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.

This poster shares our experience of engaging middle school teachers in a collaborative design of a computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum through a researcher and practitioner partnership (RPP) among two public universities and three urban school districts in the Northeast USA. The project used the co-design approach to facilitate curriculum development and foster professional learning. In this poster, we introduce the co-design process, the developed curriculum, and teachers' professional learning experiences. Preliminary results indicate that the co-design approach supplemented with one-one-on coaching has not only facilitated the curriculum development but also fostered professional learning and collective capacity building for CS education.

This pilot study explores the impact of the CS Pathways professional development (PD) program on the teachers' self-efficacy in teaching a middle school computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum. The main goal of the study is to investigate the attributes that describe the teachers' self-efficacy after their first-year participation in the PD. A total of 19 middle school teachers from two states, NY and MA, attended the CS Pathway PD program and completed the end-of-year survey pertaining to self-efficacy in CSDL; more than half accepted the interview to help further understand their perceptions (n=10). Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to study the attributes of the teachers' self-efficacy. The preliminary results capture teachers' self-efficacy patterns, which inform the PD and indicate its effectiveness and challenges.

This paper presents an experience report from an NSF-funded researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) project. Based on a collaboration among two public research universities and three urban school districts in the Northeast USA, the goal of the project is to establish an institutionalized middle school computer science curriculum in the districts. The CS curriculum incorporates digital literacy skills as an integral aspect of learning computer science, and is based on students developing mobile apps that provide social and community good. Here, we share our professional learning process during the project's first year, which had been developed iteratively and dynamically adjusted to a remote format in response to exigencies of Spring 2020. The paper includes analysis of three data sets from teacher-participants: (1) their questions about the nature of the project, which we categorized into three levels: project, district and teacher levels. These questions bridge the visions and knowledge among different groups of the project partners; (2) analysis of semi-structured interview conversations with more than half of the teacher-participants; and (3) teacher survey responses. Our findings include two recommendations: that RPP projects elicit teacher questions to illuminate the three levels identified, and use strategies that engage teachers in designing a professional learning process for teaching computer science.