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Culturally Responsive Computing

Jean J. Ryoo

February 9, 2021

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Today’s Roadmap

Group padlet
Overview of Culturally Responsive Computing
Introduction to Student Voice Research Project (Ryoo; UCLA Computer Science Equity partnerships)
Student testimony & teaching examples
Group Discussion

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What does “Culturally Responsive Computing” mean to you?

Please add any ideas you have about what it means to make computer science “culturally responsive” for your students in your classrooms!

Here is a link to a padlet:

bit.ly/CRCpadlet

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Some History�STUCK IN THE SHALLOW END (2004-8)

Disparities in CS Learning that Impact Access

• STRUCTURAL INEQUALITIES

• BELIEF SYSTEMS

• PEDAGOGY

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Computer Science for All

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Culturally

Relevant

Culturally Responsive

Culturally Sustaining

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Ladson-Billings: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Academic success: the intellectual growth that students experience as a result of classroom instruction and learning experiences.
Cultural competence: the ability to help students appreciate and celebrate their cultures of origin while gaining knowledge of and fluency in at least one other culture.
Sociopolitical consciousness: the ability to take learning beyond the confines of the classroom using school knowledge and skills to identify, analyze, and solve real-world problems.

[Harvard Educational Review Vol. 84 No. 1 Spring 2014, p. 75]

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Culturally Responsive Computing

All students are capable of digital innovation.
The learning context supports transformational use of technology.
Learning about one’s self along various intersecting sociocultural lines allows for technical innovation.
Technology should be a vehicle by which students reflect and demonstrate understanding of their intersectional identities.
Barometers for technological success should consider who creates, for whom, and to what ends rather than who endures socially and culturally irrelevant curriculum.

[Kimberly A. Scott, Kimberly M. Sheridan & Kevin Clark (2014): Culturally responsive computing: a theory revisited, Learning, Media and Technology,]

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Research-Practice Partnership

Los Angeles & Mississippi

Key Partners: Stephanie Bundle; Brittany Cohen; Cynthia Estrada; Shelly Hollis; John Landa; Jane Margolis; Alicia Morris; Vic Pacheco; Je’Monda Roy;

Jean Ryoo; Tiera Tanksley; Natascha Woods.

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Amplifying Students’ Voices & Perspectives

IDENTITY

AGENCY

ENGAGEMENT

Majority Urban Latinx School District

Majority Rural Black Schools

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IMPORTANCE OF PEDAGOGY �

Alicia Morris’s Computer Science Classroom

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Connecting technological innovation to intersectional identity, community,

and context: Example from the classroom

Student Debate:

Cashless Society?

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Teacher: With digital exchange of money you don’t have to be physically present to send money to your tia…�

Student A: If you go to Mexico, “not lots of places have those little machines to swipe cards. So, what about the raspado man?”

Student B: “Lots of kids buy things but don’t have credit cards”

Student C: A cashless society would “widen the poverty gap” because not all people have access to technology; so a cashless society would “increase classism and racism.”

Student D: “what about the church basket? You going to put in your debit card?”

Student A: “what about the homeless person?”

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CRC: Addressing Issues of Power and Equity

Culturally responsive teachers: “understand that we’re operating in a fundamentally inequitable system….that the teacher’s role is not merely to help kids fit into an unfair system, but rather to give them the skills, the knowledge, and the dispositions to change the inequity” (Gloria Ladson Billings)

[https://www.the74million.org/article/74-interview-researcher-gloria-ladson-billings-on-culturally-relevant-teaching-the-role-of-teachers-in-trumps-america-lessons-from-her-two-decades-in-education-research/]

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Stellaluna

10th grader

AP CSP student