CS4All Lockport

Notes on Grant

  • aligns with solicitation aims (1) and (3), providing:
    • high school teachers with the preparation, professional development (PD) and ongoing support they need to teach rigorous computer science courses
    • schools and districts with the resources needed to define and evaluate multi-grade pathways in CS and CT
  • Note that NSF sees breath as PreK-8 and depth as 9-12. Tricky to find a place for ECS, for example.
  • The term “computational literacy” is used in this solicitation to refer to non-CS use of comptuers. I contest this but not here.
  • Proposal should be aligned with the US STEM Education Strategic Plan
  • Strands (must select one; must be stated in first line of summary):
    • High School: the focus is on preparing and supporting teachers to teach rigorous CS courses
    • Prek-8 Strand: focus is on designing, developing, and piloting instructional materials that integrate CS and CT into preK-8 classrooms;
    • PreK-12: the focus is on designing pathways that support school districts in developing policies and supports for incorporating CS and CT across all grades…
    • Research: the focus is on building strategically instrumental, or “high leverage” knowledge about the learning and teaching of introductory computer science to support key CS and CT understandings and abilities for all students.
  • Proposals on any strand must address, in a significant manner, longstanding underrepresentation in computing.
  • Need to define proposal as RPP. Use DBIR framing.

One-pager

This proposal

Research questions

  • How will CS fit into the high school curriculum?
  • What will CS teachers’ jobs look like?
  • How can a teacher preparation program best prepare
  • How can a residency program best contribute to teacher preparation as well as meeting school needs and building community understanding and support?

Theoretical basis:

  • Build around Penuel’s (2019) call for “infrastructuring.” " Infrastructuring refers to activities that aim to redesign components, relations, and routines of schools and districts that influence what takes place in classrooms." This is particularly promising for making the most of the opportunity (and the inherent challenge) which bringing CS education into schools provides / poses.

  • therefore, we propose that in this process, we don’t conceptualize the school as monolithically representing the needs and interests of the community, but rather we view the school as a particular political configuration which has emerged through interaction of underlying forces. You can’t understand a system with a snapshot; you can’t understand a communtiy’s learning just by looking at the school. So if we want to “infrastructure,” to design into a community’s learning, we need to not just be grounded in the school.

We want to develop a model of collaborating with the teacher preparation program which makes the school more accountable to its community stakeholders. I start with Lockport because I live in this community; I’m an insider/outsider in that I’m pretty new here, but as a resident who has made a long-term commitment to the school, I have skin in the game.

How shall we avoid having our progressive vision stymied by backlash or becoming domesticated? (Tyack and Cuban (1985)).

Can we make the past history of My Brother’s Keeper part of the context of this grant?