CS Pathways: A Culturally Responsive Computer Science Curriculum for Middle School

In this Research-to-Practice Full Paper, we report on CS Pathways, a middle school computer science (CS) curriculum developed as part of a researcher-practitioner partnership among two public universities and three urban school districts in the Northeast USA. The curriculum serves middle school students to develop apps for social impact. The partnership focuses on bridging the gap between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and community and gender gap within STEM. The project is based on Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP), which includes the importance of recognizing students' culture in all facets of learning. The project employs a researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) model, which recognizes that transformational change can occur in educational ecosystems that connect research, policy, practice, and community work. The project curriculum was collaboratively developed by CS researchers, teacher-practitioners, and school administrators. Middle school students develop their own apps that support socially relevant activities in their communities. Using the RPP process, continuous feedback from researchers, teacher-practitioners, and students shaped the curriculum design. Key feedback was collected via one-on-one meetings with the teacher-practitioners, which bridged the visions and knowledge among different groups of the project partners. The curriculum includes the areas of computing and society, digital tools and collaboration, computing systems, and computational thinking. The curriculum helps students develop a critical consciousness of the role they can play in affecting their communities through computing, and empower them to move beyond simply learning to code [1]. The curriculum strives to demonstrate how to integrate computing across middle school subjects in a culturally-responsive way and spread a powerful message of Computer Science for All. This paper advocates for the need for culturally-responsive computing, describes how it is integrated into teachers' instruction, and presents the CS Pathways curriculum design.