Browsing by Author "Owens, Aileen"
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Item Computing in rural America: Developing K-8 coding pathways for Kentucky Appalachia(Digital Promise, 2020-11) Burke, Quinn; Iwatani, Emi; Owens, Aileen; Tackett, Traci; May, PaytonWhat are the technical (and cultural) challenges of bringing computational thinking to small-town school districts? The overwhelming majority of computing initiatives focus nearly exclusively on urban/suburban districts. This presentation shares the challenges/promises of such efforts in an area economically devastated by the departure of the coal industry.Item Pivoting in a Pandemic: Transitioning from In-person to Virtual K-8 Computing Professional Development(Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), 2021-03) Burke, Quinn; Iwatani, Emi; Ruiz, Pati; Tackett, Traci; Owens, AileenThis poster reports on year one of a three-year NSF-funded Research Practitioner Partnership (RPP) to develop a K-8 pipeline for computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) education within two rural school districts in Eastern Kentucky: Pikeville Independent School District and Floyd County Schools. Economically devastated by the departure of the coal industry, these communities are committed to developing high-quality computing curricula for all students, beginning in their earliest years. The poster has two components. First, through a mixture of qualitative measures, the poster reports on the genesis and development of the RPP. It focuses on the RPP's origin in leveraging the districts' existing relationship with Pennsylvania's South Fayette School District, which has developed one of the nation's leading programs for teacher professional development (PD) in K-12 computing. The second component of the poster focuses on the development of a series of summer workshops for Kentucky Appalachia K-8 instructors to learn the basics of CS and CT and how to integrate these skills and concepts into existing K-8 coursework. Of course, the RPP faced new challenges with COVID-19 most notably, the need to offer these summer workshops remotely, and adjusting the objectives and research questions accordingly. Through focus groups with the PD instructional team and survey responses from the KY teacher workshop participants, the poster will report on the pedagogical implications of offering teacher PD exclusively online and what the ramifications have been for Pikeville and Floyd County children with the return to school in the Fall of 2020.Item Resisting Edtech Colonialism through Inclusive Innovation in Kentucky Appalachia(Digital Promise, 2021-09) Iwatani, Emi; Ruiz, Pati; Burke, Quinn; Owens, Aileen; Tackett, TraciColonialism occurs “when one nation subjugates another, conquering its population and exploiting it, often while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people” (National Geographic, 2019). With K-12 public school systems increasingly becoming 1-to-1, hundreds of millions of tax dollars being directed towards computer science and computational thinking (CS/CT) education, and educational technology (edtech) companies vying to capture the K-12 market share, it behooves us to wonder: Whose interests are CS/CT edtech are promoting? While “CS/CT edtech” is not a nation, it has potential to act like a colonizer because (1) it has its own language and culture that it aims to promote, (2) has great economic and political clout, and (3) the culture and values currently promoted are fairly monolithic. The NSF-funded researcher-practitioner partnership Tough As Nails project faces this tension head-on because the program objective is to create a K-8 CS/CT curricular pathway in two school districts in Kentucky Appalachia, where the researchers are from Silicon Valley with little familiarity with Appalachian culture and education. Our core project team (from CA, KY, and PA) has so far resisted “edtech colonialism” by upholding shared visions of “student agency is core,” “Kentucky leads the development” and “competencies first (then themes, then tools).”