Supporting Teachers to Integrate Computational Practices and Design Opportunities for Equitable Participation in Science Classrooms

We designed a professional learning series for science teachers to support their integration of computational practices into instruction, and to design equitable learning opportunities for students to engage in computation. During the professional learning series, we provided the teachers with two main resources to support their enactment of equitable computational pedagogies: computationally integrated (CI) tasks, and the Equity Quantified in Participation (EQUIP) tool. We also broadcasted a contextual discourse about the importance of equitable computational instruction, and infused this narrative into all professional learning sessions. Our goal for the contextual discourse was that it might shape teachers’ personal vision of instruction (their critical pedagogical discourses). We describe two major assertions from the data analysis. First, the primary resources (CI tasks and EQUIP) focused teachers’ attention on different kinds of instructional interactions with distinct topical themes for each resource. Second, each teacher’s critical pedagogical discourses shaped how they recognized and used the primary resources, and we illustrate differences between teachers using contrasting cases.