Exploring Computer Science with Joanna Goode
In this interview with Joanna Goode, we discuss corporate influence through neoliberal practices in CS education, reflecting on engaging all students in CS programs, considerations around equity and inclusion in CS education, layers of curriculum design and implementation, discussing and problematizing integration, influences of policy and administrative support (or the lack of) on CS education, Joanna’s experience with developing Exploring Computer Science, and much more.
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Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast
my name is jared o'leary in this week's
interview i am chatting with joanna
goode
in our discussion we talk about
corporate influence through neoliberal
practices
in computer science education we also
discuss reflecting on
engaging all students in computer
science programs
some considerations around equity and
inclusion in cs education
various layers of curriculum design and
implementation
and how those often don't always align
discussing and problematizing
integration
some of the influences of policy and
administrative support or the lack of
as well as joanna's experience with
developing the curriculum
called exploring computer science you
can find a link to that curriculum
in the show notes as well as links to
many other resources such as other
podcasts on similar topics
and so much more define that by going to
jaredoleary.com or clicking the link in
your show notes
i really hope you enjoyed this interview
i was nodding my head vigorously while
listening to joanna
as much as what she described is very
much so in alignment with my approach to
curriculum and experience design
all right so we will now begin this
interview with an introduction
by joanna good morning i am joanna good
professor of education studies at the
college of education
at the university of oregon i'm on the
kalapuya
elihi the ancestral land of the calipuya
today
i come to the university of oregon
originally from california
and i began my scholarly career
at ucla i was a applied math major
specialization with computing love the
computing
programming parts of mathematics so took
some extra courses there
i have always loved teaching and being a
teacher in various ways and i knew
education was somewhere in my future so
i entered the teacher education program
at ucla became a high school
mathematics computer science teacher for
five years
before returning to graduate school and
working on my phd
in urban schooling also at ucla
so i come today as a
researcher as a former high school
classroom teacher
i also work in teacher education and
as i'm keenly aware of on a daily basis
i'm also a parent of three children who
are now zoom schooling
as we speak oh how things have changed
yes if you were to write a book about
your journey up until now in cs
education what would the
title of the chapters be this is a great
question
i think the first chapter would be
called
making and making do a story of my
childhood experiences
i grew up with immigrant parents who
were
middle class maybe lower middle class in
terms
of their early careers but very much
tinkers my dad was an auto mechanic
my mother was a seamstress my mother
ended up being an accountant and taking
some programming classes on the side
my dad built candy cane lane decorations
in our local neighborhood
merry-go-rounds and carousels and
interactive robots
without having any digital knowledge so
all mechanically
designed and he was out of school at 14
in post-world war ii england
and didn't have much of a formal
education and yet could create
all these innovative tools these
creations if you will
and it was all about the children so it
was all about supporting kids
making them smile have fun and so that
was my upbringing was this
really lovely making hands-on
seeing what materials you have around
the house and
using those to create and
that leads us to chapter two which i
would say would be when my dad brought
home a commodore 64.
they were on sale at kmart that
christmas my dad said
i don't know what it is exactly but i
know it's going to be important let me
put it in the corner of the storage room
and i was the person in the family who
sort of went back there and
started coding and learned a little bit
about the commodore 64. but
that was a really important moment in
our family to
have that investment and to see the
promise
not really understand the promise but to
see that promise of what this personal
computer might be able to do
right and the joy of it being sold at
kmart was extra special because
it was seen as something much more for
the people than
something that was at a specialty
technology store for example
i think the next chapter of this journey
through cs education
might be the myth of access in cs
education
i had the luxury of one semester of
programming class in sixth grade
it was during the 1980s it was a little
trend at the time
but it was a required elective for all
students and i didn't
realize until much later what a gift
that was
to just have that initial exposure and
so when i
tinkered in computing through college i
recognized that i was one
of very few women in those courses
none of my friends run those courses it
felt chilly i thought about that i
didn't realize the systemic inequities
and then when i went to teach high
school and i thought great i'll sign up
to be
the computer science teacher the other
teacher was retiring he was well on his
way out
and i thought hey if i'm the role model
and i can
start a recruitment plan and i can
create this access of this incredibly
diverse high school
maybe things will change and what i
learned was
my individual efforts made small changes
they weren't making these systemic
changes that i knew
were really important part of that
school environment i was
very fortunate to be under the
leadership of principal dr
sylvia rousseau who was a remarkable
educator member of the community she's
about five feet tall
soft-spoken black woman she was
trilingual i think and
we had some major problems at our school
but she was doing restorative justice
before we really had that language
and it was a school-wide restorative
justice on a variety
of incidents from some of the gang
violence around the school
to also the tracking that was going on
with our classes and the role of
teachers within that so we had inquiry
groups
we were examining our own practices and
this computer science
piece was just so important that i
knew it had such power and privilege
associated with it
but most of the discourse around
tracking was about mathematics and
ap history and so forth so i knew
something was there
and i thank dr rousseau for encouraging
me to
go on to graduate school to explore this
further from a scholarly perspective
but also with the experience of real
classroom teaching
right and struggling with these issues
with my colleagues not as an individual
venture
from there i would say the next chapter
is stuck in the shallow end
which is maybe a book at that point i
bumped into jane margolis and
and she was in the finishing touches of
her first book
unlocking the clubhouse while we met and
writing this grant to
explore computer science in k-12
or high schools specifically around
race and gender and access the next
chapter would be it's all about the
teachers
because i feel that after stuck in the
shallow end came out one of the
major takeaways was the tremendous
influence that teachers have not only in
their classroom settings
but also the agency that they can have
for
addressing inequities at the school
level that it's not just administrators
making decisions top
down it's teachers collectively deciding
on curriculum
and professional development and
supporting one another
and so i think the teachers has been
a major focus of mine both in the
teacher education work but also in the
research
in recent years because of the
importance that
those teachers play and i think
maybe now i'm in a phase of look out for
the sharks
i feel like there's a lot of easy
solutions for an incredibly
complex problem around access and equity
in computing education
i think we increasingly need to name
neoliberalism we need to think hard
about the approaches that we have
and relationships with corporations and
how
those might influence which children and
which education they're getting
i think increasingly i'm probably myself
with naming whiteness and patriarchy
in every single step of our curriculum
pedagogy policies it's everywhere and
until we can
sort of move from the deficit nature of
why aren't those underrepresented
kids groups in here and start saying
well
why might they not want to be here
yes that's going to start i think moving
the conversation
and then ultimately i hope we end up
with a chapter called
computing as literacy for justice that
computing
becomes seen as not a one
course or one lesson but as a literacy
that we fundamentally believe every
child
every community person every adult even
deserves to
have as part of their engagement with
society and with one another
yeah i like that it sounds like the work
that you're doing like
you're going for effect size in terms of
the impact that you want to have
maybe i'm projecting like why i
initially went into getting a phd but
like
when i was in the classroom i was like
this is great i'm able to have an impact
on a few hundred kids but then i was
like but
what if i worked with teachers then i'd
indirectly be having an impact on
thousands of kids
and then like when i'm working at the
non-profit right now like we're
working with a million more kids this
year so like the impact is like it's
indirect but like it's much bigger than
i would have had staying in the
classroom
am i projecting or is that also related
to your approach i think that's exactly
right and i think it doesn't come with
some loss though because i think of
those relationships i had with my high
school students
and certainly i have relationships with
teachers i work with but
there is a different sort of engagement
with the work
so i think of impact in terms of the
numbers but
i also you know in true honesty missed
some of that
individual deep 180 days
worth of instruction impact with
students right but yes
i think that is an accurate summary of
growing
sort of zooming out and thinking more
systemically about
impact through believing and supporting
classroom educators in particular one of
the other things that caught my
ear was your mention of neoliberalism
and the impact of
corporation on education so i wrote a
co-authored a paper for a music
education journal that talked about
neoliberalism in relation to music
technology and how
the hardware that we use and the
software that we use are being designed
by people who
aren't educators who don't have
experience in the classroom who
are selling us things for their own gain
without taking into account how people
are using them
and so we kind of unpack like there are
people who are
taking the hardware and going well i
wanted to do this instead so i'm going
to modify it and there are people who
are taking software and doing the same
thing or they're creating their own
hardware and their own software
so like it's circumventing the
narrative of everything has to come from
a corporation and saying yeah well what
if i want to modify it to do this
could you expand upon what does
neoliberalism look like in relation to
cs education
and what might we as educators actually
do to combat that
yeah great question i think in cs
education
i think neoliberalism for me falls
in answering some of the questions that
we should be asking
for example who created this and for
what purpose
is one question who is paying for this
and what do they hope to get
out of this when they're paying for this
and do i even know who i can ask these
questions
of and then i also think that there's a
move to individualize and to make things
about individual choice or
personalization or data analytics being
faster better somehow more effective
and we just don't have the research on
that what we do know from the research
is that learning
is a social practice that we do with
other people
not something that is customized by data
analytics
being measured so i think we can see
some of the results of these products
often
having promises about their
effectiveness which
are not based in any sort of data or if
they are they're based in the analytics
from the same company itself so in some
ways we don't put
those innovations through the same
scrutiny that we even do for a social
studies textbook if you will
right and then i think we're you know
increasingly asking
students to turn over their personal
data to these
corporations that gives me some pause
one of the most close to home examples
of this right now
is that our state has decided to require
an edtpa
exam at the end of our teacher education
program so even though these students
have come in and they've taken their
tests
they've done their student teaching
they've passed all their courses
they still have to videotape themselves
fill out
prompts send it away to a company
pay that company an extra three or four
hundred dollars these are pre-service
teachers
trying to make it through a graduate
program they don't have a lot of extra
funds
and then it's an extra few hundred
dollars to
a corporation to externally score it and
send it back to them
about whether or not that they can
become
a teacher so the stakes are very high
and what's been particularly insidious
is that this exam like many others that
occur across k-12 keep our teachers of
color
from getting teaching licenses so our
indigenous
teachers are having a harder time
passing this our native spanish
language speakers are not passing a
spanish-speaking portion
and those are our teachers who we hope
might become computing teachers
or diversify the teaching force and then
so you can look at it through who do we
allow to
be the teachers in these classrooms who
what are some of the neoliberal forces
that allow a
superintendent and a test taking company
make
a curriculum deal that trickles down
that may or may not be a good idea
yeah so i think we have lots of those
examples about what happens when
decision making is made at the top
it doesn't bring in educators who
know the communities no teaching and
learning no curriculum
and ultimately you know answering those
questions about who is benefiting
and what do they hope to grow out of
this
i think in computer science specifically
what is truly problematic is that
we're often funding in terms of this
illusion of a pipeline or
the idea that we're you know these
people are investing in computer science
education
they're not investing in literature or
language arts right
because they're hoping to have a more
technologically knowledgeable workforce
and so on they're not concerned with
the struggling students in the class
they're concerned with the top
you know creating conditions that will
be their future workforce that are the
cream of the crop
right so in some ways we start
reproducing the social norms of
technology industry
which have those characteristics of
whiteness and patriarchy
and so i think that neoliberal cycle of
having these same corporations fund
schools
fund programs and then hope that those
people come back
into that same industry and
you know perpetuate some of the
inequities and exclusions that we see in
the field
what led to your interest in access and
equity
and wanting to research in particular
underrepresented students of color and
females etc
i think it really was as a classroom
teacher when i was
cycling between my 7 20 a.m
ap computer science class which you know
talk about structurally by design
excluding people it was a zero period
and i would go from that space and it
was
almost all white and asian boys
and one or two girls the first year
and then i'd pop into my repeat algebra
class first period
down the hall and it would be almost all
boys again
a few girls but those students were
majority latinx and black boys in that
classroom
and then i was coaching the swim team
and i was thinking
how are these spaces so gendered and so
racialized and it's so norm and we are
in one of the most progressive schools
around
with a strong social justice leader
something is going on here and why isn't
anybody
looking at this systematically like this
was my college experience so i know it's
happening
and really the only literature or
readings i could find was a little
early digital divide about access to
computers
and the internet nobody was talking
about access to computing knowledge
certainly not in the k-12 space i think
the last part was i went to one of the
college four trainings around the ap
computer science test designed to help
bring people in and prepare people and
it just
this was not a topic of conversation and
i remember feeling
so disconnected from some of the
professional discourse with my colleague
teachers
around our equity justice center
pedagogy and then
what computer science felt like and
that really propelled me towards
graduate school to figure out really
what was going
on with computing as a field that it
could create such conditions that this
would become so
normalized nobody would even point it
out as
segregation really and were you
interested
in and aware of like liberatory
pedagogical practices before
meeting your principal or did they
introduce you to
this different approach to education
that's often not talked about
yeah so i was fortunate that ucla
had a great relationship with a high
school that i
worked at so the placement was
purposeful
and my teacher education mentor
dr barbara wells she was a math educator
but she really brought in a much more
liberatory
education piece as a math educator so
she gave me a lot of the language and a
lot of the background
and really some of that real talk about
okay well you're
saying these things or you want to
have this impact what is your pedagogy
going to do
in math education to get you there with
these students
you're teaching this repeat algebra
class what are you doing differently
than what happened last year so that
they're not repeating a third time
so these conversations were very much a
part of my training
i was very fortunate to have both her
and dr sylvia
so these two very strong black women
educators who themselves had lots of
experience in the classroom and
leadership
really setting that foundation for what
it means to be a good teacher
and a good teacher isn't concerned with
the top 50
of the class a good teacher is concerned
with the children in the classroom
yeah it sounds like you're in a very
fortunate place
and space to be able to explore those
topics and whatnot
there are a lot of places that i know
education wise
you're not able to do that whether it's
because of the kids you work with it's
too homogenized for different reasons or
because of the teacher education program
you go into they just simply don't talk
about this they focus on pedagogy that
is not related to liberatory pedagogy
and whatnot
so that sounds wonderful that you had
that i'm curious so i did the unpacking
scholarship episode of that paper that
you wrote from 2008 that was like kind
of talking about well what are some
strategies that we can do
to get access and equity and like try
and improve
some of those areas but what has changed
or kind of remained the same in those
last 12 or so years since you
wrote that paper in terms of
recommendations that you would give
sure so i think actually in rereading
that paper
and listening to your podcast it was fun
to revisit some of the ideas and to see
what's aged and what has not aged
ipods are out so that is one technology
that
is not familiar but i would revisit a
few
of the ideas and maybe deepen them with
some
systemic understandings i think this was
written a little bit more
for teachers themselves but i think that
critical bificality of what can i do in
the classroom
with learners and also what is the more
systemic
influences and rather than say i can't
you know that's not for me here's my
walls to think about those two
together so i might add you know
over the past 12 years that recruitment
looks different i think
we want to have much more of a
school-wide responsibility not on one
teacher to do
so much of that labor of recruitment
so how can school counselors
have their own education programs like
counselors for computing
administrators and have a common
understanding
about who computing is for everybody and
how the school should recruit
or put place students in particular
classes or
settings maybe as computer science
becomes for
all we don't have to talk about
recruitment that would also be a hope
because
we don't talk about recruiting for
algebra
we place students in mathematics classes
right
we do some tracking there but we place
students in those classes we don't have
to recruit it's because it's still
considered an enrichment project which
for many people in richmond
signals is sort of privileged people
that belong in that class
so that's one point i think another
piece would be for pedagogy powerful
pedagogy
i would also ask teachers and educators
to consider
having some goals and metrics so that
they can hold themselves accountable for
that pedagogy
what does it mean to make sure that
english language learners are involved
or how are students with special
accommodations
learning the conceptual knowledge so
really thinking about engaging all
students not
just from that pedagogy perspective but
that how do i know i'm doing what i
think i'm doing i think there's always
room for reflection there
myself included you videotape yourself
one time you'll see those areas for
growth
i think having some goals so you know
what to look for
can be really helpful otherwise it's
improving but not really knowing
if you are or not one of the things that
i'd probably add on to
like the metrics that you look at one of
the things that you can look at is more
qualitative in terms of well what do
students actually
perceive are they enjoying this class
well why are they enjoying this what do
they not like about the subject area and
like
diving into that is a thing that you
look into not just what are they
learning but like
do they want to continue their learning
when the class is over
that's exactly right do they feel like a
part of this classroom learning
community
right what a powerful thing and how do
you measure that that's exactly right
and being purposeful and intentional in
what that looks like
because kids don't necessarily remember
learning loops
on a tuesday of february they remember
how they felt in that classroom and how
they felt as a learner
and how they were treated by the teacher
and other students
and i think keeping that in mind you
know feelings are hard to measure
but just being mindful can help
that ecosystem a little bit more
carefully what about
some strategies around equity and access
in today's world so we have all these
virtual environments that people are
learning computer science through zoom
et cetera like
do you have recommendations for that
that are specific to that kind of
environment because
like it's much easier to see now oh this
kit doesn't have
stable internet connection or this kit
doesn't even have a device like
things that were occurring outside of
the classroom
are now much more obvious to a lot of
classroom teachers to go oh
they actually don't have the ability to
go home and work on this for a b
or c reasons yes it's an impossible
situation
jared i'm not sure that equity
issues are so bright
right now it's blinding in a way that
if you go one direction there's
excluding
people if you go another direction
you're excluding people
i think the major equity issue that i've
seen
so far is not taking care of teachers
that teachers are the ones who would be
able to
put together the packet for students who
need the packet
and they're also the ones to deliver the
synchronous instruction for the students
who
that's the way they're thriving and
that's the best situation
they're also the best ones to create
that learning environment the teachers
are everything
and yet we've asked them to do much more
with brand new tools with very little
support
and the teachers who are feeling that in
particular
are the ones in school systems which
have already struggled
with inequities and overworking teachers
particularly
bipod communities and bypoc teachers
and families teachers with caretaking
responsibilities
so i think for students were very
very aware of digital divide issues
we're not so aware
of the other issues going on at home
because we just don't know
what other family issues are and whether
it's students
you know needing to remember to log on
themselves because their
parents aren't home or if there's mental
health issues i think teachers
have a hard time knowing exactly what's
going on which is part of the challenge
but i suspect that if we had smaller
class sizes and
extra helpers with those educators it
would make the job
more doable so if we don't expect that
teachers who used to have 35 students
are now
delivering instruction in multiple ways
for 35
students maybe three different ways
that's a big task
what if we put more funds towards
doubling those teachers so i think
the equity issues are everywhere
in everything however i think the way to
have the biggest impact in addressing
some of those
equity issues are investing in the
professional learning
and some professional planning time for
teachers so they're not working around
the clock
and burning themselves out yeah that's
one of the reasons why i asked like the
question
towards the end of the interviews like
how do you take care of yourself and
like release a super cut of that
in september for like national suicide
prevention month because like
this is a very real thing that as
educators we need to focus on is
how to prevent that i'm curious i like
talking through ideas where it's like oh
i thought this was going to work really
well but it ended up not
what ideas have you had or heard around
like
equity and access that like on paper
sounded like it was gonna go great and
then
it didn't in implementation for whatever
reason a lot of the
equity and access that is around
particular programs or courses
that either are not sustaining over time
and here i go again do not have that
professional development piece
really give me pause and the reason why
is it's really easy to say somebody
watched a webinar
and now 1.5 million people are impacted
but what we know is that to change
teacher practice it takes
you know a year and a half 80 plus more
hours of sustained engagement
arguably a learning community that
over time that fosters that improvement
so i think the idea that this is an easy
fix
and if we just came up with a new
curriculum or a new
ap class or a new outreach project
or if we just you know made this
program with some more keen advertising
i think that doesn't necessarily have
that
long sustained impact it might
we just don't have any evidence of it so
all those great ideas
i often look at people's commitments and
i'm struck by
the level of care and
great ideas that go into those
programs or approaches but i often
pause and think well how do we know if
there's actual
impact for all that work and great ideas
are they actually getting out there and
how do we know
and so i think without having some of
that classroom based research this is
where i think research and practice are
really nice
and complementary without having the
research to
mirror back to practitioners program
people curriculum developers to say this
is what's working this is what
teachers might be struggling with or
might need more preparation
or might say this doesn't fit and we
need to
retool i think when that communication
is open
and that design process is more
longitudinal that's when i have a little
bit more hope that things will stick
over time
yeah i hope so and what you just
described really resonates with like our
approach to professional development so
like
we do district-wide implementation if
you're interested in like just doing an
after school or
gifted talented class like no that's not
what we do when we do it it's
no this is not a one-off workshop and
all of a sudden you're gonna know
everything you need to know about cs
education like we go for a minimum of a
year
ideally two to three years of
professional development every quarter
would come back
like hey we learned this new thing how
did it go all right now we're going to
dive deeper and learn something else
and one of the things that we've noticed
with districts is it's often
like in the second year in particular
when they start going
oh this thing that we've been exploring
it can actually be done with kids and
like now that you've modeled it with my
kids now i actually believe you
like so all these little things you have
to go into place to make it so the
teachers will actually buy into it and
doing like a one-off webinar like while
that's nice it's not going to solve like
these equity and access issues
or whatever you're trying to focus on
yes
i'm nodding vigorously because exactly
the same experience we have
one lesson in the exploring computer
science curriculum the cornrows lesson
it's built off of ron eglash's
culturally situated design tools
well we first started incorporating this
lesson in our professional development
program
because the first couple years after
this curriculum was released in los
angeles our teachers reported that that
was one of the lessons they were not
really teaching because they didn't
quite know how we thought
that makes it a great candidate for one
of these teaching lessons
where teachers practice teaching the
lessons to one another in the
professional development
we have a discussion about the lesson
after it's taught
and so we've started incorporating it
into the lessons
and what we've learned is when those
second
year teachers return for professional
development
they start having the conversation along
with the first year teachers who are
say things like well i don't know if i
should teach this i'm in an all-white
community
or i'm a black teacher and i'm in a
you know majority white community and i
don't know if i feel safe teaching this
what are some strategies i might use and
suddenly we have these second year
teachers in the room saying
last year i felt just like you but i
tried it and here's what i did
and it wasn't scary after all and
actually my students have
you know responded how happy they were
to
a be in the curriculum because back to
whiteness we default to whiteness and
don't name that
but we named the one lesson on cornrows
is
something maybe scary or troubling to
teach in a computer science
public school classroom and so we have
these great conversations
but it's because those second year
teachers are saying
i did this here some strategies the
first year teachers are starting to name
some of their discomforts
working through that coming up with a
pedagogical plan
and then they become sort of that
mentors in the community
the following year and i think that's
really an example
of if we did this sort of lesson or
curriculum
and just handed it out and didn't have
that long-term professional growth
we could say this is in the curriculum
but we could probably also conclude that
very few teachers would feel prepared to
teach it
and so being in the curriculum is fairly
useless if it's not enacted
by teachers and i think that's that fine
point
we don't say often enough about what is
the enacted curriculum in the classroom
not the designed curriculum
but is the enacted curriculum i'm glad
you brought that up one of the
unpacking scholarship episodes i did was
talking about how those are the
different layers like there's the
intended there's the enacted
there's the embodied there's like all
these layers of curriculum that you have
to like get into and it's like well what
was design
versus what was taught versus what was
understood versus what is like
embodied later on like what is the
hidden implications that were
unintentionally taught like these are
the layers i love to nerd out on when it
comes to designing curriculum and
thinking about them
like after the fact but oddly enough
like not enough people in css are
talking about that like it's like oh i
made this new fancy shiny thing
okay but like there's a lot more to this
people have been talking about this for
a very long time you should look at the
scholarship on it well i think that for
so long in our community
computer science has been king so to
speak
that the content knowledge has almost
been weaponized
to keep out people who know about
teaching and learning
you weren't a major in this so step
aside i went to stanford
let me create something and you teachers
go do it because
computer science is everything and i
think
that as a field we are not
very welcoming of other expertise
that doesn't begin with a college major
in computer science
yeah which perpetuates the patriarchy
and whiteness because it becomes a
barrier to even be in k-12
cs education when it becomes weaponized
as
you don't really know let us do the
curriculum pieces
because we know what this field is about
yeah that's a really important point
i'm glad you brought that up i'm curious
taking it back to like individual
classroom
educator they love computer science they
want to
do it in their class or their school
their district etc what advice would you
give
for them to try and kind of develop
these grassroots movements to
implement cs across the district or
school or even just a class
one of the first pieces would be to have
a
team or a coalition of people
so again it's not all the work all the
institutional work on one educator
i think what happens is that one
educator
has the vision designs the vision enacts
the vision
and then might leave schools or retire
or do something else and
then we have no sustainability plan so i
think
the first piece is to really make sure
that it
is an effort that involves some school
and district people and not just person
and with that i would say that part of
that team
should be people who are already focused
on equity and inclusion efforts
because if those people aren't part of
the design team they have that expert
knowledge about what works
they run those programs and if we're
really
committed to equity inclusion then those
are the first people at the table
along with the counselors and
administration so that you have
that administrative support along with
the teacher
knowledge as well so i think having that
team is really critical for the
perspectives and for the sustainability
and that equity focus i think equity
and anti-racism has to be at the
heart of any efforts it cannot be an
add-on otherwise
we've baked whiteness into the cake and
added a little diversity frosting and
[Music]
that doesn't quite work in terms of
changing the flavor of what we're trying
to do i think
so i think that's really it's about the
people and about
that commitment from the beginning and
then i think at that level
once those people are in place really
thinking carefully
about what curriculum and what
professional
supports are available that meet the
needs of the community
of the grade bands and of
the particular students and teachers i
think that will probably look different
i think it
will be cool when we have more
place-based examples
of what computing can look like i think
one
really exciting place is to have
teachers plan together
one teacher can't do all that
interdisciplinary work but a few
teachers
with shared students can do amazing
things and i think
computing really gives lots of different
options for interdisciplinary work
when we have those content sort of
teachers at the table to think through
what that means
so that might be one fun approach to
begin of course there's curriculum
that is already out there that has that
professional development
if it's a good fit for people but i
wouldn't necessarily start
there it's starting with the people and
needs assessment of the particular
school and community and how computing
can help propel probably some of their
already existing goals and initiatives
rather than be
one more mandate type policy that has to
be
you know checked off something that's
more organic
and meets the needs of the students and
community
do you have advice specifically for
teachers who
are like experts in other subject areas
who want to
also engage with or incorporate computer
science in particular
yeah i think one is to if they have a
computer science teacher
or colleague to buddy up that's always a
good plan
and if not i think there are
increasingly
programs that will start to give
teachers these interdisciplinary ways of
thinking about computing
but i think you know not so many are as
focused in that formal education
i think what's missing and what makes it
difficult to give advice
is how do you tell a teacher who has 24
mandates
in six other subject areas how to get
started
with a seventh subject area and so
getting started might have to be what
are you already teaching out how can you
layer and infuse computing within that
so
you're teaching about the election let's
talk about modeling
you're teaching about social studies
let's talk about
archival processes and different forms
of media
and there's lots of ways in
frankly maybe this is my bias as a
teacher educator
we're not going to be able to give pd to
all
existing in-service k-12 teachers
and if we do a little five minutes for
everybody means
nobody for everybody so i hope that
pre-service teacher education
departments like my own
are really taking this seriously and
thinking about
how are we preparing and infusing this
throughout all of our courses
how is this computing education
replacing the old
edtech you know they don't need to learn
how to use smart boards
they're beyond that we can do other
things and i think that's really the
place where we're going to be able to
start exploring ideas because
the cohort of math educators are
learning and talking about math together
and also getting a little computing
and the science educators are talking
about science together and thinking
about computing
and the way we've set up education in
the united states once they go out to
schools
most schools districts provide little if
if any professional development so this
is the place where
a lot of those professional
conversations and dispositions are being
seeded
and it's not too late obviously growth
mindset teachers are
lifelong learners but it's a much easier
investment if you will to think about
infusing this knowledge within this new
cohort
of teachers who are going to go out to
the schools each year
but that's a very slow process in terms
of educational reform it's a hard nut to
crack because i don't know how else we
do it without a lot of one-offs
and if we look at the history of
education in the united states
the one-offs will always benefit the
privileged
so we do it systemically we're going to
grow computer science and we are going
to maintain
the achievement gap or education that
borrow from
dr gloria lads and billings is that a
success
if we're growing you know computer
science for all
but we look at the numbers and we've
grown computer science
and we've either maintained or perhaps
even widened
or perhaps stratified the digital
inequities in computing so
that's what keeps me up at night that
how do we recommend and grow computer
science
without it being the schools that serve
the most privileged reaping the most
benefits
i'm curious from a teacher education
perspective and with your understanding
of curriculum development and whatnot
how do you encourage educators to
consider
whether or not the interdisciplinary
experiences that they're designing are
complementary in nature or are
problematic in terms of being
subservient so as an example like when i
used to teach music classes like i had a
math teacher come up and be like oh well
i want you to create a song to teach
math facts
that was using music in a subservient
relationship to math like it had no
creative abilities on the students in
related music they were literally just
going to sing math facts
another example in computer science
there's like a dozen or so papers that i
can
readily point to that in the abstract it
says
the purpose of creating this
interdisciplinary course was to increase
enrollment in computer science classes
that is putting whatever other subject
area you pair this with in a subservient
relationship to computer science
so how do you help educators understand
that there are problematic
and unproblematic ways of actually
combining multiple disciplines
in some kind of educational experience
oh
that is a great question because i think
back to my earlier comment about
computer science being weaponized as a
knowledge right like
that you can't really teach us because
you don't really know
the oncology the epistemology you don't
know this discipline
deeply and yet that is also a fair
characterization if we held it steady
with other ways of knowing right
you don't have a you know an education
degree
so you're talking about education
so as we put these things together i
think it's not only
the disciplinary knowledge we make
subservient we also think about who gets
to make those decisions who's coming in
with the funding
it's not the language arts people coming
in with funding and saying hey please
partner with me
i have funding it's the other way around
so those power issues are so
huge when we think about who's gotten
the most funding
what is this infusion of money into
schools
it's not writing a check to the
principal's discretionary fund
it's for computer science education or
computing across the disciplines or
so i think there's also we're not coming
in with these disciplines really on the
same political
ground that they're being privileged in
different ways maybe one in the school
system
because it's being assessed in high
stakes tests and the other from these
outside
entities because jobs and national
security
and cs is everything and so it's the
little apples and oranges as it comes
together because
whose odds wins out and if it gets to
where the school says
hey we have so many other mandates we're
already in an underperforming school
maybe that will win out and computer
science will sort of go away because it
doesn't have that same
power in the way that the school's
culture has been
set up via policies right and mandates
so that's another worry to get to your
question when we put these subjects
areas together i think that whole
situated context of what's going around
whose eyes are looking on it does
somebody have to
file a report somewhere or is this just
two teachers having a conversation over
a cocktail napkin on a friday night
about a really cool
instructional plan and how they might do
justice to both disciplines
and i think when we can get into that
situation where school structures allow
these professional
conversations to happen and the
discourse to happen
amongst educators who have that
pedagogical content knowledge in their
discipline
as well as their knowledge and then we
can have like that sort of
speed dating mash-up of ideas that i
think would be
incredibly generative and we could say
no i'm not doing that song with
your math facts no way let me explain to
you what music is about
and i think only then i don't think we
can package it
i think we need to create the conditions
which allow
professional people who have these
knowledge have shared students
understand where their students already
are come up with wonderful ideas and
then try them out in their classrooms
and i think that's where the most hope
for
the in-service teachers to
really do thoughtful infused
interdisciplinary work
i'm not sure that any single program can
really do it because
it takes those sets of knowledge that no
one person
might necessarily have it sounds like
you are
a special person in terms of your music
and computing knowledge
but not everybody has deep knowledge in
multiple fields yeah so
for pre-service educators then would you
recommend
experimentation and collaboration and
communication like it's all about that
just try things out have some dialogue
with other people and reflect on what
you're doing
like what do you recommend for that
person who's just about to become
a full-time teacher and they're like i
want to do this thing but like i know
there's all these like hegemonic
influences
and like all the power structures that
be like what do i do
how do you help them out i think this is
where you dive into the deep end in
terms of teachers i think if they're
asking those questions
that's a great place to be i'm a big
believer on
the critical practice cycle of thinking
about
a particular goal in your classroom
that's influenced by
theory and research and then going
through
sort of a study cycle in your own
classroom and on your own classroom
teaching experience
back to setting the goals and thinking
about metrics
and then am i doing this well yes i
probably am furthering hegemonic of
course but
what can i do next time to further
disrupt that
right because any of us who have taught
in the classroom know
that like please don't come visit me my
first year i'm just trying things out
i will get better and that's that's the
way it's supposed to be but the second
year we should be seeing things get
better and then the third year
but it's not getting better into
settling on the perfect
i'm gonna date myself transparency slide
it's not like this is day four of the
curriculum
i have perfected my teaching practice
but it's digging deeper into those
questions and
simultaneously considering you know the
content the pedagogy the student
experience
the climate of the classroom and your
own growth as an educator to go
deeper and harder each year because
that's you know we don't
want to be in complacency right that's
not a goal
of teaching and education it's adjusting
and growing as well along with our
students but maybe in a different way
yeah i like that that really resonates
with my own approach i would
have students come back to the classroom
whatever subject error i was working
with and
why don't we do it this way when i was
in the class well because every year i'm
like
trying new things and iterating and
learning etc
but i say that having worked in a
district where like they mandated
specific lesson plans on specific days
and it was the same
every single year you weren't allowed to
change them you had to be teaching the
exact same thing every day
it wasn't evolving with the times it
wasn't changing with student interests
and needs or
this particular district had over 50
elementary schools and all 50 of them
were very different in terms of like
demographics and needs and interests etc
but they all were teaching the exact
same thing it's like okay this is not
ideal like who is this easy for is it
for you as an administrator for the
teachers or for the students because
it doesn't seem like you're really
taking into account what the students
want to learn
it's almost the color blind view of
what you know equality looks right
everybody's on the same page right
this is fair yeah that definitely hits
home
the very first class that i taught in
that district was
it was supposed to be a class on like
singing about being back to school and
it was all in english
and the class that i was working with
not a single one of the kids spoke
english and it was a three grade level
combined class so i was like
all right well already on the very first
lesson your curriculum is not designed
for these kids
so fail right off the bat so
one of the things that i'm interested in
is influences
on like we talked about hegemonic
influences and whatnot so how does
policy and administrators like
influence what happens in the classroom
so how does
the support or lack of influence
computer science implementation in the
day-to-day
so i think a few different ways one of
the primary ways
is policy makers and administrators
are often particularly in middle school
and high school spaces deciding where
it gets placed into the curriculum which
seems like a
oh it's a victory it's at the school and
often policy
you know checkbox policy has css offered
at the school
but i think the placement into the
curriculum is something we don't
talk about quite enough because if it's
placed
into the advanced placement curriculum
if the introduction to computer science
becomes ap
then suddenly we've designed a learning
experience
that again is targeting students who
identify with ap who might think of
themselves as apa students
who already have that college-bound
identity
who might have some confidence and
it's a space that is already marked for
a particular set of students
and a place that is marked as not for
other students so i think that decision
automatically
much like at my own high school that's
where the computer science course was
placed it was an ap
course and then even worse at my school
experience it was placed as a zero
period so
before the buses came so unless you had
transportation to the school early on
it was difficult to have access to that
course so
i think that administrator decision
about like oh well we
want to grow computer science oh ap
let's plop that in similarly but the
other side of the coin
that i'm increasingly seeing is the
career technology
education standalone courses and when i
say standalone the ones that aren't also
marked as academic credit some are some
aren't
and what those do is pretty similar to
the idea
of ap is i'm a cte student
i this is my future career trajectory it
here's a competing class
okay well that's me because a i'm
already thinking cte
and b this is going to be my trajectory
imagine us offering math or language
arts like that like
either putting it in the highly
academically elite or
vocationally themed program
and not in the regular curriculum that's
accessible
for all students right so that's a
choice but as significant
repercussions in terms of which students
have access to
the course and what are potential future
opportunities for those particular
students
so i think that is a major choice
decision that principals administrators
policymakers are making
without really diving in and saying how
can we
put a course in this part of the
curriculum
and use the equity language when we
already know those places in the
curriculum
have some pretty staggering
racial and also gender discrepancies
about who
occupies that space and who that space
is marked for
that's one piece and i think the other
piece is policy makers
and administrators underestimating the
need for this ongoing
teacher support and professional
development thinking that they
are signed up for a program and thus
like we bought the curriculum we're done
here
and i don't know that that's necessarily
administrators i think administrators
are pretty clear that professional
development
is important at least school building
administrators
often recognize that but i think as you
go up to policy makers
to other folks that often it's easier to
adopt curriculum than
to pay teachers to go to a professional
development
organize sub days do the things that it
takes to actually support
educators enacting the program or
curriculum that was
adopted by the school or district yeah
well first of all the
the cte and the ap discussion i love
that that was
definitely something that people need to
consider is what kind of
computer science are you implementing
and how and who is this going to
basically be marketed for in terms of
the students who would attend it
but then the administrative support the
pd side of things
it reminds me when i was the coding
mentor for the last
district that i was working in i was
arguing with an administrator saying
like look they need professional
development they don't have the content
knowledge on this
literally everybody has come from some
other subject area said they want to
learn this thing
but they don't know how to do computer
science and their argument was well i
teach people who have never taught math
before how to do that so all you need is
good pedagogy
i was like no the difference between
that is in order to get a degree in
education you have to go through like
what 12
some odd years of math classes you've
seen people teach this they've done the
content area for at least a decade of
their life
computer science they may never even
like seen what code looks like before
this is completely different it's like
asking
somebody to teach russian when they've
never seen it heard it spoken it etc
and now you're asking them to do that
without professional development like
good luck with that
right and what they'll do is they'll do
a google search find the first little
tutorial or video or and then we'll have
low quality computing for probably for
the teachers who work with the students
who need it the most
so you mentioned your work with
exploring computer science
the curriculum that you helped develop
what were some of the big things that
you learned while creating that
curriculum
wow there's a lot of big things one was
that we started by teacher
sourcing the curriculum which was great
fun but we also learned
that designing curriculum was more than
just
putting ideas from teachers together
that
having a thread and a spiraling approach
required that careful design
particularly with an inquiry-based
curriculum because we want to make sure
that the concepts
percolate out but then are built on
later on so
thinking about how to get ideas from the
field from teachers
into curriculum materials but also
curate them in a way that is cohesive
across these multiple voices
that was a big learning piece and also
being
okay with the fact that some of our
links are going to expire
the day after we release a new edition
of the curriculum
that really believing in the teachers to
say okay that's another example
that the professional disposition will
carry the curriculum
that we think of the curriculum as the
notes on the page but the
pd is sort of the symphony where it
comes alive
so understanding what the curriculum
could do
should do how it supports teaching and
learning but also
understanding that it is not stand alone
maybe that was just my own
learning around that piece and i think
another thing i learned is that
curriculum is not a political
that there's been pushback over the
years about various parts of the
curriculum
at one point we were asked by a funder
and after some deliberation we did take
out a lesson because the funder
was uncomfortable with the lesson and
the lesson was about the
martin luther king.org site and about
fake news and about white supremacy you
know
praying on adolescence on the internet
to join their hate groups
and we thought that was an important
lesson well other people
felt that that could get misread and
that we'd be having all these kids go to
the website and clicking on it which
our curriculum never asked them to do so
i think i also
learned that doing the work of
equity-based curriculum
is not always going to make people happy
they want equity and inclusion built on
whiteness and sometimes
having some of these other lessons gets
some of this
pushback because curriculum is not a
political
so that was a lesson too and i think
we're going to be re-integrating that
into our curriculum
because i think if there's ever a time
to talk about
this part of the internet and the way
that computer science has led to
the hateful discourse white supremacy in
this country
this is part of the naming that our
field is not
all good and that computer science is
not deterministic to
create more people to help support such
websites and technologies that we need
to have students
be aware and informed of these types of
lessons
so i'm also aware of opportunities that
continue to present themselves but
sort of the political climate in which
we're able
to continue to support exploring
computer science with funds to
frankly which go to teachers and
professional development support
how do you design for equity and what
advice would you give
for other educators who like even if
it's just a lesson
and they want to design with accounting
for equity
what advice would you give in terms of
designing for
equity i think about opportunities for
students to find their different
identities within the curriculum
so thinking about many different ways
that different students can connect in
so
not having the same assignment i mean it
could be the same assignment with the
same criteria
allowing students to really find
themselves
find people who look like them but also
find people who think like them who have
values like them
who have extracurricular hobbies like
them who might be
an athlete like them or an artist and i
think
finding those opportunities are
really particularly useful in curriculum
i also think that we have some
historical routes that we should start
integrating into
curriculum as well to tell some of the
hidden tales
around the history of computing and the
people
in them if i had some extra time this is
something that
i would love somebody to do for k-12 is
some curriculum around alan turing and
grace hopper and catherine johnson other
people who have had
an impact in this field whose stories
have not been told or when they're told
they're
sort of outside of the curricular
content so i would also hope that as
people
are designing for equity going forward
that they're thinking about
making sure that computing isn't being
perceived as something that
you know was invented in silicon valley
in the late 20th century but something
that is bigger than that that has had
more participation of that
and it tells some of the counter stories
about the field and what it can do
in addition to the field as a technology
i think our biggest mistake with
computing curriculum is we
treat it as a technical knowledge when
really it's a social science
in terms of social people this is not a
natural science
we have created this and we have
designed this and we have written the
algorithms and we have bought the
devices and put them in our homes and we
have made
choices every step of the way
there's nothing sort of natural about
computing
as a field so i think the more
curriculum design that
presents that more holistic vision of
computing
rather than just the technical
dimensions devoid of all
socio-cultural context will be really
generative way
of designing for equity and inclusion so
if you had the ability to
wave a magic wand and like here's the
ideal curriculum whether it's like a
variation of ecs or its own
thing what would you include in that you
know one thing
as much as i'm not a big person on tools
i
love ron eglash's culturally situated
design tools and
wish we had more of those to
develop some content and curriculum
around because i think it's
a nice sort of approach to computing
what excites me about that approach is
it's basically ethnic studies for
computing
which is what we should be doing anyway
and i really appreciate that perspective
and wish there were more resources
along that way i think a major problem
just in k-12
is connecting the dots between great
bands particularly k-12 formal education
but also those
informal opportunities what does it mean
when we do scratch in second grade and
sixth grade and 10th grade
and maybe in at uc berkeley as a cs0
class
maybe it's layering and building on each
other each time just
like we teach students to write a
paragraph when they're younger and
they're still writing paragraphs in
college
but it's getting more sophisticated or
maybe it's the same intro scratch
activity
we don't really know and i think that's
for me
it's getting that braid band cohesion
not just written down as standards but
actual curriculum where we can point to
that does that threading between
grades between schools so we start
thinking about things from a student
experience instead of a
program experience so if my kid went to
kindergarten next week where would they
be
in 12 years right what would that
experience be like
and i think my magic wand would be to
have
the resources in place to support that
trajectory rather than
a whole bunch of opportunities that may
or may not be connected
across that experience how have you
iterated on your own understandings of
either education or cs education
over the years like how do you being
like a practice nerd musician
i was trying to think of how do i
improve upon my abilities
what is your version of practice how
does that look like for you
in education i think there's a couple
different ways one is
i see a nice synergy between my research
and my college teaching so
a lot of the exploring computer science
lessons for example
i infuse into my college teaching and
then we
have conversations around sort of
educational design
and pedagogy and liberatory approaches
to education based on those and
that helps me both appreciate what's
going on with teachers i work with
because i'm having similar experiences
but also
reflective places of areas of growth for
myself
i would say honestly though the place
that i
feel like i'm get the most professional
development is hanging out with my
colleagues
both my teaching k-12 teaching
colleagues
and my university scholarly colleagues
in different areas
who say well that's great but what does
computer science
mean when we think about it in terms of
native people and sovereignty
and then i pause and i think wow that's
a really good question
that i probably wouldn't have gotten
from hanging out with mostly
you know these folks and so i think i'm
fortunate enough to be in a scholarly
area where we can have those
conversations in a department
that is built on people with different
areas of expertise but a common
commitment to social justice and
decolonization
and so some of those threats continue to
inform
that theory nerd in me about almost puts
pebbles in my shoes of like
okay i've been doing anti-racist
education
but have i really been thinking about
decolonization and what it means
in terms of computer science education
and if i haven't okay now who do i need
to talk
to what do i need to read what do i need
to do
and so i think just being around those
people with both
similar areas and different areas has
really
continues to provide reflective fodder
and conversations for me
yeah that is also something that i
highly recommend any
like whether it was a new doc student
coming into a program or
just like another teacher i always
recommend read outside of the field like
just keep learning from other people
that you're not used to hearing
from the same discourse in the field try
and get a different perspective and
apply it into it you learn so much from
that practice
one of the questions that i mentioned
that i love to ask is
talking about how do you prevent this
burnout and in particular with
the research on access and equity and
social justice and liberatory practices
like
when you actually sit down and really
think about that and that's what you do
like all day every day that can lead to
out very quickly because it can be very
depressing so how do you personally try
and take care of yourself
while also engaging in these heavy
topics good question i think
again relying on colleagues and
friends and having these conversations
so it doesn't feel like it's a
solo endeavor or such a load because
it can be you know systemic racism is
not
the easiest to swallow and you know as a
white person i am
very conscious of how i can sort of turn
off the computer and walk into the
grocery store and have an experience
that is
validating all the systemic racism but
validating it from a place that
continues to give me privilege
and that could be challenging as well
i believe in self-care i like to get
sunshine
it's the opposite of the computing part
reminds me of my commodore 64 and my
mother always coming up and saying go
outside and play go climb a tree
and she would kick me out of the house
and i tried to still
do that like okay i've been at the
computer go down and i like to garden i
found that really
restorative for me to feel like my
fingers in the soil
and to grow and to nurture and
also i have always been a swimmer and i
still swim
so that gives another layer to this
given that swimming is a metaphor on
being stuck in the shallow end
because swimming is a great form of
self-care and yet i
finish this work and i often go pop to
the swimming pool and i feel great and i
have incredibly awesome exercise
and i look around myself and i'm
surrounded by mostly other white people
swimming at the swimming pool
so it's that self-care but the constant
i mean we live in a society where
to get to my swimming pool nowadays i
have to have a reservation then you walk
through either the
women's locker room or the men's locker
room to get to the pool
so it's almost the things are so
clear how we do this gendering and this
racing
and i can't i never shake it because i
think it's who i am i think about these
issues all the time
but i tried to do the healthy exercise
and that being
grounded in my place and in my community
to remind myself that these ideas and
issues are all connected but we can only
work on it when we take care of
ourselves
and we're able to show up and do the
work
yeah so at the time the recording this
morning the interview with nikki
washington released
and in that one and in the interview
with joyce mccauley we talk about double
consciousness and how
both of them being black cis women like
they are
unable to escape that double
consciousness
and it sounds like with what you're
going through you're still experiencing
that double consciousness of knowing
oh well i'm in a situation of privilege
and i recognize that
so you're seeing yourself from those two
different angles of how you are
fitting within it but you're also trying
to actively fight against it and
recognize that it's problematic so yeah
that can still be draining even when
you're trying to engage in leisure
yes in fact i'll share a funny little
story the other day
i went to my swim practice and i was
standing in the line outside
you have to have a reservation one of my
colleagues came out she's a math
educator and
we were so happy to see each other you
know six feet away at distance instead
of on a zoom call we were chatting away
i went into the swimming pool and as you
go in because you have to have a
reservation you have to disclose your
name
and answer the code questions and so i
did so and about 20 minutes later this
woman leaned over and she said can i ask
you an
awkward question i said sure she said
are you joanna good the cs education
researcher
and i thought it was going to be one of
my students because i'm teaching on zoom
and we
all we live in a community i said
yes and she said oh my gosh i've read
everything you've ever written
and turns out she had heard my name when
i came in
and she works for google philanthropy
and
she had just recently moved to oregon
but it was me taking the time off from
work
to go to the swimming pool to have this
workout
that ended up having a double
professional sort of encounter
right but again within the
you know is this the locker room banter
right am i in a privileged space to be
having these conversations
that i know historically have kept other
people out of so
i think that double consciousness you
know as that white person
sort of understanding of how we navigate
and maneuver in a world
that was built for us structurally but
without being complacent with it is it's
a difficult space to
maneuver and yet it's nothing compared
to what i know
by poc lgbtq people other folks who have
been marginalized
feel every second of every day so
speaking of your research
i'm curious what do you wish more people
understood about your research
what i think people maybe misunderstand
is
that this is about curriculum rather
than about teaching
and learning and equity and i think
curriculum
is one of the vehicles along with policy
and professional development but i think
it's so easy for people
to hear exploring computer science
or to hear that language and to think
that
the curriculum is what is the work
rather than all those levels of
curriculum that you listed before
and also the power of pedagogy being
something that people
develop over time and is beyond those
single efforts
so i think that's one piece and i think
the other piece
is that connection between classroom
teaching and learning
and policy and maybe this isn't what
people
misunderstood but what i hope people do
understand
is that double lens between
what are the equity practices happening
with teaching and learning
and what are the structural equity
practices that we put in place
that support that teaching and learning
and that we can't do one without the
other
and i think we've had lots of examples
of hey in this ideal classroom
these are great computer science
knowledge that comes out or
here's some policy structures to get
computer science instruction
but i believe and i hope that my
research continues to think about
the place where we consider both of
those ideas simultaneously
because without one the other is
inadequate i'm also curious
what do you wish there's more research
on that can inform what you
do in the classroom one of the areas is
thinking about anti-racist curriculum
and having more examples of that i'm
really
thrilled about nikki washington's class
at duke i can't
wait to listen to the podcast i want
more of that
frankly i think that's a really exciting
place
i also would appreciate
studies and scholarship around
gender and computer science that goes
beyond the binary that considers
what it might mean to queer computer
science not just
in terms of who the students are but the
way we
have codified gender binaries
in almost every single space in computer
science and
the damages it does to people in our
systems
i think that is an incredibly important
and needed area particularly because
we've been talking about gender
and computer science for 30 years 40
years i don't even know how many decades
and yet we're still it still ends up
with
okay what are we going to do to fix
these girls or women
which one it's not really about the
deficits of girls and women and secondly
gender is much more expansive than
that binary so i think that's an area
that i
would like to see more scholarship
because i would like to cite that more
scholarship i feel a little
limited in my own treatment of gender
because
this is one of those let's read outside
of other fields certainly
and thinking about genders
performativity and such
is helpful but i don't think that
discourse is quite entered in computer
science
the way i hope one of my graduate
students max gorandinsky is exploring
this as his dissertation research too so
i'm very excited about that area
and i would just say less gap gazing in
general like we know the disparities we
know the statistics
i think less focus on the pipeline i'm
troubled by that metaphor
maybe that's changed since that article
too it's not the metaphor it's
problematic for many
ways i think we need to think about
success
in computing that is not measuring how
many students want to go on to
technology industry or even majors that
there's a lot of ways to be successful
and we're almost limiting by that
singular
treatment of thriving in a perhaps
hostile space
as the metric of success so that's
something
also i've been thinking about in terms
of more research
and that would be more qualitative
descriptions that thick rich
descriptions of what success might look
like
and what impact might look like that
doesn't end up in a chart
that shows the same education debt over
and over again
yeah there's so much that i just want to
like snap my fingers with that like
that heavily resonates with a lot of
things that i've been exploring
one of the things that i'm working on is
a paper it was submitted
it was for a music education journal and
it was myself a non-conforming
individual
a trans woman and trans man like talking
about from our perspectives within the
trans and non-binary community like
here are some suggestions for you in the
music education field
because the narrative has been kind of
taken over by well-intentioned cis
individuals
but not actually people within the
community talking about it so like
one of the reasons why i speak up as
like hey i'm non-binary hey
like i am not a heterosexual male like
it's not discussed enough
but i will say that computer science is
actually a little bit further ahead in
terms of
including at the very least another
category or a fill in your own blank
category on gender whereas
some of the music education stuff that
i've looked at they still don't even
have that
so like that is a good thing but like
you were saying with the gender gaps we
tend to talk about well where are the
women
in computer science fields but there's
an episode that's going to release
next week from the time of this
particular recording on
paulo ferreira's book pedagogy of the
oppressed so like
in that chapter four discussion that i
do i say
okay well if we're going to problematize
the lack of women in computer science
why are we not problematizing the lack
of men in
elementary education it's 80 white
female so
like if we're going to say that this is
an issue to have this kind of imbalance
then we need to talk about it everywhere
and not just highlight certain
demographic differences over others
but that's my own little rant do you
have questions for myself for for the
field
i think just the question for the field
is
the one i raised earlier how do we
grow expand computer science i'm a big
believer in computing i used to think
okay how do we grow opportunity maybe my
own
progress or growth over the last decade
is looking at my three children and
saying which one would i say
should not take computer science which
one is it not important for and since i
couldn't reach an answer i thought
okay which other child can i think would
not benefit from computer science and i
couldn't think of a child who would not
benefit
so i've come to the realization that i
really do believe it's
critical fundamental literacy maybe
reading the code to the fairy pun on
what it means to be literate right and
the importance of that
so i think my question given that
computer science is
important and a critical literacy how do
we
grow it and not have the same gaps how
do we grow it and not just grow it
for the groups of people who have always
benefited
in this country and as somebody who's
thinking about equity inclusion first
i wouldn't think that our work is
successful if the gap
continues to be there so
the question is how do we do computer
science for all
and not perpetuate the access
and achievement gaps right literacy for
all
we still have those achievement gaps
algebra for all we still have tracking
and achievement gaps
how will computer science for all be
different so that's
the question that i leave for the field
is
how do we grow things without
perpetuating the privilege
that's already been there yeah and how
do we as a field
if we think it should be for everyone
but we also acknowledge that not
everyone's going to become a computer
scientist
for a career how do we engage in
computer science for leisure for mental
health for
like other reasons besides future jobs
and whatnot that's one of the
big things that i've tried to push for
in the content that i create
like whether it's the curriculum or the
podcast is like look it doesn't have to
be for jobs like i proposed to my wife
by modifying a video game i changed the
code put our dogs in it
like that was for fun it wasn't for a
job it was just something i wanted to do
and there's this
whole side of research on mod culture
that is often not discussed in computer
science education which is weird because
like it's programming
like and there's also the hardware side
of things as well so like
it talks about everything related
computer science but it's for informal
practices for fun
and yet as a field we rarely mention it
i think that's a really important point
i think
the formal and informal people are
rarely
talking or if they're talking we're not
having those conversations about the
synergy
that we really could be and i think
that's a ripe area for what does it mean
to
have sort of a supportive ecosystem
of a computing education ecosystem that
doesn't only live
in the summer camps it doesn't only live
in the fifth grade curriculum it doesn't
only live in the ap
class there's some thought and how these
students can
build on these learning different spaces
to ultimately get a much more
well-rounded and situated
experience in computing where might
people go to connect with you
and the organizations that you work with
people can always email
me at goodjay uoregon.edu
our exploring computer science website
is also a great
resource at www.exploringcs.org
we have a great list of research
articles associated with ecs
on that website as well as e-textiles
resources and a new ai unit
and people can always feel free to reach
out to me anytime i'm happy to have
these conversations
and with that that concludes this week's
episode of the csk8 podcast
i hope you enjoyed listening to that
interview as much as i did
and i hope you consider sharing this
with another educator
that might benefit from it or providing
a review on whatever platform you're
listening to this on
again you can find links to much of what
we talked about in the
podcast by going to the show notes and i
hope you stay tuned next week for
another
unpacking scholarship episode and two
weeks from now for
another interview thank you so much for
listening i hope you have a wonderful
week
and are staying safe
Guest Bio
Dr. Joanna Goode is the Sommerville Knight Professor in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. She began her career in education as a high school computer science teacher in a large, diverse urban school, and she builds on this experience to research how educational policies and practices can foster equitable and inclusive learning in K-12 computer science education. Joanna has directed multiple National Science Foundation-sponsored research projects examining teachers’ learning around equity, inclusion, and justice in computing classrooms. She is the co-creator of the equity-focused Exploring Computer Science course and is the co-author of the book, Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing (MIT Press, 2008/2017). Joanna is currently a member of the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Social Justice Action Committee; and is a past member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s ACM’s Education Policy Committee and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Board of Directors.
Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode
Other podcast episodes that were mentioned or are relevant to this episode
Computer Game Mods, Modders, Modding, and the Mod Scene
In this episode I unpack Scacchi’s (2010) publication titled “Computer game mods, modders, modding, and the mod scene,” which examines modding practices within the mod scene, and discusses the social and corporate pressures that influence this culture.
In this episode I unpack Goode’s (2010) publication titled “Connecting K-16 curriculum & policy: Making computer science engaging, accessible, and hospitable for underrepresented students” which discusses the development process behind the Exploring Computer Science curriculum, as well as the policy work that occurred in parallel with the the curriculum development.
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.
Educational Aims, Objectives, and Other Aspirations
In this episode I unpack Eisner’s (2002) publication titled “Educational aims, objectives, and other aspirations,” which problematizes behavioral education objectives and discuss two alternative approaches.
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.
Increasing Diversity in K-12 Computer Science: Strategies from the Field
In this episode I unpack Goode’s (2008) publication titled “Increasing diversity in K-12 computer science: Strategies from the field,”which provides suggestions for educators who are interested in increasing the diversity of their CS classes or programs.
In this episode I unpack El-Nasr and Smith’s (2006) publication titled “Learning through game modding,” which describes two case studies on modifying video games to learn software development and design, as well as programming, artistic, and video game concepts.
Nicki Washington is Unapologetically Dope
In this interview with Nicki Washington, we discuss the importance of cultural competency, expanding beyond “diversity” by focusing on creating inclusive and equitable environments, learning from people and scholarship outside of the field, lessons learned working with CS educators across the country, lessons learned while teaching during a pandemic, focusing on the humanity in computer science education, and much more. If you haven’t listened to it yet, check out the unpacking scholarship episode that unpacks one of Nicki’s papers.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
This episode is the start of a miniseries that unpacks Paulo Freire’s (1970) book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This particular episode unpacks chapter 1, which discusses how oppressors maintain control over the oppressed. Following unpacking scholarship episodes discuss what this looks like in education and how educators can adopt a “pedagogy of the oppressed” to break cycles of oppression.
This episode is episode two of a miniseries that unpacks Paulo Freire’s (1970) book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This particular episode unpacks chapter 2, which discusses the “banking” approach to education that assumes students are repositories of information, and then proposes a liberatory approach to education that focuses on posing problems that students and teachers collaboratively solve. If you haven’t listened to the discussion on the first chapter, click here.
This episode is episode three of a miniseries that unpacks Paulo Freire’s (1970) book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This particular episode unpacks chapter 3, which discusses the importance of dialogue when engaging in liberatory practices. This episode builds off the previous unpacking scholarship episodes on chapter one and chapter two, so make sure you listen to those episodes before jumping in here.
This episode is the final episode of a miniseries that unpacks Paulo Freire’s (1970) book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This particular episode unpacks chapter 4, which synthesizes the concepts introduced in the previous chapters and discusses the difference between anti-dialogical and dialogical practices in education (and at large). This episode builds off the previous unpacking scholarship episodes on chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three so make sure you listen to those episodes before jumping in here.
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.
Reconceptualizing “Music Making:” Music Technology and Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism
In this episode I unpack Benedict and O’Leary’s (2019) publication titled “Reconceptualizing “music making:” Music technology and freedom in the age of Neoliberalism,” which explores the use of computer science practices to counter neoliberal influence on education.
The Shire as Metaphor for Systemic Racism with Joyce McCall
In this interview with Joyce McCall, we unpack and problematize some of the issues around race and racism in relation to education. In particular, we discuss the importance of allies not only showing up to support marginalized or oppressed groups, but staying when conversations get uncomfortable; the Shire from the Lord of the Rings as a metaphor for hegemony and systemic racism; as well as a variety of theories such as critical race theory, double consciousness, cultural capital; and much more.
Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
In this episode I unpack Ladson-Billings’ (1995) seminal publication titled “Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy,” which influenced much of the discourse around culturally relevant pedagogy in computer science education.
Understanding Women Modders Using the Serious Leisure Perspective
In this episode I unpack Trancred et al.’s (2020) publication titled “Understanding women modders using the serious leisure perspective,” which discusses a survey that investigated motivations for participating in modding practices among women.
When the Game is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices Among Computer Game Modding Culture
In this episode I unpack Sotamaa's (2010) publication titled “When the game is not enough: Motivations and practices among computer game modding culture,” which is a case study that explores the attitudes, motivations, and practices of 29 people who create mods for the game Operation Flashpoint.
Learn more about Exploring Computer Science (the curriculum Joanna helped develop)
Connect with Joanna
Learn more about Exploring Computer Science (the curriculum Joanna helped develop)
Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter