The purpose of this research was to study the experiences of middle-school teachers of autistic students during the co-design of neurodiverse pedagogies for computational thinking (CT) within the context of a research practitioner partnership (RPP). This knowledge building partnership was founded on the neurodiversity paradigm and challenges the assumption that individuals with disabilities are exceptions for which accommodations must be made. Neurodiversity, here, is viewed as the natural variation of neurological differences and as such is proposed to be the baseline in every educational setting (Silberman, 2016; Walker, n.d.). When neurodiversity is seen as a baseline for an educational community, the focus is on educating diverse (whole) individuals rather than planning and teaching a standard computational thinking curriculum, while adding accommodations or adaptations to meet the needs of individual students.
Our paper presents the results from a critical event analysis using qualitative data collected during the first year of a three-year mixed methods study, which includes teacher workshop mini-interviews and teacher embodied interviews. In this study, we ask: How do teachers experience the co-designing of neurodiverse pedagogies for computational thinking in a research practitioner partnership? And, how do these teachers modify and diversify their teaching practices of CT?
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Poster: Co-Design of Wearable Music Curriculum for Neurodiverse Computational Thinking
We develop computing practices for neurodiverse learners. While many researchers in special education adopt a behavioral perspective, we leverage a neurodiversity perspective that is more widely accepted within the autism community itself. We report on an initial phase of a research-practice partnership with a pilot cohort of four middle school teachers with whom we are co-designing embodied musical practices using networked Internet of Things (IoT) wearables with embedded inertial measurement units (IMUs). Our culturally and epistemically diverse teaching fellows work with diverse student populations (Black, Brown, Native American, neurodivergent) at Title 1 schools. The neurodiversity perspective sensitizes our co-design to tactile, kinetic, sensory, and ensemble energies that overflow neurotypical learning modalities, which typically privilege screen- based interaction, cognitivism, and isolation. We find “wearable music” to be an inclusive, mobile, and mobilizing computing approach that foregrounds embodied interactions in fun and engaging group activities surfacing computational thinking (CT). In later phases of this research, our teaching fellows will run workshops for additional educators, scaling the curriculum for implementation and evaluation in many more classrooms.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2122924
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10356706
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- RESPECT 2022
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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