Preface

What Is This Guide and Where Did It Come From?

Welcome to all educators reading this! Whether you are new to computer science (CS), equity in education, or both, we hope that this guide will support you to advance equity in CS education (CS Ed) in your context. Before you embark on your journey into this resource, we’d like to share some background about the people who have contributed to it and how it came about.

This guide is the product of a community of educators and researchers committed to equity-focused work. We draw on the knowledge and experiences of educators and researchers who have laid the foundation for equity efforts in CS and in education. As a collective of educators, teachers, administrators, learners, and leaders, we are committed to engaging in critical reflection and practice with and around computing and computing education.

We were purposefully brought together to provide professional development to New York City Public School teachers as part of the district’s CS Ed initiatives. The Director of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education, Christy Crawford, organized us as a group because of our range of professional experience and the diverse identities we hold around ability, class, gender and sexual orientation, language, nationality, race and ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, and more. Some of our many identities are reflected in Figure 1. We have spent time grappling with what these perspectives have offered as we have worked to better understand critical computing education.

Figure 1

Our Collective Identities^[1]

Our story begins in 2015, when New York City made a commitment that within ten years, the city’s public schools would provide meaningful CS instruction to all of its 1.1 million students. This effort was called “Computer Science for All,” or CS4All. Through a public-private partnership with the Fund for Public Schools, New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) began developing a blueprint for CS education to meet this commitment.^[2]

It quickly became clear that implementing the vision of meaningful CS for all in New York City involved two intertwined components. First, there was a need to increase teaching capacity for CS. Second, implementing meaningful CS instruction required meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse student population through relevant CS education.

Meeting the first goal found great success. When the CS4All initiative began, New York State did not have a CS teaching credential pathway. To ensure there were enough educators prepared to teach CS, NYCPS provided in-service teacher professional development, expanding the number of schools involved in the initiative.

However, progress toward achieving the second goal was more uneven. In examining the impact of the initiative, one study found that “schools not offering CS in New York City generally served higher-needs students, including English Language Learners, students with disabilities, low-income students, and students who were not proficient in math or English language arts” (Fancsali et al., 2022). Even as NYCPS mounted efforts to ensure that every school would have well-trained CS educators, it was clear that those educators and their collaborators needed tools to meet students’ needs.

Given the diverse population of NYCPS students, CS teachers needed support to ensure that all students received a meaningful and relevant CS education. Since the project began, this diversity has only continued to grow. During the 2023-2024 school year, for example, across the city, 42.2% of students identified racially as Hispanic, 19.5% as Black, 18.7% as Asian, and 16.2% as white.^[3] Of the district’s students, 16.3% were classified as English Language Learners, with many more speaking a language other than English in the home, and 21.6% of students had district-documented disabilities (New York City Public Schools, 2024).

This diversity reinforced the need to prepare CS educators to teach CS in ways that interrogated how power dynamics like ableism, racism, and sexism have shaped technology and students’ experiences with technology. The team leading the CS4All initiative recognized their role in contributing to social equity in technology through “attract[ing], engag[ing], and prepar[ing] the most diverse and socially aware generation of computer scientists and CS educators in the country” (Crawford et al., 2023, p. 3).

Experts from across New York City and the nation were brought together to consult, teach, and research how best to achieve this goal of equitably educating all NYCPS students in CS. These efforts aimed to ensure that all students had access to relevant CS coursework. But they also sought to go beyond access to CS education by preparing teachers who could disrupt—and help their students disrupt—the ways that people are marginalized in and by technology. To accomplish this goal, professional development offered by NYCPS was intentionally designed to support teachers in confronting and dismantling oppressions like ableism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia (Mirakhur et al., 2021). Computer science education was framed as an important contribution to a culturally responsive and sustaining education. This connection was bolstered in 2018 when New York State adopted a framework for culturally responsive-sustaining education.^[4]

Crawford headed up efforts to ensure that equity was included in all city-provided teacher professional development (PD) programs for CS education. Under Crawford’s leadership and in partnership with DiversFYI—a human and organizational development consultancy—the CS4All team launched a tiered, multi-year professional development program and learning ecosystem called “Exploring Equity in Computer Science” (EECS). EECS is guided by the following goals:

• Affirming students’ sense of identities in CS by centering the genius and joy of students who identify as girls, Black, Latine, Southeast Asian, and other historically marginalized communities in CS.^[5]
• Helping students acquire the skills they need to critically analyze attitudes, beliefs and systemic challenges related to ability, class, gender and sexual orientation, language, race and ethnicity, and the status quo in CS.
• Sharpening students’ activism and advocacy capacities so that they are able to use CS knowledge and skills as a way to improve their CS classrooms, schools, and communities.

To accomplish these goals, EECS is structured to provide intensive summer sessions that focus on introductions to racial and equity literacy. The summer sessions scaffold teachers into year-long, curated PD activities as part of the journey work of equity. During successive school years, teachers progress from Level 1 to Level 4 (see Table 1) as part of the ongoing process required to work toward equity (Crawford et al., 2023).

Table 1

EECS Levels (see Crawford et al., 2023)

EECS Level	Level Description
Level 1	Level 1 works to help teachers build a foundation of shared knowledge and shared language for equity-focused CS work. As they enter enquiry work, teachers make new commitments to challenge inequity in CS and CS education.
Level 2	Level 2 moves beyond individual teachers and the social and emotional work required to engage in equity work. In Level 2, teachers consider systemic characteristics of oppression in CS. These “developing” teachers move beyond making individual commitments to “recogniz[ing] inequity in the systems in which they exist and teach” (Crawford et al., 2023, p. 10).
Level 3	Level 3 invites teachers to start addressing institutional and systemic challenges within their CS education contexts. These “advancing” teachers start to take up identities as “teacher advocates” or “teachers able to voice their own needs and the needs and rights of their students” (Crawford et al., 2023, p. 11).
Level 4	Level 4 teachers become members of the Ingenuity Team. They have “graduated” from EECS but “seek to continuously work with other CS4All alumni and staff to provide oversight to the NYC CS4All community and to implement the equity-focused skills they have gained. … [They] also provide leadership and mentoring for CS colleagues” (Crawford et al., 2023, p. 11).

The summer sessions were developed by three teams selected from many groups who had been involved with EECS. These teams included (1) DiversFYI, the consultancy who assisted with designing the EECS ecosystem as a whole; (2) the Creative Technology Research Lab (CTRL) of the University of Florida, which studies and supports techniques to aid in equitable CS education for students with disabilities; and (3) Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS), a research-practice partnership focused on bi/multilingual learners and CS education.

In summer 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic and protests galvanized by the police’s murder of George Floyd blasted through NYC, Crawford assembled these three teams to provide online workshops on racial literacies, translanguaging pedagogies, and Universal Design for Learning for nearly 100 educators and administrators. As the teams repeated the summer PD annually, they gradually integrated the program and templates across these three areas to provide an interwoven foundation for equitable CS teaching.

In 2021, the teams came together to take what they had learned and create a new, integrated resource that could not only support the EECS courses in NYC but would also bring these approaches to a wider audience. With funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the teams began meeting and drafting the present guide. Additional collaborators adjacent to the three teams were brought in, and the name “Computer Science Educational Justice Collective” (CS-EJC) was chosen to describe the mission of the group.

The guide includes a variety of materials previously developed by the three individual projects described earlier as well as collaboratively created materials developed specifically for this guide. It is intended to be complementary to and supportive of the materials developed with NYCPS. The book is designed to grow over time and to be used in both structured PD settings (with in- and pre-service educators) and as a tool for individual educators, administrators, or teacher trainers. It is a work in progress. It by no means covers every aspect of equitable teaching in CS, but it serves as a foundational resource for any educator beginning a journey toward advancing educational equity in CS.

We have used a combination of authorship designations to identify key lead authors of each chapter and the larger CS-EJC group as a source of inspiration and feedback. We also gratefully acknowledge feedback from a wide variety of educators and teacher PD experts whose ideas and insights informed and refined this guide. See Authors and Acknowledgments for full details and author biographies.

References

Crawford, C., Kuyenga, M. A., Talley, L., Mirakhur, Z., & Clark, H. (2023). Organizing for educational equity in computer science: Lessons from New York City’s CS4All initiative. New York City Department of Education. https://sites.google.com/schools.nyc.gov/cs4all-equity/about-us/impact-report?authuser=0

Fancsali, C., Lee, J., Hill, K., Adair, A., Rivera-Cash, E., & Clough, S. (2022). CS4All: Examining equity in computer science access and participation in NYC schools. NYU Research Alliance. https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/research-alliance/research/cs4all-examining-equity

Mirakhur, Z., Fancsali, C., & Hill, K. (2021). The potential of CR-SE for K-12 computer science education: Perspectives from two leaders. Voices in Urban Education (VUE), 50(1). https://doi.org/10.33682/3en3-cbgn

New York City Public Schools. (2024). Demographic snapshot 2023-24: Visual guide. https://infohub.nyced.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/23-24-demographic-snapshot-summary—july-2024—web.pdf