Resisting the Normative through Curricular Program Co-design with Teachers: Questioning the Epistemologies, Ontologies, and Axiologies in Computing Education

The alignment of computing education with neoliberal logics has limited its epistemological, ontological, and axiological goals. It normalizes the delinking of computing from politics, economics, and social realities, turning computing classrooms into sites for erasing marginalized voices and production houses for software labor. The instrumental ideology that attacks public education and teachers has reduced computing teaching to the acquisition of value-free and abstract skills, and teachers’ roles to the transmission of discrete concepts. We present two counterstories developed with six high school teachers to demonstrate resistance to the normative ways of doing, being, and valuing within computing education through their three-year-long curricular collaborative design (co-design) work. We employed composite counterstory methodology to create fictional characters from our collective teacher experiences while protecting our identities. Drawing from qualitative analysis of video recordings and transcripts from five online teacher reflection sessions at the end of the co-design work, we developed composite counterstories to understand: (1) How have teachers resisted the normative role that computing education plays in introductory computing classrooms within their curricular design? (2) How has the co-design process supported teachers in becoming transformative intellectuals in computing education? We developed narratives to illuminate emergent themes from the analysis and demonstrate how teachers questioned the abstractness of the discipline, compartmentalized identities promoted among learners and teachers, and resisted software labor production as the end goal of computing education. They identified co-designing as an opportunity to have a voice in educational transformation, continue to grow professionally, foster trusting relationships, and build solidarity towards joy and possibilities.