Designing a residency-based CS teacher preparation program with a high school community

There is widespread consensus amongst researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and families on the importance of expanding access to K12 computing education. However, implementing computer science (CS) courses in high schools and hiring qualified teachers to teach them are major barriers, particularly in schools serving marginalized populations. Prior work has shown that community involvement is important for designing how new CS courses will fit into a school’s program; community involvement is also important for designing residency-based teacher preparation programs in which future teachers learn to make their disciplinary knowledge relevant and salient to their students, who are multi-faceted members of families, communities, and cultures. This research-practitioner partnership between SUNY Buffalo and Lockport City School District explores the potential benefits of designing solutions for both challenges at the same time, based on the key insight that both depend on building a broadly-shared vision of how and why computer science will become part of the school. This project will equitably broaden participation in computing by developing models by which marginalized communities are included in envisioning the role computing will have in their children’s futures. Through a process of design-based implementation research, stakeholders from the SUNY Buffalo and the high school in Lockport City School District will design a pre-service CS teacher residency partnership and will also design the school’s CS curricular pathways. In order to support community members in empowered, informed participation, a group of students will learn CS in a youth bootstrapping course, followed by a bootstrapping course for the community co-taught by youth from the first course. This project will use a process called conjecture mapping to study how the design of the bootstrapping courses produce situated understandings of CS, how these understandings support empowered participation in the CS design committee, and how community involvement in the CS design committee yield effective, equitable, and broadly-supported designs. The project team hopes 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. The resulting knowledge, models, and research capacity will directly support the establishment of a regional community of K12 CS practice in western New York while offering models and design processes which can be replicated elsewhere. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.