Connected Learning Summit 2019

How should we think about computing education and its relationship to justice? While dominant equity frames around computer science education center on making CS learning accessible to all youth (‘for all’) and especially under-represented groups (‘broadening participation’), these frames have notable limitations when it comes to questions of justice. There are, however, many research and practice initiatives in formal and informal digital media spaces that share a commitment to justice -- from anti-racist design tools to sociotechnical economic empowerment -- as a core value, with distinct visions and differently grounded approaches. In this structured poster session computing education researchers and practitioners will share examples of different justice-centered CS education projects. We analytically group these projects into three “families”: (1) Computing education for social impact (technology as a means of promoting social change); (2) Critical computational literacies (technology as subject of critique and site of resistance or remix); and (3) Culturally Responsive Computing (computing as situated practice in cultural context). This session will explore the divergences and convergences within and across these “families” of justice-centered computing education, promoting interrogations of the dominant pedagogical and methodological assumptions around CS teaching and learning. By challenging these established boundaries, we aim to radically reimagine who, where, and what counts as computing education across all sites of learning and cultural participation.