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Culturally responsive computing (CRC), that centers sociopolitical issues and transformational uses of technology, has been described as valuable for increasing engagement with computing, especially for historically underrepresented minoritized students. But what do high school students think? Through a sociocultural lens prioritizing student voices recorded in 56 interviews over a period of 2 years (1–3 years after students’ first experience with computer science (CS) education through Exploring Computer Science or Advanced Placement CS Principles in high school), this study centers the perspectives of 39 primarily low-income, Latine and Black youth from urban California and rural Mississippi public schools to understand what they perceive as the role of technology in our world and what they subsequently desire of their computing education. While none have studied CRC before, the majority responded with CRC ideas about the kind of pedagogy they believe would make for a more meaningful computing learning experience: They see computing as a form of power that impacts both good and bad in the world and want computing educators to prepare them to take on these issues of equity, ethics, social responsibility, and underrepresentation in the field. The students’ perspectives offer important pedagogical insight into how to support deeper engagement with computing in current CS for All initiatives, while also preparing youth for the rapidly evolving and increasingly complex computing landscape that impacts all of our lives.
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The 1964 freedom schools as neglected chapter in Geography education
Our paper revisits a neglected chapter in the history of geographic education–the civil rights organization SNCC and the Freedom Schools it helped establish in 1964. An alternative to Mississippi’s racially segregated public schools, Freedom Schools addressed basic educational needs of Black children while also creating a curriculum to empower them to become active citizens against White supremacy. Emerging out of a history of Black fugitive learning, Freedom Schools produced a critical regional pedagogy to help students identify the geographic conditions and power structures behind their oppression in the South and use regional comparisons to raise their political consciousness and expand their relational sense of place. Freedom Schools have important implications for higher educators, especially as contemporary conservative leaders seek to rid critical discussions of race from classrooms. They offer an evocative case study of the spatial imagination of the Black Freedom Struggle while pushing us to interrogate the inherent contradictions, if not antagonisms, between public higher education and emancipatory teaching and learning. Freedom Schools prompt a rethinking and expansion of what counts as geographic learning, whose lives matter in our curriculum, where and for whom we teach, and what social work should pedagogy accomplish.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1660274
- PAR ID:
- 10404792
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Geography in Higher Education
- ISSN:
- 0309-8265
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 21
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Montessori pedagogy is a century-old, whole-school system increasingly used in the public sector. In the United States, public Montessori schools are typically Title I schools that mostly serve children of color. The present secondary, exploratory data analysis examined outcomes of 134 children who entered a lottery for admission to public Montessori schools in the northeastern United States at age 3; half were admitted and enrolled and the rest enrolled at other preschool programs. About half of the children were identified as White, and half were identified as African American, Hispanic, or multiracial. Children were tested in the fall when they enrolled and again in the subsequent three springs (i.e., through the kindergarten year) on a range of measures addressing academic outcomes, executive function, and social cognition. Although the Black, Hispanic, and multiracial group tended to score lower in the beginning of preschool in both conditions, by the end of preschool, the scores of Black, Hispanic, and multiracial students enrolled in Montessori schools were not different from the White children; by contrast, such students in the business-as-usual schools continued to perform less well than White children in academic achievement and social cognition. The study has important limitations that lead us to view these findings as exploratory, but taken together with other findings, the results suggest that Montessori education may create an environment that is more conducive to racial and ethnic parity than other school environments.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Through our engagement with the ‘Freedom Singers’, we advocate for approaching the archive through the racial politics of atmosphere to understand both the affective, emotion-laden practices of the past and the affective work carried out by contemporary researchers within the archive. This atmosphere provides an important pathway for identifying and analyzing the relationality and encounters that advance a fuller study of the black experience and define what (and who) constitutes critical actors in that story. The Freedom Singers and their politico-musical legacy, while lost to many members of the public and even many scholars, offer an important lesson in broadening our appreciation of civil rights practice, as well as the practice of archival research itself. This piece contributes to broader understandings of the archive as an affective space and the role of affect in analyzing archive materials.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Responding to recent work in critical cartographic studies and Black Geographies, the purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptual framework and a set of evocative cartographic engagements that can inform geography as it recovers the seldom discussed history of counter-mapping within the African American Freedom Struggle. Black resistant cartographies stretch what constitutes a map, the political work performed by maps, and the practices, spaces, and political-affective dimensions of mapping. We offer an extended illustration of the conventional and unconventional mapping behind USA anti-lynching campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, high-lighting the knowledge production practices of the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute’s Monroe Work, and the embodied counter-mapping of journalist/activist Ida B. Wells. Recognizing that civil rights struggles are long, always unfolding, and relationally tied over time and space, we link this look from the past to contemporary, ongoing resistant cartographical practices as scholars/activists continue to challenge racialized violence and advance transitional justice, including the noted memory-work of the Equal Justice Initiative. An understanding of African American traditions of counter-mapping is about more than simply inserting the Black experience into our dominant ideas about cartography or even resistant mapping. Black geographies has much to teach cartography and geographers about what people of color engaged in antiracist struggles define as geographic knowledge and mapping practices on their own terms.more » « less
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null (Ed.)With support from the National Science Foundation, an evidence-based experimental centric pedagogy (ECP) is being implemented across STEM disciplines at an historically black university. This is the first of its kind, where the ECP is being extended to several STEM disciplines after its successful implementation in electrical engineering to promote motivation and enhance academic achievement of minority students. One of the project objectives is to organize workshops whereby STEM faculty in biology, chemistry, physics, civil engineering, computer science, industrial engineering and transportation systems will learn how to develop and implement ECP as an active learning pedagogy. This paper highlights the strategies used for planning, publicity, implementation, and assessment of the workshop conducted in Summer 2020. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the workshop was held virtually with 360 participants registering globally. The workshop’s focus was developing and implementing inexpensive home-based hands-on learning activities. Workshop assessment revealed that participants expressed positive outcomes, 84% reported that they believe the workshop was a good use of their time and 83% said they plan to implement what they had learned at the workshop in their own practice, affording the participants more opportunities to include home-based hands-on learning in their curriculum. This project seeks not only to increase public scientific literacy, but to also contribute to the development of a diverse, globally competitive STEM workforce.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2022.2087056
