Preparing teachers to engage in civic participation through computing
Scholars like Ruha Benjamin have cautioned how hegemonic technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen racism against Black and Brown folks due to racial biases in"neutral/normative" Artificial Intelligence and over-surveillance of Black folks. K-12 education can also contribute to this hegemony. Culturally Responsive Computing (CRC) is an approach that works with students to challenge these hegemonic narratives and construct better anti-racist dynamics in the society while using various technologies.Unfortunately there exist several problems in fully realizing this. The K-12 Computer Science (CS) space, like much of CS, is dominated primarily by White folks which increases many hegemonic and racist issues. There are implications both in the CS field and in the world, through racially-biased technologies like facial recognition software that do not accurately identify dark-skinned folks. White K-12 teachers in CS have shown to be often race-evasive, which further exacerbates addressing these problems. CS teachers have also often separated the socio-political from the technical aspects in CS, which reduces the possibility of students addressing the racist issues in the field and through applications of CS. In this dissertation, first gap in the literature that I address is about how White CS teachers "attend to their own racial identities" in the context of teaching CS. The second gap in literature that I address is about teachers attending to socio/technical dichotomies in CS. I conducted workshops and case studies to see how three White high-school CS teachers 1) explore their racial identities, White privilege, and racism in the context of CS, and 2) How these teachers implement a lesson that encourages their students to be involved in civic engagement through CS and technology. I found that having targeted opportunities to discuss White identities and privilege in a group allowed teachers to 1) complicate and unpack their White identities instead of shying away from it, 2) debate White privilege, 3) start reconciling with the tensions and guilt they experience while exploring these topics. I also found that using a specific computing tool that focuses on school desegregation helped teacher think concretely about socio-political aspects of technology use. For instance, the three teachers were able to implement lessons that encouraged students to think about the implications and precautions of using technologies. The strategies introduced in this dissertation have implications for future research and practice and advancing the ways in which we approach integrating CRC in formal learning contexts like K-12.
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- In Collections
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Copyright Status
- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
- Material Type
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Theses
- Authors
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Moudgalya, Sukanya Kannan
- Thesis Advisors
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Yadav, Aman
- Committee Members
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Burgess, Terrance
Goode, Joanna
Lachney, Michael
- Date Published
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2022
- Subjects
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Educational technology
Computer science--Study and teaching
Discrimination in science
United States
- Degree Level
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Doctoral
- Language
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English
- Pages
- ix, 140 pages
- ISBN
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9798363500176
- Permalink
- https://doi.org/doi:10.25335/x8d0-7061