A Cultural Computing Curriculum

Abstract

Broadening the participation of underrepresented students in computer science fields requires careful design and implementation of culturally responsive curricula and technologies. Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs) address this by engaging students in historic, cultural, and meaningful design projects based on community practices. To date, CSDT research has only been conducted in short interventions outside of CS classrooms. This paper reports on the first semester-long introductory CS course based on CS-DTs, which was piloted with 51 high school students during the 2017-2018 school year. The goal of this study was to examine if a culturally responsive computing curriculum could teach computer science principles and improve student engagement. Pre-post tests, field notes, weekly teacher meetings, formative assessments, and teacher and student interviews were analyzed to assess successes and failures during implementation. The results indicate students learned the conceptual material in 6 months rather than in the 9 months previously required by the teacher. Students were also able to apply these concepts afterward when programming in Python, implying knowledge transfer. However, student opinions about culture and computing didnâĂŹt improve, and student engagement was below initial expectations. Thus we explore some of the many challenges: keeping a fully integrated cultural curriculum while satisfying CS standards, maintaining student engagement, and building student agency and self-regulation. We end with a brief description for how we intend to address some of these challenges in the second iteration of this program, scheduled for fall 2018. After which a study is planned to compare this curriculum to others.

Culturally-relevant and responsive pedagogy in computing: A Quick Scoping Review

“…For example, in the studies since 2018, Eglash and colleagues have continued to evaluate the use of CSDTs in formal settings (Davis et al, 2019). Curricula based around the Scratch programming environment have also been developed and tested in and outside of school (Franklin et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2021).…”

“…We will discuss each of these sets of studies in turn. Davis et al (2019) aimed to incorporate cultural computing into a standard Python programming course in schools and reported significant increases in students' learning of computing concepts during this time. Content that had taken nine months to learn in the standard course was covered in only six months in the adapted course.…”

“…Two studies used objective measures of learning gains, providing evidence that content was covered more quickly using the culturally responsive approach (Davis et al, 2019) and that learners improved their computing understanding and skills over the year of the ECS course (McGee et al, 2018). Both of these studies identified the importance of the teacher in implementing culturally responsive teaching: the quantitative analysis conducted by McGee et al revealed that years of teaching computing was a key predictor in student learning gains, while Davis et al discuss the reluctance of the teacher to engage with certain elements of the sociopolitical content of the curriculum and to allow learners to choose their own projects.…”

The efficacy and usefulness of software carpentry training: a follow-up cohort study

“…showed [133]. By working within a culturally responsive curriculum, student learning time was reduced by a third, which shows that addressing issues around diversity and inclusion can boost learning outcomes.…”

“…A 2018 high school study [133] examined whether a culturally responsive computing curriculum could better teach computer science principles and improve student engagement in class. The aim was to broaden the participation of underrepresented students in computer science.…”