"Social media is...sort of our East India Trading Company:" High School Computing Teachers Engaging at the Intersection of Colonialism and Computing

Revised

December 5, 2023

Abstract

There have been calls recently to integrate social justice issues with computing and to teach computing as a non-neutral discipline. Among many critical perspectives considered, colonialism and its manifestation in computing is emerging lately. While we barely know about its implications for secondary computing education, high school teachers' engagement with this issue is yet to be examined. In this paper, we qualitatively analyzed the participation of 12 high school computing teachers in the U.S. in curricular co-design sessions to understand: How did teachers relate to the theme of colonialism? And, what connections did they see to secondary computing teaching? We saw that teachers, though not fluent with the theme initially, quickly related to it through their racial and ethnic backgrounds and U.S. colonial history. They further proposed pedagogical strategies to support student learning within classrooms. Based on these findings, we discuss the need to investigate these connections and their implications for design, research, and practices within K-12 computing education globally.

Jayathirtha, Gayithri and Chapman, Gail and Goode, Joanna. (2023).