EDC 4200 & SPED 5700G (City College of New York)
DENISE FARRELLY & ROBIN GLASSBERG
Title of Activity/Assignment: (Un)Plugged Name Story Making: Using an Iterative Design Process to Construct Name Stories Centering Cultural Identity
Artifact description: Through this artifact, students will be able to utilize various problem-solving strategies to create an engineered (unplugged) pop-up card and digital (plugged) story. This series of activities will highlight the importance of students’ names by fostering connections with their intersecting languages, cultures, and identities. The artifact activities will follow an iterative design process in which creativity and problem-solving are encouraged and valued, while centering community, culture and identity in communicating the cultural & historical significance of students’ names.
Activities and Resources
Rationale:
Questions to generate thinking:
Why is this activity important for teacher education students at my institution?
Teacher candidates and faculty at KCC and CCNY bring with them diverse stories, backgrounds, and experiences. Names are a common thread between all of us, and each of our names holds a story and is linked to our unique identities. The artifact activities presented here will enable our students to view the significance of names and naming from multiple perspectives, while developing experience and confidence with an iterative design process for creating name stories with plugged and unplugged tools.
Why is this unit important to the content of my course? What’s the connective tissue to the core course content and practices?
At KCC, students will be participating in these learning activities within EDC 4200, a childhood literature and language arts course. One of the outcomes of the course is to facilitate the communication of personal narrative through storytelling to foster sociocultural literacy development. These activities will engage students in diverse literary experiences through multimodal narrative approaches. At CCNY, students will work on these activities within SPED 5700G, a practicum course for teaching fellows. One of the course outcomes is for teachers to develop pedagogical skills in a full-time classroom experience specifically focused on special education settings, multilingual pedagogies, and interdisciplinary teaching. Other aspects of the course allow teaching fellows to review teaching strategies, materials and techniques. The outcome will be for the teachers to use the artifact and implement design thinking/planning and computational literacies to bring exposure to CS in their bilingual classes (ELA/Spanish). Teachers will implement the artifact in a 4th/5th grade setting. The artifact will teach fellows how to work with, through, and against aspects of computational thinking and digital literacies and replicate these skills with their students in their classroom. They will use the artifact to integrate discussions about culture in the classroom with their students in the fall.
How does this artifact achieve the guidelines above, especially around dimensions of equity?
The artifact will focus on intersectionality of race, ethnicity, class, gender identity and expression, sexual identity, and the impact of language acquisition and literacy development on learning, teaching strategies, materials, and technology used. Other aspects of equity will focus on the learner-centered design-process and equity-focused mindset/social justice. This will allow teachers to be able to integrate culture, identity, and backgrounds in their instructional design.
What are the standards involved?
NYS K-12 Computer Science and Digital Fluency Learning Standards
4-6.CT.10: Describe the steps taken and choices made to design and develop a solution using an iterative design process. An iterative design process involves defining the problem or goal, developing a solution or prototype, testing the solution or prototype, and repeating the process until the problem is solved or desired result is achieved.
Describing can include speaking or writing.
Learning Goals for Teacher Candidates
Equity-Centered Values / Goals / Approaches / Practices
What big ideas and practices around equity do you hope to support your teacher candidates to grapple with?We hope to support teacher candidates in fostering the importance of culture and identity and how that can be communicated through multiple modalities in the classroom.
What equitable pedagogical moves do you plan to make as you integrate computing into your own teaching?By developing a culturally-responsive name story through unplugged and plugged modalities, pre-service teachers and fellows will focus on practicing self-awareness, which in turn will allow them to help their students to think about themselves, recognize incongruence in the way society sees BIPOC or multilingual students, and to celebrate themselves and their backgrounds.
Teacher Education Topics
What concepts and practices from your course are you hoping TCs engage with?
- Learners and learning theory, including social, emotional, and academic dimensions; and application of learning theory
- Creation and development of positive learning and work environments, including understanding and engaging diverse local school and cultural communities
- Equity and culturally responsive practices, including intersectionality of race, ethnicity, class, gender identity and expression, sexual identity, and the impact of language acquisition and literacy development on learning, teaching strategies, materials, and technology.
Computing Practices
Which computing practices will teacher candidates engage in / mobilize to meet the equity and teacher ed goals?
- Co-learning, co-constructing – learning with, through and against technology.
- Mobilizing and using computing and using digital tools for social and cultural action
- Equity and culturally-responsive practices.
- Design thinking and learning principles: identify, define, ideate, assess, plan, build, evaluate.
- Computational strategies
- Prototyping, remixing, iterating, tinkering, experimentation, modeling and simulation
Which digital practices will teacher candidates engage in / mobilize to meet the equity and teacher ed goals?
Digitally-supported communication, participation, reflection: Teacher candidates will use digital tools to communicate and reflect upon the stories of their names.
Tools
What digital / computing tools will students use?
- Students will use Scratch or Scratch Jr. to create their digital name stories, either narrated or by remixing a name story.
- Students will be able to use computing digital literacies (troubleshooting, debugging) through design thinking to create the pop- card.
- Scratch, Scratch Jr.
What’s the connective tissue? What brings these elements together?
How do computing and digital literacies support (enhance? transform?) teacher learning and teaching in the content areas / areas of teacher ed?
Students will be able to think critically about technology and how it can be integrated to support content area learning, while expressing themselves and creating using diverse modalities.
How does the activity foster teacher learning and teaching ABOUT, WITH, THROUGH, AGAINST technology?
Working With & Against Computing/Technology: By introducing the same learning goal using plugged and unplugged versions, students will have the opportunity to work with and against technology. They will be asked to compare the opportunities and affordances of plugged and unplugged mediums using their design experiences as a reference. They will then discuss when it might be better to use unplugged means of computing to create designs. They will also be prompted to discuss how technology can be taught to emphasize lack of diversity and how to create cultural technological experiences that go against original creations.
Artifact Walkthrough / Resources
Summary of the activity/assignment
Prework: To begin, students will engage in the 2-week Name Project at the beginning of the semester to build community in the classroom. At KCC, this project is offered in EDC 3100: Social Sciences in Childhood Education, a corequisite link with EDC 4200. It was developed by Delia Hernandez and Denise Farrelly with guidance from Edinger’s (2000) Seeking History. This is a class and home-based project that asks students to share, research, and reflect upon the stories of their names. As they continue to learn more about the sociocultural and historical significance of their names, they engage with various resources to encourage them reflect on the significance of names and naming through the following resources:
Blog post – Whats In a Name – Kind of a Lot
Short story – My Name by Sandra Cisneros
Video – Uzo Aduba Never Liked Her Name
The output of the Name Project is a short story synthesizing the significance of their names. This work will be the springboard for the CITE artifact.
Artifact:
For this CITE artifact, students will create a 3D representation of their name project stories (see description above) in physically-engineered (unplugged) and digital (plugged) form.
- Using their name stories as a guide, students will begin by creating a concept map that represents their identities. Guiding questions:
- What are some words, ideas, characteristics and/or images that you would use to describe yourself?
- How might you represent your identity, which can pertain to age, (dis)ability status, religion, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, language and gender, through images?
- Next, they will use their concept maps to create an engineered pop-up card to represent their names and identities (unplugged activity). They will explore various paper engineering techniques using resources such as The Elements of Pop-Up (Carter & Diaz, 1999) and the BMCC Makerspace’s Paper Pop-Up Workshop, and experiment with these techniques using an iterative design process in a physical space such as a Makerspace. This artifact will also be launched in 4th/5th grade classrooms where teachers will allow students to explore the pop-book resources and have students create their own name story pop-up card in the classroom.
- Then, they will be introduced to and have the opportunity to tinker and experiment with Scratch or Scratch Jr. to represent their name stories in digital form (plugged activity). Once again, an iterative design process will be emphasized.
- To assess learning, students will describe their plugged and unplugged iterative design processes by creating a 3-minute video using Flip Grid or TikTok to showcase their design processes and the end product through photos and voice narration. These videos will be shared on Blackboard for peers to view and comment on.
- Finally, students will be given a set of open-ended reflective questions. We want to understand their thinking about how cultural awareness and identity can be explored and communicated using technology/design thinking.
Iterative Design Process Based on NYS K-12 Computer Science and Digital Fluency Learning Standards:
- Define the problem or goal
- Develop a solution or prototype
- Test the solution or prototype
- Repeat the process until the problem is solved or desired result is achieved
- Describe the process using speaking or writing
Sample of the activity/assignment
Plan to assess students’ learning
- Students will be asked to describe their iterative design process (either plugged or unplugged activity) by creating a 3-minute video using Flip Grid or TikTok, showcasing their design processes and the end product through photos and voice narration.
- Students will be given a set of open-ended reflective questions. We want to understand their thinking about how cultural awareness and identity can be explored and communicated using technology/design thinking.
- Students can also interview each other and there can be a peer-review where students give feedback and ask questions about their pop-card and details.
Extension ideas
- Other advanced learning games to generate words and other idea generating games (world building for pop-card):
https://experiments.withgoogle.com/semantris (fun AI game)
