Netter Center meeting

Pre-meeting

Attendees: Suzanne Rosenblith, Chris Hoadley, Chris Proctor

Thoughts ahead of the pre-meeting

  • Positionality: I used to live at 48th and Baltimore, in Lea’s catchment. We lived in Philly because my partner was completing her MLA, lots of discussion about community voice and agency in design.
  • Claim: Universities today are part of the (Marxian) base, not the superstructure.
    • But the critical view of (for example) the Penn Alexander school would suggest they are part of the superstructure, a performance on top of economic relations which ultimately don’t change.
  • How do we integrate this with the findings of “Black Buffalo” [@taylor2021]?
  • Why isn’t ELP part of this conversation? Why not Buff State?
  • The “community service courses” in CSE (for example) lack positionality.
  • “Its primary mission should be advancing democracy democratically on campus, in the community and across the wider society.” (53)

“Chilean sociologist Eugenio Tironi that the answer to the question “What kind of education do we need?” is to be found in the answer to the question “What kind of society do we want?” (Tironi)” (p. 18).

Academically-based community service courses.

  • How is the “democratic implementation revolution” like DBIR?

From my project:

This two-year small RPP proposal addresses two long-standing challenges in scaling up access to high-quality secondary computer science (CS): the lack of high school CS course offerings and the lack of qualified CS teachers. We propose to explore the reciprocal benefits of designing solutions to both these problems at the same time. Through a process of design-based implementation research (Penuel et al., 2011), stakeholders from the university and the high school will design a preservice CS teacher residency partnership and will also design the school’s CS curricular pathways. We hope to show that a community-based, justice-oriented approach surfaces mutually-beneficial solutions to increasing all students’ access to CS course offerings and training the teachers who will bring them to life. This proposal would explore the hypothesis that there are benefits to designing solutions for both problems at the same time, based on the key insight that both problems depend on building a broadly-shared vision of how and why computer science will become part of the school.

What we need

  • Buffalo’s schools are not democratic.
  • How do we do this in a way that serves the people it should serve?
    • Engage with systems of privilege in a way that reconfigures power relations.
  • How does CS show up as community-owned?
  • How does the Netter Center position itself?

Down the road

Next steps

  • Integrate looking at models (CS teacher prep; Lockport design committee)

Readings

Harkavy, I. (2023). Dewey, Implementation, and Creating a Democratic Civic University. The Pluralist, 18(1), 49-75.