6 Building Your Computer Science Education Equity Toolkit

Acknowledgements: Melissa M. Parker

Chapter Overview

This chapter lays a foundation for developing an equity-oriented praxis, or engaging in reflection and learning to take action to transform computer science education (CS Ed). The chapter offers guidance to support educators in journaling and dialogue practices to develop self-awareness. There are six reflection topics with prompts that invite teachers to consider their own identities and what that means for talking about topics like race, identity, and power with students; their past experiences with schooling and CS; and their motivations as CS educators. Journaling and reflection as part of developing self-awareness are important practices that are part of building an equity toolkit.

Chapter Objectives

After reading this chapter, I can:

• Explore my identities, past experiences, and motivations and how they shape my work as a CS educator.
• Journal and dialogue with critical friends to practice self-awareness and educate myself about historical and contemporary issues of (in)equity in CS Ed as part of personal development.
• Identify actions that I can take to work toward equity in CS Ed that are based on my reflections.

Key Terms:

ableism; affinity group; antisemitism; archaeology of self; classism; critical friend; dead angle; gatekeeping; homophobia; intersectionality; praxis; racism; self-efficacy; sexism; transmisia/transphobia; trigger

Amanda and Yeidy’s Stories

One of the most important steps you can take in your journey toward equity-centered CS Ed is to deepen your self-awareness and continue your learning about equity. These ongoing efforts will help you strengthen the skills you’ll need to notice, process, and respond to issues of inequity. As CS educator Karime noted, “There is no script that you can follow to respond to equity issues. This type of preparation is essential to be able to think on your feet and respond appropriately without creating further issues yourself.”

Given the intensity of an average school day, it can be difficult for teachers to stop and notice when their practices or when policies and wider systems are causing inequitable outcomes or harms. It can also be a challenge to find space and time to work toward interrupting inequitable patterns and resolving situations in an equitable manner. This chapter provides supports to hold space for this work. It will help you better understand yourself and your own role in systems that create just or unjust outcomes (Stevenson, 2014). Critical and continuous learning about your own identities and about historical and current power dynamics is a key part of this work (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021). Teachers in CS should pay special attention to the dynamics that shape CS fields, education, and broader society.

Most of this chapter is dedicated to providing you with resources so that you can learn through journaling and self-reflection. We wish to begin the chapter with an important note. Some of the topics and prompts invite you to dig deeply into your past and may be connected to challenging or traumatic past experiences that surface difficult emotions (e.g., fear, overwhelm, shame). Grappling with strong emotions can be an important part of this learning. However, we encourage you to prioritize caring for yourself — mentally, physically, and emotionally — as you do this work. Caring for yourself will look different for everyone. We provide some suggested social-emotional supports in Resource 2 that can help as you engage in the activities in this chapter. We also invite you to draw on additional resources as needed.

With this caution in mind, to begin this journey, we share stories from two teachers, Amanda and Yeidy, who described their personal growth as they have engaged in practices to support self-awareness and become more equity-minded CS educators.

Amanda shared:

Yeidy described her experiences as well:

These stories show how equity work is personal work. Amanda and Yeidy described unique journeys deeply linked to their own identities. Engaging in the practices outlined in this chapter supported both of them to expand their perspectives and grow to become CS teachers working toward equity in powerful ways.

The Role of Self-Awareness in Building an Equity Toolkit

As we recognize the complex inequities in CS and CS Ed (see Chapter 3), getting started doing equity work can feel daunting. But avoiding equity work because of its nuance and complexity only reinforces the status quo. At the same time, addressing equity issues is a long-term process. It isn’t a “quick fix” that you can easily add to your existing teaching practices. It’s something more fundamental and transformational, requiring committed work every day. It requires self-examination and learning that lead to intervening in and changing harmful policies, practices, and systems. It also requires accepting that there is no way to do this work perfectly. Everyone will make mistakes and can learn from them and do better. What works for one teacher may not work well for another because we all have different backgrounds, serve different groups of students, and face different situations. What is most important is to continue our efforts as part of an ongoing journey.

A key foundational step of this work is self-awareness, or being able to “read, discuss, and write about situations that address … inequity and … bias as part of the norm of the schooling process” (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021, p. 22). Self-awareness goes beyond learning one-off techniques to use with students. Instead, it involves committing yourself to lifelong, continuous learning that leads to individual and collective action. Self-awareness is a key component of an equity-oriented praxis.

We experience the world through our own perspectives and angles. As teachers, we bring our whole selves into the classroom — our bodies, our experiences, our beliefs and values. All of these shape what we notice and prioritize and whether and how we feel empowered to act (Rodgers & Scott, 2008). Our personal perspectives can support us to promote equitable change. We can influence practice by being positively biased toward values like social justice and affirming diversity. At the same time, we may also have dead angles, or areas related to equity work that we can’t see from our current perspectives, that keep us from promoting equitable classroom changes (Copur-Gencturk et al., 2020). These dead angles may come simply because we lack awareness or experience with a given topic. When this is the case, learning more about an issue can help us expand our perspectives and make changes. Other times, our dead angles may be based in negative biases about groups of people. In these instances, we may need to engage in deep self-reflection to shift our mindsets and beliefs. Learning to recognize and work on both types of dead angles is an important part of self-awareness as part of our equity toolkit. CS teacher Christina shared how she recognized a dead angle that she was previously unaware of as she heard students share their experiences and made changes to her classroom practice as a result:

As we noted in the beginning of the chapter, given our past experiences and backgrounds, particular conversations about power and oppression in society might be difficult. Everyone has topics that are challenging for them to engage with. These topics might trigger us, or surface strong emotions or memories. Triggers can motivate us to take actions that promote equitable practice, or they can lead us to reproduce patterns that limit equitable changes. It is important to be aware of our triggers and develop coping strategies to manage our emotional responses to these topics. (See Resource 2 for ideas.) Stronger self-efficacy, or confidence in discussing topics related to identity, can help us better notice and respond to equity issues in our settings. Proactive coping strategies in the moment can also help groups address conflicts that may arise or tensions that prevail when dialoguing about equity issues. As we develop these strategies for ourselves as individuals, we are better able to create classroom cultures that can support students when they face triggers of their own. Although addressing equity issues out loud can be challenging, it is necessary. Silence often contributes to inequity and marginalization.

While this chapter centers on self-awareness, it is important to recognize that promoting equitable CS Ed is the work of collectives, not just individuals. Equity work can be emotionally stressful and taxing when taken on by just a few. This can lead to burn-out, which doesn’t advance equitable changes at all! People whose identities have been marginalized in CS Ed often end up doing a disproportionate amount of equity work because they can’t as easily ignore inequity. But people who are afforded privilege based on their identities also have a responsibility to learn for themselves about equity issues and to use their privilege to work toward changes for educational justice (Love, 2019).

Journaling and Dialogue to Develop Self-Awareness

Being willing to probe deeply into your experiences, beliefs, values, and motivations is key to developing self-awareness on your journey to becoming a CS Ed equity leader. Scholars like Sealey-Ruiz call this work an archaeology of self, or the “deep excavation and exploration of beliefs, biases, and ideas that shape how we engage in the work [of equity]” (Sealey-Ruiz, 2022, p. 22).

There are many ways to engage in this reflection toward self-awareness. In this chapter, we focus on journaling and dialogue as activities that can deepen your understanding of equity and lead to meaningful action. Journaling involves reflecting and recording your thoughts in words, images, mapping, or another format that resonates with you. Dialoguing involves sharing some of those thoughts and reflections with critical friends and engaging in open conversation about the topics. (See Resource 3 for more on finding critical friends.) We invite you to tailor both practices to what works best for you. Below is an overview of how to engage in these practices.

Remember that journaling and dialogue are merely steppingstones on your path to embracing equitable change in CS. Let curiosity be your compass, dialogue your fuel, and action your ultimate destination.

This chapter provides prompts to reflect on the following topics:

• Unpacking identity
• Talking about race, identity, and power
• Examining school experiences
• Understanding your relationship to computing and CS
• Considering your motivations
• Relating your motivations to your students

Each topic begins with some background context and a rationale, followed by some questions to invite reflection. Feel free to focus on a specific question instead of all of them, follow the topics in any order, or return to a topic more than once. These topics are meant as a guide for your own personal journey, so you should use them in ways that are most helpful to you.

Reflection Topic 1: Unpacking Identity

Psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum (2003) writes about “the complexity of identity.” She notes that identity is not just about how you self-define but also about who the world tells you that you are, and how you and others like you are represented in the world. Are people like you missing from the story? Highlighted or privileged in the story?

Many aspects of identity combine with social contexts to help us integrate the past, the present, and the future into a cohesive sense of self. Tatum (2003) argues that there are seven core components of identity that most shape people’s experiences in the United States: age, class, disability, gender, racialization/race, religion, and sexual orientation. Other salient identity markers in U.S. culture include our language practices, our nationality/ethnicity, our immigration status, our political party, and our geographic locations.

Identities are socially negotiated between the way we perceive ourselves and the way others and society position us. For example, in his book Dreams from My Father (1995), former President Barack Obama described how his own identity as a Black man developed in relation to the different places he lived. Because conceptualizations of race differ across cultures, Obama’s experiences around race were not the same in Indonesia, Hawaii, and the continental United States. Although he was a Black man living in each of these places, the way he understood this identity and the way others interacted with him differed greatly across contexts.

The distinction between how society assigns us identities and how we choose to identify ourselves is sometimes complicated. An individual may identify as belonging to a particular racial group, but when filling out a government survey, that option might not appear. An individual might self-identify as a member of a socially marginalized racial group but may have physical features that lead others to assume that the individual is racialized as white, affording them certain social privileges (known as “passing”). How we and others self-identify and how identities are assigned to us based on social norms are important distinctions to be aware of.^[2]

While individuals may experience marginalization or oppression for different reasons in different contexts, in the United States, certain identity groups have been systematically afforded privileges while other groups have been systematically afforded disadvantages. This inequity is due to long-standing historical and present-day processes that shape individual action and institutional practices. (See Chapter 5 for more on this.) For example, people racialized as Black Americans have been systematically afforded less power in U.S. society. Those racialized as white Americans have been afforded more power through processes like slavery, Jim Crow laws, and many other ways that racism has been reproduced in society over time. Groups have fought to change this reality over time, but racism remains a persistent fact of U.S. life. Because identity-based inequity shapes U.S. society, CS, and CS Ed, reflecting on our own identities is key to developing self-awareness.

How someone identifies with regard to one aspect of their identity (e.g., race or gender) doesn’t necessarily imply a certain life experience. The labels applied to a person’s identity may influence, but do not fully determine, their experiences. How people are socially identified in categories is a dynamic process. The theory of intersectionality, explored in Chapter 5, can shed light on how marginalization is experienced uniquely by groups at the intersections of multiple identity categories (Crenshaw, 1991).

As teachers, our identities can afford us privileges and/or disadvantages in our professional lives. For example, Kohli (2018) describes the racist microaggressions and race evasive discourse that racially minoritized teachers reported having to navigate. These oppressions took a toll on their ability to stay in the teaching workforce.

The questions below will help you begin to unpack how power dynamics are connected to your identity and how they shape how you experience and perceive your teaching context and how others perceive you in that space. As you consider your many interrelated identities, we also invite you to think about how you can become what scholar activist Bettina Love calls “coconspirators.” Coconspirators is a positive term that describes those who move beyond allyship to take action and conspire against inequitable systems. They draw on the power and privilege afforded to them by society to work toward equitable change in educational spaces (Love, 2019).^[3]

Reflection Topic 2: Talking About Race, Identity, and Power

We all have different identities. We also have different comfort levels and experiences with talking about power and identity. Given our cultural backgrounds, some topics may be considered “taboo” or unacceptable to talk about in a given community. Some of us may hesitate to have conversations on topics like race, gender and sexual orientation, and power out of fear that such conversations could get us in trouble. Because these topics are hotly contested in the United States, some avoid conversations about power and identity entirely. In some states and districts, discussing such topics in classrooms might even be grounds for disciplinary action, a lawsuit, or harsh community backlash. This reality has been manifest in recent years through book bans and legislation limiting how teachers can discuss topics like race and gender.^[5]

Some educators may feel more comfortable bringing up these topics and questioning social hierarchies. They may have had firsthand experience coping with oppressive conditions. They may have been in environments where curiosity about these issues was encouraged. They may be coming from a place of privilege, so they risk less by bringing up issues related to power. Or, they may have not experienced negative impacts from talking about these issues.

It is important to recognize that those who may feel comfortable talking about some issues of identity and power may feel less comfortable or prepared to talk about others. For example, one chapter author, a white Jewish woman, grew up talking about the effects of antisemitism with friends, family, and members of her community. Yet she also internalized a climate that put taboos around discussions about disability and race.

Part of building an equity toolkit is becoming more comfortable discussing issues of power and identity. Becoming a CS equity teacher leader means engaging in these topics proactively with students and colleagues. You can create a solid foundation for engaging in dialogue on these topics by considering your own socialization into these topics, triggers that are difficult for you, and dead angles related to these concepts.

Reflection Topic 3: Examining School Experiences

Like most aspects of our lives, people’s experiences with schooling are shaped by social and political influences related to identity. School systems may have biases embedded toward or against students with particular identities. For example, you may have been offered many opportunities to sign up for extracurricular programs to enrich your learning outside of school, or you may have had no such opportunities.

Your interpersonal interactions with classmates and educators also likely influenced how you experienced schooling. For example, if you are a member of a group that is afforded less power in society, you may have been exposed to oppressive conditions, prejudice, or microaggressions related to that identity that have added up over time. If you are a member of a group that is typically afforded more social power, you may have received positive messages about your potential. Or perhaps your experiences resist these patterns for particular reasons.

Your experiences affect your impressions of school growing up, which can inform how you currently teach. It’s important to understand these schooling experiences so that you can understand why you may react in certain ways to things in your current school environment. Reflecting on your schooling experiences can also help you avoid recreating harms you may have experienced and help you pass on opportunities that were afforded to you.

It is equally important to recognize how your experiences may not be shared by students in your school, even when they share similar identities. These differences may be due to students’ personal lives, how schools function, or how society has changed over time.

Reflection Topic 4: Understanding Your Relationship to Computing and CS

How we relate to CS is shaped by our exposure to it. And our exposure to computing is often shaped by broader systems of oppression and advantage (see Chapter 5). Like any school subject, there are ways in which we have been encouraged or discouraged to engage with CS. Some of us may have been provided with access to new tools and technology at home from a young age. Others may have had to rely on low-resourced schools to expose them to technology. Some of us may have been encouraged to tinker with code or have been praised for our creativity for trying to “hack” or “mod” our favorite games. Others may have been outright discouraged from or denied access to CS or been informed that CS exploration was a waste of time.

In formal school settings, you may have been told that you were smart enough to take a CS class, or you may have been told that you would never make it in that environment. You may have associated technology with a nerdy subculture, which might have attracted you to computing or repelled you away. All of these factors affect your relationship to CS and influence how you talk to students and colleagues about their CS abilities. Understanding our own relationship to CS can help us break unhealthy cycles of exclusion and create more inclusive CS experiences for others.

Reflection Topic 5: Considering Your Motivations

Educators come to teaching for many reasons, and CS educators come to CS teaching for many reasons. To promote equitable practices, it’s important to understand your “why,” or your motivation(s) for what you do. Are you looking to prepare the next generation for economic opportunities? Do you hope to support young people in expressing themselves creatively about issues they care about? Are you looking to promote skills like problem solving, collaborating, and persistence? Is coding with young people fun and fulfilling for you?

Our whys are unique and may be connected to our own histories. For example, some educators may feel a responsibility to provide opportunities for children because they did not get those same opportunities when they were students themselves. Conversely, they may wish to provide those opportunities because they did experience them as students and found them powerful and motivating.

Our whys propel us to act and keep us motivated on tough days. At the same time, not all rationales promote equitable classroom practices. For instance, we may make assumptions about who can thrive in CS based on our own experiences with gatekeeping in the field. Similarly, we should interrogate or challenge motivations for CS Ed that are rooted in savior complexes seeking to “save” or “rescue” marginalized groups through technology. These motivations can reproduce deficit narratives about students and disempower them. The following prompts will help you consider your own motivations for teaching CS.

Reflection Topic 6: Relating Your Motivations to Your Students

Your whys and your experiences should inform and motivate your classroom work. At the same time, it is important to recognize that your students’ whys will likely be different from yours because of their differing identities and experiences. Focusing on a narrow set of purposes for CS Ed in your classroom, like getting a high-paying job as a software engineer, might leave out students who don’t resonate with that rationale. CS educator Christina built on this idea:

Listening to students’ interests and motivations can help you shape your curriculum or standards in ways that meet your students’ interests and goals.

To explore this topic, it’s important to think about who your students are and how you get to know about their backgrounds, experiences, interests, and talents. As you narrow in on your motivations, consider how who your students are might shape the motivations they have. Consider as well how their experiences with CS and CS Ed might be shaped by their different identities and how those identities have been positioned in society. Reflections like these can help you understand how historical and current power dynamics shape your experiences with your students.

Revisiting Amanda and Yeidy’s Stories

Amanda and Yeidy are not the only ones who have found journaling, dialogue, and reflection beneficial. Many of the teachers we have worked with shared how these practices helped them develop self-awareness and gave examples of how their learning led to changes in their practice. Journaling, dialogue, and reflection are key to building an equity toolkit and the foundation for an equity-oriented praxis.

Amanda concluded her thoughts with the following reflection on journaling as a practice:

Reflection Questions:

1. What do you think about the journaling and dialogue practices described in this chapter? How can you see them being beneficial? What challenges might arise trying to engage in these practices?
2. The topics covered in this chapter are not comprehensive. What other topics might you benefit from reflecting on as you engage in equity work in your setting?

Takeaways for Practice:

• Choose one topic and journal about it. Reflect on the experience and consider how you might adapt the journaling practices described in this chapter to fit your personal preferences and circumstances.
• Engage in dialogue with a critical friend about a topic in this chapter. Reflect on the new insights that you came away with as a result of your conversation.

Glossary

Term	Definition
ableism	Implicit or explicit social preference for nondisabled bodies and minds that creates prejudice and oppression of disability and disabled people (Shew, 2020).
affinity group	A group of people with shared identities who come together to connect around a common goal.
antisemitism	A system of prejudice, discrimination, and hostility toward Jewish people.
archaeology of self	The “deep excavation and exploration of beliefs, biases, and ideas that shape how we engage in the work [of equity]” (Sealey-Ruiz, 2022, p. 22).
classism	A system of prejudice and discrimination in favor of people with higher socioeconomic status (e.g., upper middle-class) and against people with lower socioeconomic status (e.g., lower class).
critical friend	A supportive person with whom there is a relationship of trust who can provide constructive feedback and ask difficult questions related to equity.
dead angle	An issue or topic related to equity that a person lacks awareness of or experience with or holds negative biases in ways that prevent equitable change. It also avoids ableism implicit in terms like “blind spot.”
gatekeeping	Institutional policies and structures that control who gets to participate in opportunities and who has access to resources in ways that limit the participation of marginalized groups.
homophobia	A system of prejudice and discrimination against or fear or discomfort with people who identify as LGBTQIA2S+.
intersectionality	A theory that asserts that different aspects of people’s identity (e.g., disability, gender, race) overlap and intersect in ways that result in oppression that cannot be understood or addressed by focusing on each identity separately (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 2019).
praxis	The combination of teaching practices and theory. This guide supports praxis by providing theories about equity that help teachers develop mindsets to take transformative action toward equitable CS education.
racism	A system of prejudice and discrimination based on race that privileges individuals racialized as white and oppresses racially minoritized individuals.
self-efficacy	A belief in one’s ability to accomplish a task or achieve a goal.
sexism	A system of prejudice and discrimination based on gender and gender identity that privileges men and oppresses women, non-binary, and gender-fluid individuals.
transmisia/transphobia	Both terms describe a system of prejudice and discrimination against people who are transgender or non-binary and a fear or discomfort with people who are transgender or non-binary. “Transmisia” emphasizes how prejudice and discrimination are linked to hatred, revulsion, and disgust, rather than fear (KosmicKult, 2020). It is an alternative to ableist language connected with the word “phobia” (Planned Parenthood, n.d.).
trigger	A topic or conversation that surfaces strong emotions or memories; triggers can motivate equitable action or reproduce inequitable patterns.

References

Collins, P. H. (2019). Intersectionality as critical social theory. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478007098

Copur-Gencturk, Y., Cimpian, J. R., Lubienski, S. T., & Thacker, I. (2020). Teachers’ bias against the mathematical ability of female, Black, and Hispanic students. Educational Researcher, 49(1), 30-43. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X19890577

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241-1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039

Kohli, R. (2018). Behind school doors: The impact of hostile racial climates on urban teachers of color. Urban Education, 53(3), 307-333. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085916636653

KosmicKult. (2020, July 19). Hate is NOT fear: Reframing homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. Medium. https://medium.com/@kosmickult/hate-is-not-fear-reframing-homophobia-biphobia-and-transphobia-beabec366dc6

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.

Obama, B. (1995). Dreams from my father. Three Rivers Press.

Planned Parenthood. (n.d.). What’s transphobia, also called transmisia? Planned Parenthood. https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/gender-identity/transgender/whats-transphobia

Price-Dennis, D., & Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2021). Advancing racial literacies in teacher education: Activism for equity in digital spaces. Teachers College Press.

Rodgers, C. R., & Scott, K.H. (2008). The development of the personal self and professional identity in learning to teach. In Cochran-Smith, M. Feiman-Nemser, McIntyre, D. J., & Demers, K. E. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (3rd ed., pp. 732-755). Routledge & Association of Teacher Educators. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203938690

Sealey-Ruiz, Y. (2022). An archaeology of self for our times: Another talk to teachers. English Journal, 111(5), 21-26. https://doi.org/10.58680/ej202231819

Shew, A. (2020). Ableism, technoableism, and future AI. IEEE Xplore, 39(1), 40-85. https://doi.org/10.1109/MTS.2020.2967492

Stevenson, H. C. (2014). Promoting racial literacy in schools: Differences that make a difference. Teachers College Press.

Tatum, B. D. (2003). Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria: And other conversations about race. Basic Books.

Resource 1: Journal Prompts Reference

Resource 2: Therapeutic Techniques to Support Reflection

Resource 3: Finding Critical Friends