Overview of the Book

This guide is intended to support educators and others in their efforts toward advancing equity in computer science education (CS Ed). We ourselves are a collective of administrators, educators, leaders, learners, researchers, teachers, and technologists, and we hope that this book will help others like us and anyone else committed to equity in CS Ed.

Our goal is to make this guide accessible and useful to readers with different roles and commitments. Some readers may be K-12 educators teaching CS as a discipline, or they may be working to integrate CS into other content areas to make interdisciplinary connections. Some may teach CS or computing-integrated subjects in higher education or may be involved in teacher preparation. Some may be engaged in CS Ed policy or research; others may be in administration and leadership roles. Given this variation, we hope this guide will support many different needs. Here, we provide an overview of the book’s content and organization as well as features of the book that might help different audiences find value in what this guide offers.

Purposes of This Guide

We invite readers to personalize this guide for their contexts and communities. This guide might be used in many ways:

Content Overview

We have intentionally designed the book to build across different topics, but each chapter also stands alone and can be read, assigned, or used individually.

The book begins with an Introduction (Chapter 1) that orients readers to the guide and serves as an entry point into considering issues related to equity in CS and CS Ed.

Chapters 2 through 4 explore key concepts related to exploring equity in CS.

Each of these chapters illustrates their respective concepts through examples and concrete applications to CS and CS Ed. Together, Chapters 2 through 4 provide a foundation of shared understanding that we build on moving forward.

Chapters 5 through 7 build on this foundation by helping readers prepare a toolkit that they can use to explore equity issues in CS and CS Ed.

• Chapter 5 offers several theoretical lenses that can be used to recognize how inequity manifests, both in society and in educational spaces. Chapter 5 also uses these theories to “bust” common myths that perpetuate inequity in CS and CS Ed.

Chapters 6 and 7 prepare readers to engage in equity work on a personal level. Because of the deep work involved in these types of reflection and commitment setting, it is highly recommended that readers engage in Chapters 6 and 7 in community with others.

Following Chapter 7, the book considers what it looks like to advance equity in CS education with three specific focuses. Chapters 8 through 10 examine digital racial literacy in CS education, Chapters 11 through 14 take up language (in)justice in CS education, and Chapters 15 through 17 consider the Universal Design for Learning framework in CS education. The first chapters of these three focuses provide foundational understandings of the topic, and later chapters apply the topic directly to CS Ed.

Chapters 8 through 10 examine digital racial literacy in CS Ed. Similar to Chapters 6 and 7, they are intentionally written to be read and engaged with in community. They invite readers to pause and reflect individually and with others and to identify steps to take action. Their structure makes them especially appropriate for settings like professional development, book clubs, or conversations with critical friends.

Chapters 11 through 14 consider the role of language in CS education.

Chapters 15 through 17 consider the Universal Design for Learning framework in the context of CS Ed.

Text Features

Given the many potential purposes and audiences that this book could serve, we have worked to provide concrete, practical instructional strategies and the conceptual and theoretical foundations for those strategies, all grounded in research. Working toward this, we have included a number of different text features:

This Guide as a Living Document

As a final note, we recognize that there are many issues and topics related to advancing equity in CS Ed that we did not address in this guide. We also know that our understanding of topics that are covered in this book will continue to grow. We see this guide as a living document and community resource. To facilitate ongoing conversations and learning, we have licensed the book under a Creative Commons copyright license. This means that you are free to share, adapt, and remix what you find here to further your own efforts in working toward equity in CS Ed. We just ask that you credit the authors of the guide, indicate any changes you make, and license your new contributions under the same Creative Commons license. We look forward to how this guide will be taken up and expanded by you!