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1. CS Teaching and Racial Identities in Interaction: A Case for Discourse Analytic Methods

   Hubbard Cheuoua, Aleata (August 2023, 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research)

   Motivation. Teachers can play a role in disrupting social inequities that are reflected in education, such as racial disparities in who succeeds in CS. Professional learning addressing inequities causes teachers to confront difficult topics, including how their own identities impact these problems. Understanding the differing ways teachers’ identities surface can provide insights into designing better supports for their professional learning. Objectives. The goal of this paper is to examine the teaching and racial identities of two secondary CS teachers who participated in professional learning focused on combining CS content and equity pedagogy. The second goal of this paper is to demonstrate how discourse analytic methods can be used to examine interviews and other interactional data. Method. Teachers were interviewed individually about their teaching identity, racial identity, and professional learning. Drawing on Bucholtz and Hall’s identity and interaction framework, interviews were examined for linguistic and discursive features reflecting positionality (i.e., how identity surfaces through the way individuals present themselves to and are perceived by others) and indexicality (i.e., various ways of referring to an identity). Results. Participants used personal deictics, quotative markers, code choice, and affective and epistemic stances when discussing and negotiating their identities with the interviewer. The data reflected ways teachers problematized questions about teaching identity, negotiated tensions in their disciplinary identities, found the topic of race difficult to address, and highlighted other aspects of their identities relevant to understanding and discussing race. Discussion. The study provides a demonstration of how discourse analytic methods can reveal nuances of teacher identity that may be overlooked with other qualitative approaches. Findings also revealed how teachers’ ethnic identities might be used as a lever in helping teachers discuss the difficult topic of race in education. Discourse analytic methods are encouraged for future CS education research focused on interactional analyses. 

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2. Strategies to Address Changes in Social Supports during the COVID-19 Pandemic

   Johnston, A. C.; Douglas, K. A.; Martin, J. P.; Short, T. (June 2021, American Society for Engineering Education 2021 Annual Conference and Exposition)

   The pandemic of COVID-19 is disrupting engineering education globally, at all levels of education.While distance education is nothing new, the pandemic of COVID-19 forced instructors to rapidly move their courses online whether or not they had ever received prior training in online education. In particular, there is very little literature to guide instructors in supporting students in online engineering design or project-based courses. The purpose of this research is to examine engineering students’ report of social support in their project and design-based courses at a large research university during the move to online instruction due to COVID-19in the Spring 2020 semester and to provide recommendations for instructors teaching these types of courses online in the future.Our study is framed by social constructivism and social capital theory.We surveyed undergraduate engineering and engineering technology students(n=235) across undergraduate levels during the final week of the Spring 2019 semester.Survey questions included open-ended prompts about social supports and overall experience with the transition to online learning as well as name and resource generator questions focused on specific people and types of interactions that changed during the pandemic. We used qualitative content analysis of the open-ended responses along with comparisons of the name and resource generator to develop recommendations for instructors.Recommendations to increase students’ social supports include:facilitating informal conversations between students and between students and the instructional team, grouping students located in the same time zones in teams, facilitating co-working sessions for students, establishing weekly structure, and utilizing some synchronous components (e.g., virtual office hours). 

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3. Instructional practice learning through Instructional Incubator engagement

   Woodcock, Cassandra S.E.; Antoine, Haley; Tarnowski, Madison; Huang-Saad, Aileen (January 2019, Proceedings of the 8th Research in Engineering Education Symposium, REES 2019 - Making Connections)

   While student-centered learning has been shown to improve learning experiences in the engineering classroom, adoption of these evidence-based strategies has been slow. Research has shown that faculty beliefs about teaching and limited exposure to formal training influence effective implementation of evidenced-based instructional practices. Thus, in an effort to explore ways to implement long-term instructional change in engineering higher education, a graduate-level course, the Instructional Incubator (I2), was developed to expose future educators to instructional design and evidence-based practices. In the I2, student participants developed new biomedical engineering short-courses in an active learning classroom. For the first two iterations of the I2, we examined how this immersive experience influenced participants’ perceived teaching abilities and understanding before and after enrolling in the I2. Both I2 cohorts reported an increase in knowledge of engineering education related terms and showed a shift away from behaviorist and cognitive beliefs about teaching and learning. Introduction 

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4. Teaching Through Collaboration: Flexibility and Diversity in Caregiver–Child Interaction Across Cultures

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13443  

   Clegg, Jennifer_M; Wen, Nicole_J; DeBaylo, Paige_H; Alcott, Adam; Keltner, Elena_C; Legare, Cristine_H (August 2020, Child Development)

   Teaching supports the high‐fidelity transmission of knowledge and skills. This study examined similarities and differences in caregiver teaching practices in the United States and Vanuatu (N = 125 caregiver and 3‐ to 8‐year‐old child pairs) during a collaborative problem‐solving task. Caregivers used diverse verbal and nonverbal teaching practices and adjusted their behaviors in response to task difficulty and child age in both populations. U.S. caregivers used practices consistent with a direct active teaching style typical of formal education, including guiding children’s participation, frequent praise, and facilitation. In contrast, Ni‐Vanuatu caregivers used practices associated with informal education and divided tasks with children based on difficulty. The implications of these findings for claims about the universality and diversity of caregiver teaching are discussed. 

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5. Design Educators’ Conceptions of Prototyping in Engineering Design Courses

   Ali, Hadi; Lande, Micah (June 2019, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This is a research study that investigates the range of conceptions of prototyping in engineering design courses through exploring the conceptions and implementations from the instructors’ perspective. Prototyping is certainly an activity central to engineering design. The context of prototyping to support engineering education and practice has a range of implementations in an undergraduate engineering curriculum, from first-year engineering to capstone engineering design experiences. Understanding faculty conceptions’ of the reason, purpose, and place of prototyping can help illustrate how teaching and learning of the engineering design process is realistically implemented across a curriculum and how students are prepared for work practice. We seek to understand, and consequently improve, engineering design teaching and learning, through transformations of practice that are based on engineering education research. In this exploratory study, we interviewed three faculty members who teach engineering design in project-based learning courses across the curriculum of an undergraduate engineering program. This builds on related work done by the authors that previously investigated undergraduate engineering students’ conceptions of prototyping activities and process. With our instructor participants, a similar interview protocol was followed through semi-structured qualitative interviews. Data analysis has been undertaken through an emerging thematic analysis of these interview transcripts. Early findings characterize the focus on teaching the design process; the kind of feedback that the educators provide on students’ prototypes; students’ behavior while working on design projects; and educators’ perspectives on the design course. Understanding faculty conceptions with students’ conceptions of prototyping can shed light on the efficacy of using prototyping as an authentic experience in design teaching and learning. In project-based learning courses, particular issues of authenticity and assessment are under consideration, especially across the curriculum. More specifically, “proportions of problems” inform “problem solving” as one of the key characteristics in design thinking, teaching and learning. More attention to prototyping as part of the study of problem-solving processes can be useful to enhance understanding of the impact of instructional design. Challenges for teaching engineering design exist, and may be due to difficulties in framing design problems, recognizing what expertise students possess, and assessing their expertise to help them reach their goals, all at an appropriate place and ambiguity with student learning goals. Initial findings show that prototyping activities can help students become more reflective on their design. Scaffolded activities in prototyping can support self-regulated learning by students. The range of support and facilities, such as campus makerspaces, may also help students and instructors alike develop industry-ready engineering students. 

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