While being responsive might cause one to look back, relying on tradition and heritage,and being sustaining might cause one to look forward toward the future, being both responsive and sustaining creates an opportunity to synthesize something new. First, I use a systematic literature review method to uncover approaches to being “culturally sustaining” in CS education and how these approaches are enacted to answer the call to improve representation in CS education and industry. This review provides a critical foundation for the subsequent design of the empirical studies here and elsewhere. Next, the research and teaching that carried out in this dissertation project uses culturally responsive-sustaining computing (CRSC) pedagogical strategies to carefully demonstrate the intersections of Black cultural imagination, liberation, and technology in ways that sustain, reinterpret, and reimagine the ethos of tradition. Amiri Baraka tells us that creation powered by the Black ethos (i.e. the epistemology and philosophies of African descended peoples) brings about “very special results” and that these special results express truthfully and totally the experiences of communities, affirm heritages, and shape futures. Thus, the second article is a design-based research study that produced a design narrative, detailing the design of CRSC curricular materials for Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP CSP). I found that leveraging Black textile traditions in the development of an online application and curricular materials is valuable for informing CRSC research and design. Here, the adoption of CRSC pedagogies divest from racist ideologies and logics and make explicit connections between culture and the AP CSP curriculum. Finally, in the third article, I focus on teacher professional development through a distributed model of co-teaching. In this project, there is a concerted effort between 3 educators to connect computer science (CS) to cultural expertise. To support rigorous, culturally-informed CS education a cultural expert from the local community is brought into the classroom to support educators’ implementation of CRSC materials and efforts to connect to the community. This exchange does not minimize the technical acumen required for rigorous CS education; however, it challenges the status quo of what CS knowledge is, where it comes from, and how it is used. I conclude with a summary of key findings and a synthesis of the limitations and implications of this complete body of work.
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