Culturally Authentic Practices (CAPs)

Culturally Authentic Practices (CAPs) support students at both the community and individual level. The curriculum reflects diverse students' cultural heritages, enables students to share their own culture, and connects learning to students’ home life. It also enables students to see themselves represented in the materials, and gives them the opportunity to share their life experiences and represent themselves in their projects.

CAPs Resources for Teachers

Promoting asset-based thinking and sense of belonging

The SCC curriculum emphasizes the skills, knowledge, perspectives and strengths present already in students, their groups and communities. As part of the curriculum, students select problems relevant to their personal, social or cultural experiences and work to make sense of these problems from both research and storytelling perspectives. This emphasis on storytelling, as opposed to having an emphasis on “facts”, enables students to incorporate their own personal stories and culture into their digital products. The use of EarSketch to engage musically and communicate to audiences also capitalizes on students’ creativity, multiple skills and out-of-school funds of knowledge and engagement with musical forms. Students also build a resume over the course of the year, sequentially adding new skills to the resume and reflecting on the strengths, or assets, that they bring to the project. By the end of the course, students have explored multiple different types of roles involved in computer science-based careers and reflected upon their own interests and talents.

Building equity through collaborative work

Skillfully facilitating group work to support and engage all students requires care and practice by teachers. The SCC curriculum is designed to provide a context for collaborative learning experiences that increase equity in the classroom. Students in SCC continually work in groups and have the opportunity to try on multiple roles related to different CS skills. Some of these roles, such as Server Administrator, Layout Designer, Project Manager, and Quality Assurance Manager, are defined within the curriculum and rotated among the students. In addition, the curriculum offers continuous opportunities for students to engage in collaborative work-like pair-programming, and teacher-facilitated peer-feedback.

Building Agency

The SCC curriculum focuses on building student agency in multiple ways. The curriculum is designed so that students can develop a sense that they can, through their actions, effect some change in others or impact a situation. The year-long PBL arc allows students to focus on how to learn and then educate and advocate audiences around a specific issue using their CS skills. Creating digital products and solutions related to the problem they care about provides them with an ability to use computer science skills to address real-world needs and problems, helping them change the world into one that they view as more just.

Reducing social identity/stereotype threat

There are several interventions threaded through the SCC curriculum that explicitly address issues of stereotype threat. Students’ incremental views of their CS skill acquisition and knowledge growth are strengthened by having them explore different roles in computer science as they create their products and document their increasing skills through reflection in their resume and portfolio. After being engaged in seamless programming activities, students engage in discussions about “Who is a Coder?”, which enables them to envision themselves in that role. In addition, the curriculum provides video interviews with students of color who are successful computer science majors. These college students discuss the challenges they have faced, and how they were able to overcome them, which provides with relatable role model examples to students in the course. The focus on exploring computer science careers and the skills students have and would need to gain also allows them to envision a “future self” in computer science.

Promoting Empathy and Complex Perspective Taking

As students create their design visions, and particularly when they analyze the audience for their products, they engage in scaffolded activities that promote empathy and that require that students consider the perspectives of others with regards to their focal problem, its impact, and the products they create. Empathy is also stressed as students learn to provide constructive feedback to peers.

Promoting Critical Perspectives with Regards to Equity

As students create their design visions, their websites, and their games, teachers are prompted to engage the class in critical discussion surrounding CS issues. Some might include an exploration of students’ assumptions, and audience considerations—i.e. who is included as part of the audience, and who is excluded or forgotten. Images that are included on websites and in games also provide avenues for discussions about how people are represented and misrepresented, the ramifications of stereotypes, and how images on social media and search engines influence and manipulate audiences.

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