HASTAC 2023 Conference

The Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) initiative supports City University of New York (CUNY) education faculty across 15 colleges to prepare teacher candidates to meaningfully integrate computing and digital literacies into their pedagogical toolkits to advance equity in their future classrooms. Our research and implementation teams at CUNY, alongside collaborators from Michigan State University, provided over a hundred CUNY faculty members (so far) with professional development sessions during the Summer of 2022 that embody HASTAC’s theme of “critical making” by focusing on our faculty’s ability to think about, with, through, and against technology. Now, participating faculty are working to integrate their own digital artifact designs into their teacher education courses. These designs aim not only to integrate computational thinking/digital literacies into teaching but also to draw attention to the interwoven connections between the content of teacher-ed curriculum and technology’s relationship to it. Designs take a wide range of forms, including homework assignments, class activities, multi-step projects, and more.

In preparing faculty for the design process, they were exposed to computational thinking and design through multiple lenses, including accessibility, student agency and creative computing, equitable K12 computer science, scientific inquiry and modeling, data privacy, digital civics and activism, and other dimensions of criticality around technology and the way it is embedded into our culture. The goal was for the faculty to develop a well-rounded perspective on computing and society. In centering an equity framework, much of this work has moved towards decentering the dominant ways of doing and knowing using STEM-based skills. Some faculty have taken up this framing within their approaches to digital artifact design by integrating methods such as data analysis through digital storytelling in multicultural and bilingual education courses, pattern recognition as a tool in historical research, identifying misinformation and being critical of mass media, and many more computational processes in various teacher education settings.

In this panel, you will be hearing from members of the CITE research team as they share insights into the structure of the CITE initiative, design choices made when planning professional development, and how they aimed to promote critical making. Joining the research team will be several faculty members participating in the initiative, who will share their experiences undergoing professional development, thinking through how to integrate these approaches while intentionally addressing specific New York State learning standards, student perceptions of computational thinking and digital literacies, and other challenges faced during the design and implementation processes.