Critically Conscious Computing Research: Pre-service teacher programs
Michelle Wilkerson, Professor
Education
Open. Apprentices needed for the spring semester. Enter your application online beginning January 17th. The deadline to apply is Monday, January 27th, 4 p.m..
My research so far has focused on how teacher education programs incorporate justice and critical consciousness into K-12 computer science curricula. By investigating both their theoretical foundations and the lived experiences of CS pre-service teachers (PSTs), I have found significant variance in how these programs prepare educators to address issues of equity in their classrooms. Building on these findings, I am now examining the experiences of teachers trained in critically conscious CS programs, as well as how such frameworks manifest in credentialing programs across the West Coast (and potentially beyond).
This project has two main areas of research. The first will be to assist with interviewing teachers who graduated from a critically conscious computer science (CS) teaching program with a CS credential and to transcribe and analyze the resulting data from those interviews.
The second area is a wider analysis of CS credentialing programs across the West Coast (with the potential to expand to the US). This part of the project would involve building a web-crawler for the syllabus and/or program information of CS Credentialing programs. The goal of this analysis would be to focus on if (and how) ideas of justice and critical consciousness are included and how that is reflected in the course sequence.
Role: Position 1 (Qualitative Interviews & Analysis):
This position would involve transcribing interviews with teachers who graduated from a critically conscious CS program. If time, students could also assist with coding and analyzing the qualitative data, and assisting in summarizing findings for reports or presentations.
Position 2 (Web-Crawler & Program Analysis):
This position would be to develop/configure a web-crawler to gather syllabi and program information from various CS credentialing websites. After the web crawler is built, the role would transition to organize the collected data for analysis, identify references to justice and critical consciousness, and collaborate on basic summaries or data visualizations.
Qualifications: For the interview and analysis project, experience with (or a desire to learn) basic qualitative research methods would be helpful, but not required. For the web-crawler project, familiarity with programming or data organization is beneficial. Overall, interest in exploring critical and justice-centered perspectives in computer science education is the most important qualification.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Brendan Henrique, Graduate Student
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Related website: https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2024.115107
Related website: https://corelab.berkeley.edu/