Integrating Critical Analysis of Society and Technology into K-12 Computing Through Teacher Co-Design
As demand for K-12 computer science (CS) education grows, we argue that most students would be best served by CS classes that not only teach computational thinking/programming, but also challenge them to critically analyze the role of technology in society. One of the main barriers to implementing this into K-12 classrooms is a lack of research on how in-service CS teachers can integrate critical pedagogy into their school context and existing curricula. This lightning talk presents a proposed method to co-design lessons with current K-12 CS teachers to integrate critical perspectives into their classrooms. Teacher participants will join a synchronous summer professional development where we will teach them critical computing content drawn from relevant books (e.g. [1, 2, 3]) and frameworks (e.g. [4, 5]), and collaborate with them to design or modify lessons that will engage their students in critical analysis. Teachers will be encouraged to include content relevant to their communities. For example, a teacher in Detroit might teach facial recognition in the context of continued use of the technology by police, despite wrongful arrests [6]. Results from this work will inform future sociocultural content integration into K-12 CS courses (e.g. “ethics content”). Feedback from the audience will be used to improve the methods and literature review of the study.