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Within engineering, there is a need for more diverse faculty representation to support and serve as role models for underrepresented students. To attract, support, and retain diverse candidates, the pipeline and preparation of faculty must be better addressed. To investigate effective supports, the University of Massachusetts Lowell S-STEM program recruits and supports low-income, high-achieving students who wish to pursue a career in higher education. The UML S-STEM program supports scholars for four years, from their third year in undergraduate studies through the completion of either a master's degree or a qualifying exam within a Ph.D. program. To prepare the students in the program for future faculty positions, they are grouped in cohorts and meet monthly. In this report, we present our programming activities to develop self-awareness and social awareness. The activities of the monthly meetings center around building social consciousness through first developing students’ self-awareness in the context of their engineering journeys, and then through a more general investigation of their understanding of the importance and impact of cultural orientations within and beyond engineering. The aim of the programming was to inspire awareness of the different experiences and needs of students in engineering education. Participants were given brief surveys at the end of each activity, and they participated in end-of-year focus groups. The results indicated the approach taken helped students reflect on their own cultural orientation to teaching and learning, as well as that of their peers. 

This paper examines the use of collaborative curriculum design (co-design) as a strategy for supporting teacher professional learning and the implementation of an inclusive middle school computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum in three urban school districts. The curriculum is focused on students developing mobile apps that provide social and community good. The second year of the project has been dedicated to developing and piloting curriculum resources that support remote learning and culturally relevant pedagogy while the partner districts switched to remote and hybrid instructions. This study explores teachers’ professional learning experiences in the collaborative design of curriculum materials and piloting the curriculum at their own classrooms. The paper includes analysis of three data sets: (1) co-design meeting notes and teacher reflections; (2) semi-structured interviews with teachers who co-designed and piloted the curriculum; (3) student pre- and post-survey responses on their attitude and interest in learning CSDL. Preliminary results indicate that the co-design approach supplemented with one-on-one coaching has not only facilitated the curriculum development process but also fostered professional learning and collective capacity building for implementing the project curriculum in the partner districts. Findings from student surveys show that students perceived their understanding of, and interest in computer science and creating apps were slightly improved, regardless of gender. 

This poster shares our experience of engaging middle school teachers in a collaborative design of a computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum through a researcher and practitioner partnership (RPP) among two public universities and three urban school districts in the Northeast USA. The project used the co-design approach to facilitate curriculum development and foster professional learning. In this poster, we introduce the co-design process, the developed curriculum, and teachers' professional learning experiences. Preliminary results indicate that the co-design approach supplemented with one-one-on coaching has not only facilitated the curriculum development but also fostered professional learning and collective capacity building for CS education. 

This pilot study explores the impact of the CS Pathways professional development (PD) program on the teachers' self-efficacy in teaching a middle school computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum. The main goal of the study is to investigate the attributes that describe the teachers' self-efficacy after their first-year participation in the PD. A total of 19 middle school teachers from two states, NY and MA, attended the CS Pathway PD program and completed the end-of-year survey pertaining to self-efficacy in CSDL; more than half accepted the interview to help further understand their perceptions (n=10). Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to study the attributes of the teachers' self-efficacy. The preliminary results capture teachers' self-efficacy patterns, which inform the PD and indicate its effectiveness and challenges. 

This paper presents an experience report from an NSF-funded researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) project. Based on a collaboration among two public research universities and three urban school districts in the Northeast USA, the goal of the project is to establish an institutionalized middle school computer science curriculum in the districts. The CS curriculum incorporates digital literacy skills as an integral aspect of learning computer science, and is based on students developing mobile apps that provide social and community good. Here, we share our professional learning process during the project's first year, which had been developed iteratively and dynamically adjusted to a remote format in response to exigencies of Spring 2020. The paper includes analysis of three data sets from teacher-participants: (1) their questions about the nature of the project, which we categorized into three levels: project, district and teacher levels. These questions bridge the visions and knowledge among different groups of the project partners; (2) analysis of semi-structured interview conversations with more than half of the teacher-participants; and (3) teacher survey responses. Our findings include two recommendations: that RPP projects elicit teacher questions to illuminate the three levels identified, and use strategies that engage teachers in designing a professional learning process for teaching computer science.