Understand

How might we create more equity in STEM/CS for all students in our classrooms and schools?

What identities, biases, values, power, and context are you bringing into this work? 

I am a white, Italian/Irish, comic book loving, geeky sci-fi inspired, nerdy teacher. I grew up lower middle class as the son of a highly educated father who came from a working class family and a highly educated mother whose father was a 1st generation immigrant from Italy. I come from a background of privilege and thoroughly believe that I have a responsibility to use my power to improve the lives of others. I have biases toward trying to create opportunities for women because my mother used to take me to feminist rallies and my own daughters’ opportunities (or lack thereof) have changed the way I think about my role, especially as I look at the stats for women in computer science (Berkeley School of Information, 2021). I am also a state teacher of the year and have a platform that allows me to advocate at a local, state, and national level. I am also a startup founder and am working to expand access and opportunity for diverse groups to work on extended reality. 

What human values are you focusing on? 

In my startup and in my classroom I am focusing on: purposeful innovation, diversity and inclusion, empowering learners, social impact, personal growth, and seeking adventure. This aligns in some ways to the theoretical model of value types and higher order values (Ponizovskiy et. al, 2020), specifically with the overlap of achievement with purposeful innovation, power with empowering learners, self-direction and personal growth, benevolence with social impact, and universalism with diversity and inclusion. Each of these is centered ultimately on the belief that all students deserve to have a hand in shaping the world they live in and will inherit, have the capability to be meaningful contributors right now, and should be able to work with advanced technology so that they can see and build the future.

What are ways you are going to build relational trust?

Relational trust requires vulnerability, honesty, empathy, and self-reflection. I am attempting to bring all of these into my classroom and endeavors by grounding my energy, efforts, and approaches in creating relationships, co-designing solutions, and reflecting on my practices daily. It takes time, sustained work, and apologies when I’ve messed up, and celebrations of successes when they happen. It also takes listening and creating solutions that people are asking for. 

What ways are you practicing and bringing self-awareness into this phase?

I am hypercritical of what I do, and I usually am not able to shut off my self-reflection. Ever since I was awarded the Colorado Teacher of the Year in 2017, I have been struggling with what it means to be an educational leader given my experiences, identity, and responsibility. Since the Moonshot EdVentures Fellowship, I have been trying to figure out how to use my power, privilege, platform, and persona to create meaningful change across gender and race/ethnic lines. I reflect daily and hourly how to create meaningful change and have been fighting in my system for change for over a decade. Still, I don’t know the right way to do this work in isolation and without a support network, and I am burning out trying; I know I have more work to do, more biases to uncover, and more lenses to look through, but I am finding that on a day to day basis my efforts aren’t balanced and I sometimes stall in the process because I am so tired. I wish I could answer this question better. 

Works Cited: 

Berkeley School of Information. (2021, July 14). Changing the curve: Women in computing - I school online. UCB-UMT. Retrieved March 6, 2022, from https://ischoolonline.berkeley.edu/blog/women-computing-computer-science/#:~:text=As%20of%202019%2C%2021%20percent,bachelor's%20degree%20recipients%20were%20women 

Ponizovskiy, V., Ardag, M., Grigoryan, L., Boyd, R., Dobewall, H., & Holtz, P. (2020). Development and validation of the Personal Values Dictionary: A Theory–driven tool for investigating references to basic human values in text. European Journal of Personality, 34(5), 885–902. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2294