Reflection 3.9 - Supportive Practices, EngageCSEdu

Why?

Why focus on supportive practices when we think about teaching and learning programming? Well, ..., because a huge part of the population does not show up when we look at who is doing computer science. Computer science is arguably one of the most gender and race imbalanced discipline in STEM.  This has been true for a long time and, while some progress is being made, the problem still exist and is big! We could literally spend an entire course examining the historical shift and pressures behind this (think "Hidden Figures"). While we don't have that kind of time, we DO want to teach computer science and programming to everyone and we want them all to be successful. Using supportive practices and teaching inclusively helps everyone learn better. We all should have the goal of helping all our students learn.

 

Readings

The readings below are relatively short, probably only 10 or 15 minutes at the most. But thinking about them should take a bit longer.