Module 6 — Kingsborough Community College

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  Posted by Sara Vogel, PhD. (she/her) on June 7, 2023 at 4:04 pm

  Background

  The CITE Equity Working group has put together some resources to support faculty to think about equity in the context of designing CITE Artifacts

  • Equitable CITE Pedagogy: Putting it into Praxis – Long document on Manifold
  • Interactive version of our goals, approaches, design principles and moves

  Task

  • Feel free to annotate our document on Manifold with any noticings, wonderings, resources, and ideas you have as you review it! You will need to go to this site and create an account: https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/

  Then, come back here and share your responses to any number of these prompts:

  • What are some noticings / wonderings you have about how we’ve framed equity in CITE? Any feedback for us?
  • Where do you see connections between the spotlights you read last week and the ideas shared about equity in this week’s resources?
  • What are some of the inequities that you are interested in tackling as you design and roll out CITE artifacts?
  • After reading this, where do you think you might challenge yourself to go next?

• Joanna (she/her)

  Member

  June 17, 2023 at 12:41 am

  I mentioned this in my annotations. I absolutely love what CITE is striving for. I recently had my students (who were taking a capstone course) design and teach a play based lesson in their classrooms. Some had a really hard time allowing students the space to play even after various demonstrations, class activities, videos. It leaves me wondering – How do we introduce play to our teacher candidates in a way that resonates? Many of my students come from traditional classrooms, where there is one right answer, the teacher spends much of their time talking in front of the class, standardized tests are the norm. Given that we are shaped deeply by experience, how do we facilitate comfort with play given that this was not our students’ experience AND given that many of the classrooms that they find themselves in have stringent protocols, assessments, etc. in place? It can be done. I am an eternal optimist. But, I think it has to be done in a specific way and alongside broader systemic change so that our efforts do not contradict what happens in classrooms for most of the day. Cohesion is key to learning and I cringe at the thought of a student using a maker space one minute and then walking into a high stakes, standardized test the next.

  In terms of connections, this reminds me of Dr. Tribuzio’s work with Scratch since her work gives credit to someone where credit is due. It also reminds me of Dr. Mitchell’s work since the focus there is on being mindful. I really enjoyed the artifacts that I reviewed and learned a lot from them!
  Laura Kates

  Participant

  July 1, 2023 at 5:21 pm

  I really appreciate the thoughtful, in depth approach taken by the CITE group to framing equity. One thing that stands out to me is the inclusion of joy, creativity and expression. I think that, commonly, when issues of educational equity are addressed, and when computing related praxis is explored, the focus is frequently on quantitative findings like student outcomes on tests, college admissions, etc. Of course, these are immensely important dimensions to consider when considering equity in education but I also think joy, creativity and expression are important, just in and of themselves too because they go to the quality of life that individuals connected to NYC public schools will experience, no matter what they go on to do or earn.
  My main piece of feedback for you is to consider including more community college faculty in the Working Group, because the perspective we bring about our students, and how they live, learn, and thrive, is an enormously important one for the CITE equity framework to be informed by.
  In terms of my own goals and challenges, for years I’ve had the goal of relinquishing more control to students when it comes to the design and enactment of my assignments, particularly the blog assignment that I’ll be revising for my artifact. Engaging with CITE’s work on equity has deepened my commitment to being more open and flexible and integrating students’ lived experiences and preferences more. One specific thing along these lines that I’m thinking about now is, with my class, beginning the blog project by facilitating some sort of inquiry into education-related blogs, then giving my students more voice and choice about how the blog posts should be approached and designed, and what the components of the posts should be.