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Three Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone–serving districts formed a researcher–practitioner partnership with the Wyoming Department of Education, the American Institutes for Research®, and BootUp Professional Development to advance the computer science (CS) education of their elementary students in ways that strengthen their Indigenous identities and knowledges. In this paper, we share experiences from 2019 to 2022 with our curriculum development, professional development (PD), and classroom implementation. The researcher–practitioner partnership developed student and teacher materials to support elementary CS lessons aligned to Wyoming’s CS standards and “Indian Education for All” social studies standards. Indigenous community members served as experts to codesign culturally relevant resources. Teachers explored the curriculum resources during three 4-hour virtual and in-person PD sessions. The sessions were designed to position the teachers as designers of CS projects they eventually implemented in their classrooms. Projects completed by students included simulated interviews with Indigenous heroes and animations of students introducing themselves in their Native languages. Teachers described several positive effects of the Scratch lessons on students, including high engagement, increased confidence, and successful application of several CS concepts. The teachers also provided enthusiastic positive reviews of the ways the CS lessons allowed students to explore their Indigenous identities while preparing to productively use technology in their futures. The Wind River Elementary CS Collaborative is one model for how a researcher–practitioner partnership can utilize diverse forms of expertise, ways of knowing, and Indigenous language to engage in curriculum design, PD, and classroom implementation that supports culturally sustaining CS pedagogies in Indigenous communities.
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This content will become publicly available on January 7, 2027
Secondary Teachers’ Design and Implementation of Data Lessons
Twenty-one secondary teachers participated in a 15-month experience to design and implement data lessons in their classrooms with the support of data scientists and data science education experts. We collected and analyzed teachers’ lesson plans and conducted interviews with teachers. We found that most of the teachers designed lessons that provided opportunities to engage their students in multiple phases of a data investigation process, where they designed lessons that utilized real and relevant data encouraging students to consider context throughout the problem-solving process. Teachers were motivated to design lessons grounded in authentic and relevant data. To varying degrees, teachers provided opportunities to engage students with complex data, where datasets contained a “large” number of cases, attributes and were messy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908760
- PAR ID:
- 10687418
- Publisher / Repository:
- Hawaii International Conference on Education
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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