Module 6 — Bronx Community College

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  Posted by Aankit Patel (he/him/his) on June 9, 2023 at 2:13 pm

  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?

• Stephen Powers

  Participant

  June 9, 2023 at 2:45 pm

  The three areas focused on by the CITE sub-group are:

  – empower learners and communities

  – promote joyful, meaningful learning

  – transform institutions towards justice

  • I think the framing of equity is well done, very broad, and it needs to be given the audience of senior colleges and community colleges, the participating programs, the diverse faculty and staff and most importantly the student diversity in terms of race, religion, age, gender, etc.  We are a diverse group and equity needs to be sought everywhere
  • The faculty spotlights tried to bring CS to the students, and now we are trying to bring the students more to the CS – that is, how can we better integrate the students, the content, the technology and the teaching?  I do not think all players will ever be equal, as there will always be communities that have more resources than others, so while inequality may be a social or academic reality, it does not lessen the quest for equity. .  For example, I think Dr. Mitchell gave us insight into college classroom equity and Dr. Smith offered insight into adolescent student equity.
  • Access in terms of technology, as well as language and culture.  The digital divide is an ongoing issue that I first phrased into the achievement gap(s) and now I think technology and data access are in that mix as well.  As someone who teaches fieldwork as well as urban education I see the inequity, but I believe that the people who live in disadvantaged communities find ways to solve issues of equity.  Many of my students do not have computers – they do everything on their phone.   I am also sensitive to students with disabilities (cognitive, physical, social, emotional).
  • I had already broadened the array of educational theorists that I teach to or from with more women and minority members.  That is a start.  I want to get students more involved in the creation of material for course use.

   
  Carlos Liachovitzky

  Member

  June 12, 2023 at 7:41 pm

  There is lot to digest here about equitable CITE pedagogies! I like that the goals include different dimensions from the personal to the institutional, and consider the experience through the process (e.g., joy, meaning, well-being). I found the selected “moves” useful as a framework to keep in mind when designing a course, an activity, a curriculum, etc. I was attracted to the “adopting expansive notions of learning” as a move to apply to any aspect of life.

  I do not yet have a concrete plan for how to explicitly incorporate equity in a lesson (or a topic), including as many goals and considering as many moves as possible.  However, I’ll probably do it practicing computational and digital literacy in the context of learning about the Theory of Evolution. My initial impulse is to look into misconceptions and myths about evolution, which are often driven by unshared power and at least some way of oppression (opposite to two of the mindsets discussed in a module 2) that are also drivers of inequality.  I’ll probably will be coming back to these resources and to the drawing board a few (many?) more times.
  Elise Langan (She/Her/)

  Member

  June 14, 2023 at 5:09 am

  In reading through the CS4 Imitative, I was glad to see that Gloria Ladsen-Billings was cited since I have long been an admirer of her work on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.

  I was struck by the emphasis on the “4I’s” which help teachers understand and develop strategies to mitigate social oppression and disadvantage; however, I think this could be difficult to untangle for students/pre-service teachers who are themselves facing enormous challenges regarding equity and access–particularly to digital resources.

  Another important aspect was the high number of teachers (88%) in the NYC study  who said they would modify their CS lessons in order to reach a more diverse population. It was also gratifying to see that there was an emphasis on consideration of students’ social and cultural background.
  Propa Akter (she/her)

  Member

  June 21, 2023 at 10:56 am

  Empower learners and communities; promote joyful, meaningful learning; and transform institutions towards justice — these three Equitable CITE pedagogy goals are powerful. They’ve given me a better understanding and have opened my eyes to the positive effects CT can have on learning/teaching experiences.

  The main topics that I’ve had in the back of my mind for my artifact are SEL and digital storytelling, so the goal of “promoting joyful, meaningly learning” resonates with me. This reminds me of one of one of the tinkering activities on Dr. Linda Tribuzio’s spotlight (The Digital World Meets the Music World in an Early Childhood Education Course) I am referring to teacher candidate Rolla Khass’ scratch animation about the story of her name: https://padlet.com/indranilchoudhury/animate-your-name-with-scratch-h7hesf0ul9jk48s . Sharing a story about yourself and educating others in a creative way through technology — an activity like this can definitely promote joyful and meaningful learning.

  An inequity I’m interested in tackling is linguistic inequity. Although much of teacher education (general certification exams, essays, etc.) are administered in English, this can be challenging for many BCC students whose first language or dominant language is not English. I’ve had my own professors at CCNY accept assignments in certain languages other than English because they believe students are still able to show they understood the requirements of the task and content and are able to express themselves. This approach isn’t for everyone, of course, but allowing students to utilize the language they feel most comfortable in for certain assignments may be a good way to empower learners and communities, promote meaningful learning, and transform institutions towards justice.
  Minkyung Choi

  Participant

  June 22, 2023 at 11:20 am

  I really appreciated the way in which equitable CITE pedagogy was broken down into three areas: goals, approaches, and design principles. I immediately thought that for me, equity often revolved around goals and approaches rather than design principles — probably because I had never considered how equity could be incorporated into design principles. Looking back at the spotlights, I could see that each of them did have elements of all three areas. I wonder how possible it is to try to achieve equity in all three areas evenly. I would like to challenge myself to develop an equity framework in design principles.