CULTURALLY RELEVANT PEDAGOGY

Introducing culturally relevant pedagogical practices to your classroom can make all learners feel welcome and represented, and that computing is for them

In order for computing to be relevant, concrete, engaging and accessible to all learners, educators should reflect on their curriculum, materials, and teaching practices. Educators can draw on the full breadth of student experiences and cultural knowledge, facilitate projects that have personal meaning for learners, and discuss issues of bias and social justice.

What is culturally relevant pedagogy?

Culturally relevant pedagogy1 is a framework for teaching that emphasises the importance of incorporating and valuing culturally relevant and responsive computing curriculum design and teaching (helloworld.cc/crpguidelines). These guidelines identify three main focus areas, with some key elements outlined below:

■ Curriculum ■ Teaching approaches ■ Learning materials

Contextualise computing

Can you, for example, bring in the social, historical, or political context of a particular development in technology, ensuring that not only the dominant culture is represented? Can you make cross-curricular links to other subjects, or link to specific times in the school calendar (for example, Black History Month)? Understanding the relevance of theoretical concepts to real life is important in keeping a wide range of learners engaged in computing.

SUMMARY

Culturally relevant pedagogy emphasises valuing all learners’:

■ Knowledge ■ Heritage ■ Ways of learning

Culturally responsive teaching includes:

■ Opportunities for personally meaningful projects ■ Curricula that draw on learners’ cultural knowledge and experience ■ Exploration of ethics, social justice, and bias

Benefits of culturally responsive teaching include:

■ Improving learners’ attitudes towards the subject ■ Encouraging more learners to select computer science as a qualification ■ Improving understanding in core computing concepts all learners’ knowledge, ways of learning, and heritage. It promotes the development of learners’ critical consciousness of the world, and encourages them to ask questions about ethics, power, privilege, and social justice. Culturally relevant pedagogy emphasises opportunities to address issues that are important to learners and their communities.

Culturally responsive teaching2 builds on the framework above to identify a range of teaching practices that can be implemented in the classroom. These include:

■ Drawing on learners’ cultural knowledge and experiences to inform the curriculum ■ Providing opportunities for learners to choose personally meaningful projects and to express their own cultural identities ■ Exploring issues of social justice and bias

It is important when using the term ‘culture’ that we do not focus on only one characteristic, such as ethnicity or race. While a person’s ethnic background can contribute to their culture, a person’s cultural identity can be based on a number of influences, including their age, gender, where they live, their family income, and their religious beliefs. Making computing a subject that is responsive to these different elements of learners’ cultural identities will engage a wider range of learners.

Implementing culturally relevant pedagogy

The Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) has created guidelines for implementing

Allow student choice and promote collaboration and discussion

For example, allowing learners to choose a problem or issue that is personally meaningful to them to address through technology can encourage them to persist when facing difficulties. Collaboration and discussion allow learners to bring different expertise and knowledge to tasks, which can help challenge stereotypes about computing as a career.

Ensure your learning materials are accessible and inclusive

Consider the videos you use to introduce a topic, for example: are there captions that can support those with English as

■ The focus areas of culturally relevant and responsive teaching can be represented by a tree

an additional language? Can the captions be translated into other languages? Do the videos represent computing in a stereotypical way, or do they feature diverse groups of people? Ensuring that everyone can access and feel that they belong to computing is important, as it helps to engage and inspire learners.

You can think about these focus areas like a tree, with the curriculum forming the roots of the approach, and the branches representing a number of different teaching approaches you can take to deliver the curriculum. The leaves represent the learning materials you use in your computing lessons. Beginning with the curriculum and working your way up will give you the strongest basis from which to implement culturally relevant pedagogy in your classroom.

Benefits

The aims of culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching are to set high standards for all learners in terms of academic success, and to engage and retain more diverse learners in a range of subjects.

In computing, taking this approach has:

■ Improved learners’ attitudes towards the subject, increasing engagement, confidence, and feelings of belonging3 ■ Encouraged more learners to select computer science as a qualification ■ Led to learning gains in computational thinking and core computing concepts4 5

Providing authentic and meaningful contexts for learning computing and identifying different applications of computer science outside of school can help more learners see the relevance of computing to their lives and their communities.

Considerations

In order to successfully design and implement culturally responsive teaching, educators must first understand the approaches and reflect on their own unconscious biases. Adding a few activities as an add-on to regular teaching will not have the same impact on learners as incorporating the approach throughout all lessons. You can improve your understanding of the approach by reading the RPF guidelines and by looking up some of the resources suggested for professional development. These guidelines also encourage you to reflect on how your own cultural identity may affect the way you experience the world, and computing as a subject.

It is also vital that teachers identify areas in their current teaching where changes could be made. It is useful to work on this activity with a team of teachers, to bring together different ideas and cultural identities and ensure that culturally relevant pedagogy is being implemented similarly across different classes. It is even better if teachers can work across disciplines to incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy in a cross-curricular way to help embed the approach within the school.

Finally, uncovering unconscious biases and discussing meaningful, complex topics will include negotiating some uncomfortable conversations with colleagues and learners. It is important to model how to deal with these conversations sensitively. It is vital that everyone is able to speak openly and feel that their opinions and experiences are being heard and valued.

Making your computing teaching culturally relevant will include challenging conversations and difficulties at times. The reward, though, is a classroom where everyone feels welcome and represented, and feels that computing is most definitely for them.

REFERENCES

1 Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491

helloworld.cc/culture1

2 Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press helloworld.cc/culture2 3 Eglash, R., Gilbert, J. E., Taylor, V., & Geier, S. R. (2013). Culturally responsive computing in urban, after-school contexts: Two approaches. Urban Education, 48(5), 629-656 helloworld.cc/culture3 4 Davis, J., Lachney, M., Zatz, Z., Babbitt, W., & Eglash, R. (2019). A Cultural Computing Curriculum. In: Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 11711175 helloworld.cc/culture4 5 McGee, S., et al. (2018). Equal Outcomes 4 All: A Study of Student Learning in ECS. In: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 50-55

helloworld.cc/culture5