Module 6 — LaGuardia Community College

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  Posted by Sara Vogel, PhD. (she/her) on June 7, 2023 at 4:05 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?

• Agnieszka Rakowicz (she/her)

  Member

  June 14, 2023 at 10:52 pm

  I found the idea of citational justice illuminating. Who and how we cite has implications on how truth is defined in various disciplines and can further marginalize those already less included in dominant discourse. In linguistics, for example, we often talk about speech communities. When learning about a speech community, looking at primary resources may be more effective than reading a peer-reviewed article – written by a scholar who is not part of that speech community. I may challenge my students and myself and create an assignment in which students will explore the citations in several ‘seminal’ sociolinguistics articles. The ones that can be found in Google Scholar, for example. Students can be asked: How many primary sources have been included? Whose ideas are considered facts? Who is most cited? What and who do you think is missing? Why? It could be done in groups as a collaborative project and then be presented to everyone in class. Presentations and follow-up discussions will help students reflect and engage critically with research in sociolinguistics.
  Laurie Gluck (she/her)

  Member

  June 15, 2023 at 11:53 am

  The readings inspired many ideas about what and how for artifact design; it also highlighted the challenges. Two notions that are sticking with me now are ‘internalized misogyny and white supremacy’ and ‘diversity is the norm’ mentioned in the Empowering Learners and Communities section. In our, Introduction to Language class, a primary goal is to foster open mindedness about the diversity of language, to blunt the right/wrong, proper/slang, biases that virtually all students bring into the study of language. My hope for the future educators in the room is that they appreciate the wonder of the human capacity to acquire and use language to communicate with different communities and be creative with language. The right/wrong binary the fear of sounding foreign, or not have a native-like accent in their home language are ideas and internalized feelings that students hold that go against the course goals. A principle of equitable design is to understand that ‘diversity is the norm’ and ‘consider learners’ multifaceted identities’. So my big question is how to get students to see their own linguistic multi-faceted identities and value them equally after years of learning to suppress them.
  Maria Jerskey (she/her)

  Member

  June 16, 2023 at 6:30 pm

  I loved the acknowledgement that tech plays a role in fostering injustice. It’s really helpful and actually inspiring to know that equity in tech is a project that needs a range of “experts” and stakeholders. That in and of itself levels the playing field by assuming that we are all contributing to identifying and transforming inequitable practices.  The inequities that I have been focused on tackling in my work (outside of CITE) have to do with the interconnection between racism and linguicism. (And I am really gratified to see language included as a site of inequity in the Equitable CITE Pedagogy docs!)  As I design and roll out CITE artifacts, I’d like to challenge myself to center and affirm learners (particularly in my design around language and race), rather than lead with tech (which, because I’m so new to this, I might be wont to do).
  Maria Savva

  Participant

  June 19, 2023 at 7:29 pm

  Schools systems tend to treat subjects/learning as if they exist in silos. This approach may unwittingly foster faulty assumptions such as the idea that culture has no relationship to technology, or that equity and identity are not relevant to the hard sciences. The reality is that we live our lives every day in an interdisciplinary way.  Teaching this way is also important. My challenge is to ensure student-teachers are aware of the interconnectedness of learning and how their learning (and their students’ learning) is affected by more nuanced aspects associated with identity, equity and access.
  Thomas Cleary

  Member

  June 20, 2023 at 12:07 pm

  Something that stood out to me in “Equitable Cite Pedagogy: Putting It Into Praxis” was the “access to what?” section.  A lot of hype that comes from computer science initiatives usually seems to think that just access to technology itself is the answer to equity issues, taking a “if you build it they will come” approach. Usually this might involved workshops and lessons that will introduce you to a tool, but not in a meaningful way that makes the tool useful unless you already had prior knowledge on how to use the tool.

  I like how CITE, and the spotlights, seems to be focusing instead on getting students to understand technology both as a tool, but also how some of these tools connect to every day tasks. I want to try to focus this connection to address inequities focusing mostly on the “empower learners and communities” goal, not necessarily by introducing to students yet another tool, but how they can evaluate the structures and existing tools that present information to them.  As for how to challenge myself, it would be to incorporate universal design into a lesson effectively. Its something that I’ve worked on in instruction before, but can always be tweaked to fit all learning needs since each time I do a lesson there is always a new issue that comes up.
  Kenneth Yin (he/him)

  Member

  June 23, 2023 at 4:09 am

  In reading about equity discourses in “Equitable CITE Pedagogy: Putting It into Praxis,” a most thought-provoking document prepared by the CITE Equity Working Group, I was struck by the idea that equitable pedagogy can support students and educators to not just engage with the existing protocols for technology, STEM, and computing education, but to change the ways in which these are in fact implemented in schools. Indeed, students need to be shown how to respond effectively to oppression. I agree wholeheartedly with the messaging of community activists, educators, and others that education ultimately needs to be understood as part of broader liberatory social-justice projects. And although large bureaucracies, both at CUNY and beyond, can admittedly be slow to respond to issues surrounding systemic, institutionalized racism and other forms of oppression, teacher educators and staff at CUNY, for example, in their advocacy of values around equity and liberation can have an important impact on what happens on a day-to-day basis in their classrooms and programs. I am most interested in promoting cultural and linguistic pluralism as I design and roll out CITE artifacts.