual learners.
So last time we spoke was January of 2020,
at least the last time we did the interview with Raffi.
And it's interesting to think just how much has changed
since then, like going back and listening to that interview.
Just like, wow, like times were different back then.
I'm curious for you, though, like,
how has this almost two years now kind of impacted your own vision?
Of course, Like, has it changed or being reaffirmed in different ways?
First of all, well,
I hear you what you're saying about it being such a different time.
The last time we spoke to each other
and I hadn't even made that connection until you flagged it for me,
I guess I would say in terms of how my own vision of science education has changed,
I feel like it's changed a lot and also not that much at the same time.
So maybe to contextualize it a little bit within sort of
where the field is, I know that was also something you were interested in, is like,
how does the discourse around Seaside change since we last spoke?
And I think my own vision stems out of that in a way.
So I think on the one hand I've seen this move towards
centering justice more in the teaching of science education.
I think that the protests and the uprisings that took place
in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's murders by police
really played a role in bringing issues of centering justice
and cost for especially white educators and institutions.
But also I think this move was building for a long time.
Even within the report that we last spoke about, we were talking
a lot about centering justice and critical computing in different ways.
But there are now sort of more calls for culturally sustaining computing.
There's a lot more teacher PD happening in this area.
The semester released its sort of guidance for inclusive educators.
There's a lot of articles and attention in the scholarly community
around these values and thinking about how this year
the Respect conference in education was centered around justice orientations.
So there's that kind of like rhetorical moves from this broadening participation
rhetoric, which I think was more dominant in thinking about equity
in the last few years to one that's like, what does it mean to centered justice?
So that's one sort of shift that I've been seeing.
But at the same time, like not a lot has changed.
Also at the Respect conference, I think it was Allison Scott
from the Kapor Center.
She pointed out how the numbers really haven't moved much in terms
of black and Latinx engineers at tech companies, students in higher ed
and of course, like those aren't the only valued outcomes,
but in a sense they're kind of canaries in a coal mine for some.
So there's sort of this like push towards justice, but also a sense that
what we're doing is not enough.
We're seeing all these disturbing trends in education now like that are also
setting us back from this justice centered education, like the political climate.
Lots of teachers in states where you can't even mention a word like race or racism
without fearing that you might get fired or you might get blacklisted.
So there's a lot of tensions.
There's a lot of like two steps back, one step forward kind of situation.
And and so in contextualizing my own vision within that,
I think thinking about this pandemic era education has put a lot in focus for me.
At the start of the pandemic, I was seeing a lot of spaghetti
being thrown against a wall, people really scrambling to get virtual learning
infrastructures up and running
and experimenting a lot with different tools and different texts,
seeing the challenges and opportunities that those provided
and I think that spaghetti approach is fine for a crisis mode,
but I'm still waiting for this pandemic to prompt a sort of fundamental rethinking
and sort of really an opportunity to realign
what it means to include technology in a thoughtful way
and to attend to issues of equity and justice within that.
So my own vision for CSS education has been expanded
even as my core commitments haven't changed.
So I wouldn't have ever thought of myself as really a sex
education booster per say.
I think my main drive has always been to see a world where young people are using,
creating and critiquing technology for reasons
like furthering their own goals, reaching their own potential, becoming
active participants, becoming change agents in the world,
and like maybe sex education is part of the way we get there.
But also there's
so many other types of education that can kind of lead us to that vision.
And so right, I've been thinking a lot about sort of
how we build as a seaside community, coalitions with people who think
about other kinds of technology education because it's all needed, right?
Digital literacies, digital citizenship, education, tech information
literacy, media literacy, algorithmic literacy, civic tech.
There are so many realms.
CC Education is like part of this larger umbrella.
And so I've been thinking about like, why is the secret sauce the
why isn't the secret sauce kind of all for all of us from all and, you know,
perhaps even there's a recognition of that I think about in New York State,
the standards came out recently and they combined the
some digital literacy standards and one and, you know,
I don't know if that's a good impetus for us to think more together,
but I think that's where I want to head in the future.
And I would hope that the field isn't headed towards more siloing, though
it could if we just think about things like broadening participation in Apex,
if that's our sole indicator or like teaching kids to code right?
So I think before we had a really broad sense of what this was for.
And now I'm like, not only do I have a broad sense of what
this is for, but I have a broad sense of what technology,
education, computing space, in a more general sense could be.
So yeah, let's dive deeper into some of those.
So like one of the things
that I was trying to reframe as like a positive that came out of COVID
was we have this opportunity to kind of reset
how we've been doing things and break up some of the norms
that have been going on in the classroom when it's shifted to virtual.
But many educators that I spoke with were
trying to apply what they're doing in the classroom just in a remote context.
And then when they went back into the classroom,
it was just resuming business as usual as much as possible, given
different COVID restrictions and whatnot.
But if you were to, like, be able to wave like a magic wand and engage in this
like fundamental rethinking of how to use technology or engage with CSE,
like what would you do for the field at large or what would you recommend?
I guess there's a lot of different recommendations
for people at different levels.
Like these are such systems questions as much as they are like, What would I do?
Like I feel like in being in classrooms, coming back
after the pandemic, teachers are overwhelmed.
So giving them one more thing to do and think about seems like,
you know, it's like, oh, yeah, we just need, you know,
so that all teachers can learn how to use technology more holistically.
Like, that would be great.
But, you know, I'm seeing firsthand the stress
and pressure that people are under, the shortages, right?
I think so much of these are system wide questions.
As much as they are like what teachers can do in their classrooms,
teachers are doing what they know how to do and what they can do
given bandwidth, given the circumstances that they're in.
So I would want to see a kind of collaboration between
a grassroots and a policy level
to support teachers to do that kind of thinking,
because it just can't happen in a status quo scenario.
Like if I could wave the magic wand, it would have been that
this year would have been a year of like passion related projects and growth
and kind of like not a year for trying to quote unquote
remediate learning loss, which I think is so much of
what the rhetoric became was like, How do we make up for lost time?
It's like time wasn't lost.
Time went on, people grew, people changed.
People are resilient. People are struggling.
But making things happen, like what would it mean to support students
to get in touch with a passion of theirs, to try something new, to do more art,
to do more music, to do more creative projects,
and to just kind of give everyone like you got to do the third grade over again.
It's third grade plus.
I think we're just going to spend some time healing, and that could be
a great platform for them thinking about this sort of more radical reorientation.
But that's me on my soapbox.
I don't know.
What do you think? Yeah, no, that definitely resonates.
It would have been nice if we would have been able
to dive more into passions like I've mentioned many times on
the podcast, the curriculum that I create and the way that I ran my class was
is all that interest driven learning like I wanted kids to explore their interests
and the medium that they happen to do it through in my class
was through coding, and that's because that's what the class was about.
But it was all about for them.
Oh, I'm really into sports, so I'm going to spark sports through code
or Oh, I'm really into music, I'm going to code to music, etc.
I wish we had more of that.
But your mention of like the focusing on learning loss,
one of the things that just baffle me was people referring
to kids these days as like the Lost generation because of COVID.
And just like that is so offensive on so many ways and it's just like it's ignorant
from like the literal definition of just like you don't understand
how people learn and like, kids are learning a lot of things right now.
Some of what not to do with seeing like
parents and guardians being burned out from working too much, etc., etc.,
Even if they took like
a whole five years off, like they would still be learning things
and they'd still have the opportunity to continue learning
when they went back into like a formalized school.
But that also is like, okay, kids don't just learn in formalized context.
Often they will spend more time learning outside of formalized context.
So why are we saying that this is a lost generation of learners?
Like that's just that's not right.
Yeah, a lot of what you're saying really resonates with me and I know
has resonated with folks who I work with on the project that I mentioned before.
We've been talking a lot about that, like how do we reframe that deficit thinking
which is taking place and has taken place and now just, just getting re inscribed.
I'm wondering
if we can dive into another thing that I have voiced a few times on here,
and I know it's controversial for some and I mean this respect for everyone
in the field who is very passionate about sex education, like, yeah, it's great.
I think everyone should have the opportunity to learn it,
but I don't think any subject area should be mandatory for anyone.
And I honestly don't understand why this is such this dominant thing.
And then computational thinking in particular,
like one of the things I've been grappling with a lot lately is the way that I hear
people talk about computational thinking positions, other disciplines
as like a subservient relationship or as like lesser
than like one that I heard and I've heard many times is people saying, Oh, well,
you can use computational thinking to like create an algorithm for a song.
Lyrics.
Okay, Well, as somebody with multiple degrees in music education,
I don't know anyone who's done that for like the majority of their career,
maybe for some like cell theory, for some contemporary music,
you might actually literally create an algorithm.
But in general, when you're composing music, you're focusing more on expression
and like how you are communicating to other people or express yourself
rather than focusing on whether or not you're using a loop to repeat a lyric.
Multiple times like that, to me is kind of a reductionist approach
when it comes to looking at other areas and quite frankly, at positions
like other subject areas as a deficit as saying, Oh, well,
the way that you've been thinking for thousands of years
and have used to do this like discipline, well, that's not cool.
You should really check out this computational
thinking thing we're teaching you how to do, thinking in a new way
without any regard to ways that you've actually been thinking within the field.
I don't know if that resonates or you disagree or I think it does.
I've had this conversation a lot with I don't know if you've had him
on the podcast before, but on does not yet.
And I'm sure if you do have him on the podcast, he'll have brilliant things
to say about this question because we've talked about it at length
because he works really hard to support teachers in Michigan and New York City
and all of our to integrate computational thinking into their practice.
And we've talked a lot about how it gets positioned relative
to not just other disciplines, but students practices and their communities
practices, their communities literacies, their own sense making.
And I agree with you that we could
really run the risk of saying we have the secret sauce.
It's like, No, no, it's one of many different ways of thinking
that might be useful to solve different kinds of problems.
And it's not always the right set of strategies to bring to a problem.
So I'm definitely open to kind of exploring the limits and realm of where
computational thinking can support students and open up doors for them.
This is what I sort of mean
about needing to like broaden the scope of what we mean when we say
computer science or digital literacy or like there's so many.
We just attend to the sort of intersections
and the ways that these forms of thinking play around with each other.
They're not bounded objects in the ways that we talk about
them, like computational thinking over here and historical
thinking over their artistic thinking over their right.
And I think that's why on our project, we've moved towards
a theoretical perspective rooted in the idea of syncretism.
I think you had sort of pulled this out on our project website
as something for us to discuss more in depth.
But there's an amazing thinker learning scientist Chris Gutierrez
out of University of Berkeley, and we've been really inspired
by a paper that she wrote about Syncretic Literacies.
And the idea there is that rather than think about practices
in isolation or the boundaries and borders between them, we think about
when we juxtapose different practices, different literacies together, always
there are new tensions and new sparks, and we can even kind of break down
the hierarchies that exist between these different kinds
of forms and practices by thinking critically.
So it's not about like we're going to use students practices
to get them to this thing we call this where is the valued practice?
And students ideas and practices are less then it's that what happens
when you bring and you equally value or you consider the tensions as you value,
or try to value students ways of knowing which might be marginalized
in some spaces and what school disciplines are.
And what school disciplines value.
And when those things come together, new things happen.
And so we've tried to use that as a guiding
principle for our project and curriculum design.
And I can tell you about what some of those examples
have looked like of what we think sort of syncretic pedagogy can mean.
But I think that might help us get away from this notion
that we always have to be continually moving towards some kind of standard,
whether that's an external flows like computational
thinking, capital C capital T, or if it's C.
S, or if it's even just like English or history, right?
There are no master narratives here.
So I wonder if you could elaborate a little more on what you're mentioning.
So like, if I were a K-12 practitioner, I might be wondering,
okay, what am I doing that might be problematic
that's related to this and then what could I do differently
as a result of, like, better understanding what you're saying?
Sure.
So I'm going to do a critique of code.org because it's
an easy thing to critique and I don't know the curriculum these days.
So I should also give that as the caveat.
I'm thinking about some of the curriculum
they were doing a couple of years ago with the puzzles where it was like
Angry Birds and Elsa in order to teach you about loops and variable.
So that an example of like we're going to use what, you know,
as a hook to get you to this value thing that we think is value.
We're going to use the cartoon characters that we know you have experience with
to teach you about loops and variables.
So that to me is problematic for a couple of reasons.
One, the corporate element,
which is, you know, like free advertising for various companies.
Also, I think on another level it's sort of treating students
interests and engagement as a vehicle for something else
rather than as a interesting point of explorer vision in and of itself.
On our project, we have a curricular design that we supported.
We worked with a teacher on a research practice partnership to create,
and this is a teacher
who's out of a neighborhood in New York City called Washington
Heights, which is a really multilingual neighborhood.
A lot of students from the Caribbean, from the Dominican Republic,
from Latin America, but also the Middle East and Northern Africa,
Eastern and Western Africa as well.
And in her curriculum,
she had to cover things in science like water cycles and weather.
We actually overheard her students talking about Hurricane Maria.
So it was in 2017 and they were just sort of spontaneous
mentioning this idea had come up in their news.
Maybe it was something their families were talking about.
And so we thought, Oh, why don't we design a computing unit
that really takes students conversation about these things seriously?
And so we had them do things like talk to their family members about
strong storms that they lived through and then found an activist
who is working to support Puerto Rico after the devastation from the hurricane.
And they interview that person about what they were doing.
And then we had them use scratch
to create models that showed the impacts of the hurricane.
So they were coding in order to have a deeper conversation
about this hurricane, about its impact, and then got a chance to actually share
that with some local folks
in New York City who work for the utility company, who are part
of the American Association of Latinos in STEM and they came in and they learned
about what the students had coded and what they'd created
and their ideas about how to support Puerto Rico.
Right.
So it was code embedded in a larger conversation to kind of deepen and widen
the scope using what students brought to the table as the jumping off point.
So not as like we know coding is the ultimate goal.
So everything you just said definitely resonates
with like my own approach in the classroom and even with what I'm doing
with the curriculum at boot up.
But I'm curious how you respond to this.
I've heard some especially new to see educators who might hear
something like this and go, Yeah, but code.org, I can just pick up and run with.
It's easier for me to do.
I don't have to create custom projects and lessons and whatnot.
I have my own set of responses that I've given previously,
but I'm curious what you would say to somebody who might say that I hear them.
I know the kind of stress and pressure teachers are under, and sometimes that
it might be an entry point.
But I would also say like, don't stop there in terms of, well, okay,
what can you do with code.org if you want to use this package thing?
How do we use it in a way that's going to like support and advance
and celebrate and, you know, sustain students cultural practices, interests.
And I think like hacking the tool,
there's a way to like, create something from scratch like we did
in the Hurricane Maria unit or that you're saying that you're doing.
But there's that kind of use modify create spectrum.
So there's use on one side, which is I'm just going to do the code.org
curriculum as it's written and then there's design on the other side.
I'm going to create something totally new,
but there's that modified space in the middle,
which I think could be really something that teachers can explore,
like in doing this code.org, you know, asking students
how you would like, change this program, What are the things that Code.org
doesn't let you do that you wish you could do?
Or, you know, having that conversation about the corporate
like nature of this is why do we think that Elsa is here?
Why do we think that Angry Birds is here?
What characters would you want to see here?
You know who's behind this, Like treating these things a little bit more as text?
I'm always going to say this because I have a background as a literacy teacher,
and I'm now teaching literacy instruction to teachers,
like really embedding what we're doing in these broader questions
of like talking with a text, talking around a text, talking about a text.
So much can be done even just with the packaged stuff that's off the shelf
to take it one step further, make deeper connections with your students.
That would be something
I would ask a teacher who's interested in sort of starting small
or starting with what is available, how do you help teachers see that?
Like when I used to teach undergrad classes,
undergrads more so than the master's students, had this tendency of seeing
a lesson or a curricular unit or whatever and go, Oh, I need to go through this
as if it were a script.
But then the more experience you I'm in the classroom,
you see it more as like a launch pad or as a set of ideas
that you can modify or even create your own based off of some of those ideas.
So how do you teach that to get to that point where they can see,
Oh, I don't have to follow this like verbatim.
I'm definitely in that process now.
So if you have any ideas, I would love to hear about it.
We're doing something with the teachers who I work with, I think ST this year
to support them in learning how to design lessons.
The director of the T cell program
and then
I sat with this question for a while because I'm like always ready to just go
straight in like, let's have the teachers design their own thing.
And he was like, Slow down.
Let's start with having them learn to internalize someone else's vision,
to see what that feels like, to see like what
it feels like to go through a lesson step by step by step
and ask critical questions about it to, like, really make something your own.
Then to modify it and think about all the values you have.
We expose our backstreet students to lots of frameworks, whether it's Goldi
Mohammed's framework, historically responsive instruction.
I'm trying to remember her amazing framework,
but there's five different kind of literacy pursuits.
She talks about joy and criticality, intellect
and skills and identity.
And so we'll expose our students to a framework like that and then say,
you know, how might you modify what you're seeing here to amp up the joy
or amp up the criticality and, you know, to engage
in some potentially collaborative sense making and co-design.
So we've only done the first step, which is the internalizing.
And so hopefully
I would have more to say to you after we sort of support them with that
next two, which would be around the modifying and then the sort of creation,
so supporting teachers to like be in a community of learners
where you can experiment and play around with and see a lesson plan.
Is something mutable?
Yeah, like that.
One of the things that we did with the undergrads in a practicum class
was they had to figure out how to modify lessons
based off of randomized 504 is that they were given individualized
education plans or five or four plans, depending on where you're at.
They're called different things,
basically having to have students think through, Oh,
if I had a student who is not neurotypical or who had various disabilities
or different mobility things to consider, how would I modify this lesson?
And that was a way to kind of get them to think beyond,
but also just engaging in discussions of, well, what if, like what happens
if your computers are not working that day?
Or what happens if you only have one device
for every four students, like how would you change things, etc.?
And like setting around like real world problems, Like that was a way
to help them to envision other possibilities outside of what was written.
I love that.
And also thinking about the assets that your students bring.
Like when I was saying about this Hurricane Maria situation,
like it really started because we were listening to students,
but we also had in mind the seventh grade curriculum.
And we also had in mind the idea of computing as a powerful tool.
And so kind of thinking with a couple of constraints
can sort of bring forth like new possibilities.
So our project sees it as these like three intersecting circles
that guide us when we're planning units.
So we think about the community literacies,
like the ways of reading, writing, creating that exist in students
worlds that they might learn from their friends or families and beyond.
And then we think about computing communities
like not just Google engineers, but all the different kinds of people
who use computing to do things and the literacies that they exercise.
And then the third circle is those disciplinary literacies.
So the ways that we read, write, create that are sort of
within these disciplinary communities like science
or what it means to be a mathematician or a scholar of different kinds.
So when you bring all those three things into conversation,
that's where the Syncretic Literacies and project idea is going to come about.
And the other question
that our project asks a lot is what conversation is code a part of?
What is the conversation that we're starting where code is involved?
And I think that these have been generative questions and frameworks
for at least some of the teachers that we've worked with.
We hosted a professional learning community
with some of them over the summer, and I think some of them came away saying
like, Well, yeah, this was actually a useful way for me to think about
making stronger connections to my kids and what they bring
and what their communities bring. Yeah, I like that.
Even framing the idea, like going back to the first point of like, well,
how do you modify these or help people modify them?
Like even having the conversation of, look, if you teach in an elective class,
you can assume buy in for the most part for like probably 90% of your kids.
They're likely interested in the subject area because they elected to take that.
But if kids are mandated to take this, you can't assume that buy in.
So what happens if you're teaching a unit and the kids just aren't interested
in that subject at all?
How would you modify it
if they were more interested in other subject areas, A, B or C, etc.?
I mean, my initial thought about that is to really incorporate opportunities
for choice and sort of some of the ways
that you were saying, like, you know, there's a framework
for the kind of basic ideas and the ways that the different kinds
of skills or experiences that everyone will have.
And then there's the directions that each individual can kind of take their work.
So I know that that idea of choice has helped us where it's like
one of our other units uses the idea of the telenovela
like the Spanish soap opera, as an analogy for thinking
about Intro to Scratch and not all kids in the class where we work.
Like like Telenovela, but they all knew what they were,
and we'd sort of heard from the teachers like what?
You know,
usually when you introduce scratch, you might use the analogy of a play
and the teacher said,
Well, my kids don't really watch plays, but they do watch telenovelas.
So we knew all of them would at least be familiar with it.
But then in giving the students the opportunity
to then remix our telenovela to be however they wanted,
but just including
some of those telenovela conventions like high drama or whatever,
like they made their telenovela take place at a rock club or at a,
you know, like they're able to kind of change up the premise
and the ways that they can, but
still guiding students to have initial experiences that everyone can share.
And make sense of together.
I wonder if we could zoom out to one of the larger
things that you mentioned earlier on in our conversation.
So you mentioned there's this tendency
for like some deficit mindsets or frameworks that have been going on.
I'm wondering how that deficit mindset or ways of thinking kind of relates
to the conversations around bilingual and multilingual students.
I had to go back into the history for my Ph.D.
to kind of think through a lot of this, and I think going to the history
can really help on this conversation.
There are deficit views really baked into our education systems
since the early days of our education systems around
by multilingual students, especially those who are racialized.
And, you know, we see evidence of that in the boarding schools
that Native children were sent to, where they're not just their languages,
but ways of being were stripped from them and they were forced to assimilate
in violent ways.
And, you know, there's a lot of reckoning around some of those institutions
that have been happening and also not enough at the same time.
So there's those ways that the deficit mindset has been
inculcated from a beginning stands there.
These assimilate of kind of English only policies around schooling
for immigrant children and erasure of black language
and black languages and black people from the education system.
So that sort of comes from our history
as an American society, from the colonial days.
So we'll see that deficit model continues and is sort of reproduced
in different ways.
Even as we resist that, we can think about the civil rights era
and struggles that the Puerto Rican community in New York
took, the Chinese-American community in San Francisco took, and through those,
they earned the right to educate their young people bilingually.
And so there's sort of a lot of hard fought victories
to reframe away from a deficit mindset.
But the right to do that is also periodically attacked
like we had an office
of bilingual education in this country at a federal level for a long time.
And then with No Child Left Behind, it was erased and turned
into the Office of English Acquisition.
A lot of this is covered in the research of Ofelia Garcia
was one of my dissertation committee members
and just an incredible leader in the space of supporting emerging bilinguals.
So there's all this struggle,
there's all of this history, but still in most states,
making annual yearly progress, write AYP as schools for immersion bilingual is
the goal is still English, and that's still sort of the core
metric upon which schools and students are evaluated.
So that has an underlying deficit mindset, like it doesn't recognize
that these young people
are not just English learners, they're by a multilingual people.
They have complex language, repertoires and identities and ways of knowing
and being in the world.
So that deficit view is still kind of with us
in a lot of respects, especially at a policy level and a lot of what
teachers and schools, you know, they have to grapple with that
even if they have views that say we want to support our learners,
to recognize their multilingualism and support them in building towards that.
So much to unpack there.
So like one way that I kind of relate to it is like I eventually want to live in
Japan down the road, so I'm slowly learning Japanese,
but it doesn't mean that I need to erase everything I said.
I understand you're my English to move to another location,
so my goal is to still learn the language without giving up
who I am in the process of it.
But with what you're saying, like there's often that tendency of like
you have the at home languages and then the academic languages that go on.
So like having lived in Arizona my whole life, there's this interesting
overt or at the very least undercurrent
of racism towards Hispanic
people in Arizona, especially closer to the border that you get.
What I find really fascinating is that in the low socioeconomic schools
that I've taught at or know about bilingual ism or multilingualism
is frowned upon.
Like it's no, you need to just focus on English.
But then when you go to the high socioeconomic schools, it's desired.
It's suddenly, oh, well, you can learn multiple languages,
you can have dual language here.
And it's weird, like how it's in the same location,
like some of those schools are literally just a few miles away from each other.
And yet it's like frowned upon in one community
to be able to speak multiple languages and then another.
It's like it's an asset. Absolutely.
A lot of these ideas are unpacked in some of the research of Nelson
Flores and Jonathan Prosser.
They have this concept that they work with called Ratio Linguistic Ideologies,
which sort of point out like the fact that the same linguistic practice
coming out of bodies that are racialized in different ways.
If you are a racialized person, your language practices
are going to be viewed as deficient no matter what they are.
So your bilingualism is going to be, like you said, denigrated,
whereas the bilingualism of a white middle class person will be celebrated.
So I think that partly why you can't disentangle
language from race, language from class language from, you know,
any of these other forms of oppression that shape our school systems.
And I guess in reflecting on
what that means for our schools, it's about being able to notice, like
when people are being held to these different standards
and then what can we do about it?
Because it's one thing to identify something, but then in this another to ask
how do we address this thing that we've problematize?
Often there's these conversations, especially around DTI work,
where it's just conversations and then what are the actions
that actually come from that?
But then when there is like any kind of action, then there's this like pushback,
which like with the critical race theory being conflated
with like culturally responsive teaching and then all the pushback that's been
going on with that, it's been fascinating trying to figure out, well,
how do we engage in dialog like thinking from like agrarian, like lens
with people who are inherently against having a conversation around this thing
because potentially it's giving up power that they know that they have.
And I know what to do. It's just me thinking out loud.
Yeah, I don't know if I have an answer to that because it's
the ongoing work of continually pushing institutions and from self to.
Yeah, I'm curious if you want to unpack what trans language is.
I have to admit that when we first spoke on the last podcast that we did together,
when I was doing some research, like looking into your background
and Rafa's background, it's like, I don't know what this thing is.
And so when I looked into it, I was like, Oh, this is interesting.
I'm curious if you could unpack what it is
and like how that concept has kind of informed your own teaching.
Sure.
So you a moment ago were talking about how there's this separation between like
what is quote unquote academic language and what is quote unquote school language.
And I think trans language
being the intervention that it makes is to say that our language practices,
or especially the language practices of bilinguals,
especially the language practices that have been marginalized,
they don't so easily
fit into those categories and that these categories are social constructs.
They're not linguistic constructs per se.
Like if you were to ask someone what is academic language,
they'll say, Oh, it's language that we use in school.
Like, that's a circular argument, right?
And who's to say that I can't bring, you know, some kind of language
that wouldn't
be considered school ish into school and then all of a sudden that's academic.
So the categories that we put on language are social constructs,
and trans language recognizes that.
And it's defined by the idea that people,
especially bilinguals, use their full language repertoires
without regard to those name languages all the time,
and that the language practices of people are complex and dynamic and fluid.
And then there's the idea of trans language in pedagogy,
which builds on that idea by encouraging teachers to welcome
and build on all of those diverse language resources of their students.
Trans language can be a really useful way to think
about what's happening in your classroom from an asset based perspective.
Instead of seeing a student who might be using, let's say,
English and Spanish in the same sentence, you might look at that and you would say,
Oh, the student is code switching and it's diluting English
and it's diluting Spanish, and it's some kind of mix of the two.
And we've got to help the student keep them separate.
They don't belong together.
Right. That's sort of a way to think about what a student is doing.
That is a code switching.
Or you could say, no, these language categories are social constructs
and I'm going to look at it
from the perspective of the learner who's using all what they know,
because they're embedded in a community of people who use language that way
to make meaning, to express themselves.
And so in that way, it takes the learner
and their community at the center and not center the languages.
So in our pedagogy, instead of saying I teach language, you would say,
I teach children, I teach bilingual people.
Yeah, I just had a thought, like
when you were mentioning like speaking two languages in the same sentence.
Like, it's fascinating that on one side of the coin
it's frowned upon in the context that you mentioned.
But then on the other side of the coin, I can almost guarantee you
that that person who might say that also uses like words,
like schadenfreude when engaging in a conversation.
It's like, wait, you're borrowing words from other languages.
You know, Schadenfreude is not an English term, right? Totally.
And that's back to that racial
linguistic piece and the sort of power implications of how language is used,
which I think is really embedded in the idea of trans language as well.
We're trying to dismantle these linguistic hierarchies
by highlighting the inherent fluidity of language, period.
Yeah, like that.
And if anyone is really interested in this, we talked about this
a little bit from a different perspective
in a conversation that I had with Brian Brown.
So I'll include links to that in the show notes.
It's interesting stuff that I like to nerd out on.
Oh, that's great.
And also, if people want to learn more about trans languages, the work of Ofelia
Garcia, who I mentioned earlier, has a ton about trans language,
its definitions, where it's come from, any of her articles, any of her books.
And then there are tons of people who've been thinking about trans languages
within applied linguistics, education and beyond.
So a quick Google Scholar search will unearth a lot.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Does your work also include exploration of language acquisition
or is that like separate from what you are interested in research?
Schweizer I would say my teaching is a lot about language development,
supporting these teachers to support students, to develop language English,
but also in a bilingual context. And that was where
my professional experience was with like bilingual education.
But I think now in thinking about education, there's a role
for language acquisition or language development to be played with in a C.
S context.
But I think oftentimes when we think about emergent bilinguals,
language is the first thing we think about like, oh,
let's say a teacher gets a lesson plan and oh,
how do I modify this for my English language learners, quote unquote.
And they'll say it's like language is the answer.
We need to put more vocabulary.
We need to put grammatical interventions within what we do in C.
S, which I think, you know, could be part of it.
It's great to teach language and content together.
It can be really an impactful practice.
But we also want to recognize, like our immersion bilinguals
are full students who have a lot of purposes and goals
beyond just language development for what they do with X.
And so part of the answer is coming up
with language goals and thinking about language goals intentionally within a C.
S framework.
But it's also about supporting students to express themselves in multiple ways,
including with code.
And that's where our project has been thinking a lot about the relationships
between trans languages and computer science education.
The ways that our languages
and our language practices can become tools for learning C.
S, and then the ways that we can sort of have conversations with a computer
through a computer or about a computer.
So you mentioned trans languishing pedagogies,
but I've also seen that you're also interested in apprenticeship.
Where do those align or diverge from each other?
And like how does that apprenticeship fit within it?
Like, are we talking about
like leaving Wenger's version of apprenticeship model
or are we talking about something different?
I bet you're referring to the article that I wrote a few years ago with Judith
Perry that was like about
sort of supporting students who are doing location based game design
and then apprenticing them into that space.
I feel like I have a lot of interest because I've lived a lot of different
professional experiences, but I was before I went back to graduate school
to think about computer science and emerging bilinguals.
I was an after school program leader and sort of facilitator
of these digital media youth programs all over New York City.
We wanted to engage students in these really exciting novel
tech projects, like creating location based games that were focused on history
or having them create video games and scratch about global issues.
So was a really innovative, exciting program.
But whenever you have sort of limited time and a really ambitious idea,
you need to think about scaffolding and doing the location based game
design work, right?
That involves understanding place, it involves understanding
coding, it involves creating a story, it involves
marrying story and place and mechanics in interesting ways.
And so that's novel and complex for like a teenager, for anyone.
So with Judy Perry, we thought a lot about what roles can adults
play in the sort of innovative work that young people do and.
We were looking at Kirchner's framework for he sort of has this
like the idea of joint work facilitators and young people working together
to achieve some common goal where young people aren't necessarily
like their hands aren't held through the process.
It's kind of like all hands on deck.
Everybody do the work and we're doing it together.
And that's one model and then there's the model of sort
of a more hands off where the youth are really facilitating everything.
And that also has its pros and cons like youth might take on leadership positions
if they're encouraged to kind of go in their own directions,
but then they might not get as much practice with like what we would call like
expert practices in a domain because they're novices
and then you've got this sort of middle ground, which is the apprenticeship, where
you're paying attention to the ways in which joint work might occur
in a way that supports
the young person's development and initiation into a practice.
So we were playing around with this theory as we were creating these location
based games with young people around New York City and sort of landed on like,
what does apprenticeship look like, What does it mean to scaffold?
What are the steps that adults can do to make youth lives easier and more exciting?
And so those questions of structure and agency have always been with me
in my teaching, like how much am I giving and how much are they constructing
on their own That's like just continual continually on my mind.
And that article helped me kind of crystallize some of that.
It's related to trans language
and to the work we do in classrooms of emergent bilinguals
because there's a kind of pigskin skin angle to a lot of this.
But yeah, it's sort of from a different life.
The apprenticeship work.
Yeah, No, I appreciate that conversation.
One of the things I'd like to think through
is like the antithesis as something that I really agree with.
So like I'm a huge fan of project based learning.
I like to think through, well, when would I not do project based learning?
So like with what you're saying with the joint work totally resonates.
Reminds me a lot of the approaches that I was using in the classroom.
But when would you not use joint work in the classroom?
Sort of depends on your goals.
I think the way that joint work was proposed is a Kirshner article from 26,
the way that he talks about joint
work in that article is imagine that there's some kind of complex
political campaign work and, you know, it's all hands on deck.
And like youth are learning as they go.
And that's helpful
because the work gets done and it gets done in a sort of an expert way.
But then the youth might not be engaging in many exciting opportunities,
like they might just be handing out fliers if you're not careful.
Some youth who might have a real energetic spirit and a kind of preparation
might dive right in and fit really well and just like get in where they fit in.
But then some youth maybe fall
to the wayside because they don't have as much of that preparation or support.
So other models might be needed if that's part of your goal.
So if your goal isn't just we need to get the campaign done
and the goal is also around youth development,
then you need a little bit of that middle ground, which is not to say that
youth can't come away from a joint work experience learning a ton.
It just means like, what are your priorities?
So yeah, the apprenticeship approach or the sort of facilitation approach,
it depends what you're out for.
Is it about we need to get this campaign done or is the focus,
Let's have these youth come away with some new experiences of learning
and maybe the product suffers a little bit like the process over product.
And this is why I love that question and asking it is because, like it
gets at the nuances of it.
There's a tendency, especially with new educators like undergrads
and whatnot, like
when they
see an idea or a theory, they think that's the only thing that you should do.
And there's no other framework or perspective to consider or context.
So I appreciate that.
So you also have a professional background that draws from many different sources
and experiences and whatnot, and it's something that I have recommended
on this podcast and even like early career scholars and new educators is right
outside of your field or your domain because you will learn so much
that can be applied to it in ways that you would never have considered.
I'm curious how would you recommend
people step outside of that familiar
discourse that they might be aware of and they don't know,
Oh, I can learn from A, B, and C that I hadn't considered.
I guess a lot of my learning comes through communities
that I try to affiliate with outside of work.
So I have a couple of book clubs that I'm in.
One is related to the idea of female identifying writers writing about cities.
So I was an urban studies major in college.
It's always been an interest of mine.
And now I
in more firmly in the world of education, but I'm also in the world
of urban education.
And so understanding sort of like the dynamics of city
histories, migration, you know, architecture,
design, like all of those things are still relevant in some ways.
But I also I'm just
like a geek on those things and oh, sometimes they wind up being relevant.
So I think the book clubs really help and
I listen to a lot of also like podcasts that are outside of what I do.
I actually don't listen to any podcasts, sorry, Daryn,
on education, because I'm like, I think about this all day.
I want to just turn my brain off or think about things in another way.
And so I tend to listen to podcasts
that are like story driven or design driven or comedy driven.
And I think that also leads to, like you said, serendipitous moments.
So it's kind of like in the process of trying to turn my brain off,
I wind up turning it on in a different way and then connections get made.
Yeah, a good point.
There have been a couple of other guests
that have mentioned similar things, like a Dan Schneider in particular.
That interview stands out as like he shifts from one thing to another.
It's just it's changing his focus
and it kind of like allows him to reset like, so
if his day gig is working in the school, then he goes home
and he learn something else and that allows him to reset.
So he's ready to come back the next day. Oh, I like that.
That's great.
And it also keeps the boundaries.
I think teaching and I'm saying this
as much to myself as to anyone out there, like teaching can become
an all consuming enterprise because really you can never stop learning.
You can never stop improving what you do.
There's always another angle, there's always another way of doing something.
And if you're not careful, like I said, just it can become all consuming.
So being able to say no, when I get home, I'm focusing on this other thing.
It's helpful for your own sanity, but it's also helpful for you to like,
grow and change and look at things from other perspectives.
Yeah, I'm wondering if you can expand upon that more like the burnout rate is high
among educators, like historically, but it's even higher now because of
what's been going on this last year and a half.
So like, how have you tried to maintain those boundaries when it might be harder
working from home, especially if you're like in, let's say, a studio apartment?
It's not like you have an office space dedicated to going there
that you're living in your leisure and workspace simultaneously.
So how do you try and work through that?
Every time I think I have balance or I've reached a kind of like
optimal boundary setting,
something changes that resets and then I have to go back and do it again.
So I started this new job,
I think straight, which has been exhilarating
and really exciting, but also really challenging.
Any time you teach something new for the first time,
just getting your head around the course, the content, the curriculum,
like the directions that you're going, it's overwhelming.
So it's like, Wait, how am I living my first year teaching again?
But I'm not living my first year teaching again.
I think I have many more boundaries from that time, but now I do actually
have a separate space.
I'm and not having the situation that you mentioned, like
I can come to an office, I can work here and then I can go home
and sort of make a mental separation between those two locations can help.
And then just knowing, like I try to plan activities and things that are outside
so that I purposely give myself a time to quit and you know,
those help a having people accountability partners like, you know, in my family
or my boyfriend to say did you eat today like kind of those reminders
of like you're in this grind but you're not too firmly in it.
And it's really tough.
But I think it's also that feeling of like, I will come out the other side
of this year and then hopefully come away with even more strategies
for that balance in the next year when things are a little bit more stable.
Yeah, one of the things that you mentioned with like starting a new position
and teaching a new class, like it feels like going back to the first year.
There was an article I read several years ago and I forgot
who wrote it, but they basically found that when an experienced educator
who has worked in a single situation for an extended period of time
when they moved to a new location, like a new district or a new school,
they performed at the level of a novice who was also moving into it,
even though they may have had like 20 years experience
because it was a new context, like figuring out new dynamics
and communities, etc., like they performed at that level.
Granite They probably were able to like accelerate
how quickly they were to like regain that feeling of, Oh, this is what I like
to be an experienced educator.
But yeah, that's interesting how much the context can impact.
Like what it feels like moving into a new environment, teaching it.
Oh yeah.
I mean, you don't know what you don't know when you move to somewhere new.
And so like, even just from three months ago, I was like, Oh, wow,
I wish we had done it differently.
I wish I had done like the career structured the course in this way, but
I was just sort of throwing out my first best effort.
And it's it's only through iteration that these things get stronger.
So yeah, and I'm lucky to be in a really supportive environment
at the college where I am.
They spend a lot of time on faculty development meetings
with like really generative feedback meetings and observations and,
you know, I think that helps a lot and having a pretty decent class size
like there are a lot of things that institutions can do to support teachers
not burning out
because I think it's not just like on the individual to guard against burnout,
it's also on the institution to say, you know, what's your workload?
And like, what are we expecting out of people?
And, you know, how is our health insurance policy and all of that.
So it's sort of could be a joy to the team effort.
And paying special attention to populations
that get marginalized in our institutions is even more important.
Yeah, that's a really important point, especially among academics.
Like I have several friends who are at Research One institutions
which people aren't familiar with that
it's like the highest output of research, like you might have the majority
of your contract hours dedicated to conducting research.
And there's only one friend that I can think of who actually
has like a good work life balance, if you want to think of that way.
And it's because the university prioritizes
it and it's the only university that's in one that I know of that like mandates
that new professors go through this training to figure out
how to maintain that balance while having a high research output.
So it's interesting.
Wow. And I would hope
that they set up a structure. So it's because it's like,
oh, you can give me a course and teach me how to do it.
But like, I would also hope that they have a good vacation
policy and a good leave policy or all of that supports it.
That's great and a good incentive policy, or especially in the academic world.
Yet when I've spoken to them like, would you ever consider leaving?
It's like even if you were making higher pay, like it's just the amount of support
that you have here is I've never heard of it
anywhere else at an hour, one in particular.
So they're planning out and sticking around. That's great.
You mentioned iterating on your own abilities.
How with the classroom, maybe the structure,
but how do you do that broadly speaking?
So like for me, I engage in reflection every morning and afternoon or evening,
rather like I go into the spreadsheet where I just like
go through these questions or ask myself, How did I do with this?
How is my anxiety today?
What could I do differently tomorrow, etc.
And I'm constantly trying to figure out like ways to just do subtle
improvements and iterate over time.
I'm curious how do you try and do something like that?
So that's a really,
really good question and it's great to hear about your processes.
I have some informal ways I do it like I have a commute now,
and so a lot of my thinking about how the class went
will often happen on the way home of just how that go.
And, you know, I kind of know my tendencies when I'm teaching.
I have like an overloading issue.
I think that I can get too much done in one small time
period and know that chunking up what I have to do
and really kind of providing enough time for each task is important.
So sort of like having some reflective moments to think about that.
And then as I said before, I'm really lucky to be an institution
where people will give you that feedback and I'll also keep a document
between semesters.
So I think, you know, the crash of a semester is real
and it can be hard to iterate from class to class.
So if I can't, I'll just I'll jot down on that assignment
task sheet that I have in my drive, like next year, do this
next time you teach this, change it up like this so they don't forget.
Or when I'm grading, I'll notice.
Oh wow, all the students had trouble with this or the rubric really
didn't make sense, so I'll leave myself little clues because I think the iteration
tends to happen the next time I teach it and I'll integrate those learnings.
But there is something like if I think that it's really important,
like this week,
I had to support the teachers to learn how to administer
a certain kind of reading assessment and to think critically about it.
And in thinking about it with my chair, it was like, Oh,
you know, I don't think they really got this.
And so I spent a bunch of time creating a little video
to help kind of like guide them through the aspects that I thought were thinner.
So there's an attempt to do it, but then you run the risk of the burnout
if you're constantly iterating the semester and changing things up
and also you might wind up confusing students
like, Wait, didn't you say we should do that?
So yeah, but that wasn't working.
So do this now, you know,
right?
Yeah, that response honestly reminds me a lot of conversation with Amy Co.
So if people haven't listened to that, they should check out that interview.
It was definitely a good one.
She has similar practices where she like write notes like,
Oh, this is what worked well.
This isn't what didn't work well, because sometimes it might be up to two years
in higher ed before you teach the same class again.
It depending on what kind of cycle it's on.
So can be a while.
You forget everything, right?
But zoom out broadly, What do you feel
is holding back educators or the field and what can we do about that?
To some extent it's resources.
And I think I also mean human resources like especially now there is a teacher
shortage in the world of New York City, computer science education.
Most of the central office staff, which was supporting that initiative
at a policy level, have been put into the classroom, which is great for them.
And it means that we're filling in gaps with smart people,
but it also means we're taking our eye off the long term.
So how do we continually fund and support people to replenish the field?
I also think just the focus on singular
test scores or singular standards might also be holding back educators.
And then also sometimes like relationships that schools have with communities
aren't always the healthiest.
Sometimes they are, and those schools are often the most generative.
But if schools don't have these type relationships with families,
I think that can really hold back educators.
It means that they're
not making strong connections that can benefit their students.
So those are my hot takes. Shared.
Yeah, and I like that your last point about the relationship with community is.
There's one school that I worked at
where it was basically everybody was on free and reduced lunch.
Kids were all wearing school uniforms, which was not the case for the
other schools in the same district.
Like a mile away. They weren't wearing that.
It was probably 95% of students spoke Spanish at home
and it was interesting the way that the school
did not really engage in a relationship with the communities.
It was not a conversation.
So it's just more of you're going to do things our way.
And there were some laws in place in Arizona at the time.
I don't know if it's still there, but it was illegal to speak Spanish
unless you were teaching a Spanish course.
So I had a class where it was 35 kindergarten students
and five year olds who did not speak any English at all.
And it was illegal for the kindergarten teacher to speak Spanish to them.
So it was interesting how that sets up this really poor relationship
with the community
when you're not even willing to engage in the that they speak at home. Yep.
And that's sort of what I was alluding to with this history that still
is this ongoing deficit of thinking and deficit actions.
I know Arizona had a law like that California had a law up
until 2015 that forbid bilingual education.
Massachusetts had passed a proposition like that.
There really are these pendulum swings in policy
that make for hostile learning communities and schools.
Definitely those policies are holding back our institutions.
But even beyond that, I think it's not just the policy.
But then the attitude towards those languages, even if the policy is gone.
Yeah.
For anyone who's passionate
about this area of work, love, equity, work and whatnot, like
and you have a background in education, you can go into policy
like there are grants that you can actually go into or fellowships
and in Washington DC that you can apply for where they will specifically pay
classroom educators to like help work on policy and whatnot with senators.
So look into it.
It's in Washington and I'll include some links
in the show notes if anyone's interested in that.
That's very cool.
I would be interested to hear how people's ideas are incorporated
and who tends to get those.
And I would love to see
what kinds of legislation have come out of examples like that.
Yeah, it was a couple of years ago where I was engaging in some service
work with Kia, and so I had to call like representatives and whatnot.
And one of the people that I spoke with was like, Oh, what's your background?
And they said, Oh, well,
I'm on a year sabbatical from teaching, helping with policies, etc.
And I was like, Tell me more. So like, that's how I learned about it.
But until then, like, I had never heard of these opportunities.
So they're out there. Yeah, absolutely.
What do you wish there's more research on that can inform your own practices.
I guess I want to know more about how teachers
stay focused on questions around equity, on these deeper questions
as they negotiate just the day to day struggles.
I would love to see sort of more on that because
it's something that we expect our teacher candidates to do.
But if you don't have strong models for it, then and maybe in some ways
we are designing for a future that doesn't exist yet and that's great.
But I know that there are teachers out there and I've met many of them
who are able to do this, but I would love to just read something
more comprehensive and maybe it's out there.
Maybe I just need to be looking harder.
Yeah, I don't know.
I wonder if it's like of those things where it's like
you just find the right term.
Then all of a sudden it's
just like you'll find a bunch of articles that are relevant.
But yeah, I'm not sure what something
then that you're working on that you could use more help with.
Probably that.
I think that's probably why I'm most concerned about like learning
more about it.
I know that there's a sense of urgency around these equity questions
in our systems, but it is so easy when confronted by the challenges
that our systems bring to, okay, how do I just put my head down
and get the work done?
So what does it look like and mean to sustain over time the passion
for the energy for and the ability to enact change in what you do every day.
And I know there's great work like our thanks to have
Yolanda Ruiz speak at our convocation
and she has a great work around this idea of the archeology of the South.
How do you start from kind of your own
racial literacies and then work towards becoming an interrupter?
And so, you know, I love to kind of keep on that track
and keep thinking with people together about that idea.
But it is one that it's going to take some energy and time
and just like continue dedication and renewal of our commitments.
I would like more help with that.
And I'm happy to be in communities of practice
where other people are thinking about that too.
Yeah, and we'll make sure at the very end to include like in the show notes,
how to reach out to Sarah.
So if anyone can assist with that and you'll definitely be able to reach out.
Do you have any questions for myself or for the field?
Yeah, I would love to know.
Kind of alluding to what I had said at the very beginning about building
these coalitions between us and these other spaces that do,
you know, relevant technology work in our relationship
as educators to the other disciplines, as you'd mentioned, Jared, Like,
are we just denigrating the kinds of thinking that other disciplines do,
or are we enhancing, are we supporting like I would love to, I guess, ask
that question of the field, like how can we work in community with those
not just in our space but outside of it, even just tangentially?
Yeah, I'll include some links in the show
notes to some arts education scholars in particular.
They've been having this conversation for decades and
I think it would be relevant for us educators to take a look at that and maybe
even do like an unpacking scholarship that kind of talks about, well,
what does a multidisciplinary person interdisciplinary
versus an interdisciplinary versus a transdisciplinary?
Like how do these different approaches potentially put
some disciplines in a subservient relationship with another?
And then in what ways can you do it where that doesn't happen?
And it's like an open
dialog and exploration of both disciplines in a way that's symbiotic.
So Yeah, maybe even Socratic as the we were talking about earlier.
That's great.
I would love to see that.
So then where my people go to connect
with you and the organizations that you work with.
So our website for the Research Practice partnership that I mentioned a number
of times, it's called Participating in Literacies and Computer Science,
and the website is the Ella Dash CSA dot org.
So Pila in Spanish means battery.
So we like to say on the last charge of the batteries.
So Bill AAPL acs0 RG and then I can be found on Twitter
at Sarah E Vogel and yeah, just out in Brooklyn.
And with that, that
concludes this week's episode of the CSK Ed podcast.
Make sure you visit JR Telecom to check out the show notes
where you will find the links that Sarah mentioned to be able to connect
with her, as well as many other resources related to computer science education.
Stay tune next week for another episode, and until then,
I hope you're all staying safe and are having a wonderful week.

Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode

Other podcasts that were mentioned or are relevant to this episode
- From Mathy McMatherson to Codey McCoderson: An interview with Dan Schneider
  - In this interview with Dan Schneider, we discuss how Dan transitioned from math education to CS education, designing spaces for educational experiences, suggestions for expanding and diversifying CS programs, how pedagogical approaches evolve over time through experimentation and reflection, the importance of listening to and working with kids one-on-one, and much more.
- How to Get Started with Computer Science Education
  - In this episode I provide a framework for how districts and educators can get started with computer science education for free.
- Situated Language and Learning with Bryan Brown
  - In this interview Bryan Brown, we discuss the importance of language in education. In particular, we discuss the role of language in teaching and learning, discursive identity, situated language and learning, the importance of representation in education, the role of language on stress, how smartphones and virtual communication platforms (e.g., Zoom) could change learning, and many other topics relevant to CS education and learning.
- The CS Visions Framework and Equity-centered Computing Education with Rafi Santo and Sara Vogel
  - In this interview with Rafi Santo and Sara Vogel, we discuss informal learning in CS, the CS Visions Framework, equity through social justice pedagogy, considerations for Integration, and much more.
- Vulnerability, Reflection, and CS Education with Amy Ko
  - In this interview with Amy Ko, we discuss the importance of mentorship in education, learning what not to do with teaching, the positive results of being vulnerable, understanding and exploring the limitations and consequences of CS, problematizing grades in education, practicing teaching through mental simulations, the importance of engaging in the CS community, and much more.
- Curriculum integration podcasts I mentioned
  - Contemporary Venues of Curriculum Inquiry
    - In this episode I unpack an excerpt from Schubert’s (2008) publication titled “Curriculum inquiry,” which describes different venues or types of curriculum that educators and education researchers should consider.
  - Images of Curriculum
    - In this episode I unpack an excerpt from Schubert’s (1986) book titled “Curriculum: Perspective, paradigm, and possibility,” which describes different examples, intents, and criticisms of “images” or “characterizations” of curriculum.
  - Intersections of Popular Musicianship and Computer Science Practices
    - In this episode I unpack my (2020) publication titled “Intersections of popular musicianship and computer science practices,” which discusses potential implications of hardware and software practices that blur the boundaries between music making and computer science.
  - The Centrality of Curriculum and the Function of Standards: The Curriculum is a Mind-altering Device
    - In this episode I unpack Eisner’s (2002) publication titled “The centrality of curriculum and the function of standards: The curriculum is a mind-altering device,” which problematizes curricula and standards by discussing how both can deprofessionalize the field of education.
  - The Subservient, Co-equal, Affective, and Social Integration Styles and Their Implications for [Computer Science]
    - In this episode I unpack Bresler’s (1995) publication titled “The subservient, co-equal, affective, and social integration styles and their implications for the arts,” which “examines the different manifestations of arts integration in the operational, day-to-day curriculum in ordinary schools, focusing on the how, the what, and the toward what” (p. 33).
- More episodes related to computational thinking
- More episodes related to discourse
- More episodes related to translanguaging
- All other episodes
Learn more about the RESPECT conference that Sara mentioned
Check out some of the publications by Aman Yadav
Learn more about Gholdy Muhammad’s Historically Responsive Literacy Framework
Read works by Ofelia Garcia
Read more about apprenticeship by reading the Kirshner article that Sara mentioned
The article titled “The Subservient, Co-Equal, Affective, and Social Integration Styles and their Implications for the Arts” by Liora Bresler is an excellent article to think of integration
Connect with Sara
- Participating in Literacies and Computer Science
- Follow Sara on Twitter
Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter