As demand for K-12 computer science (CS) education grows, we argue that most students would be best served by CS classes that not only teach computational thinking/programming, but also challenge them to critically analyze the role of technology in society. One of the main barriers to implementing this into K-12 classrooms is a lack of research on how in-service CS teachers can integrate critical pedagogy into their school context and existing curricula. This lightning talk presents a proposed method to co-design lessons with current K-12 CS teachers to integrate critical perspectives into their classrooms. Teacher participants will join a synchronous summer professional development where we will teach them critical computing content drawn from relevant books and frameworks, and collaborate with them to design or modify lessons that will engage their students in critical analysis. Teachers will be encouraged to include content relevant to their communities. For example, a teacher in Detroit might teach facial recognition in the context of continued use of the technology by police, despite wrongful arrests. Results from this work will inform future sociocultural content integration into K-12 CS courses (e.g. "ethics content"). Feedback from the audience will be used to improve the methods and literature review of the study.

Neoliberal capitalism - the favoring of privatization, marketization, and deregulation of public resources - is hegemonic in education. It shapes our institutions and everyday life, including educational practices. The increasing push for market driven computing curriculum and large tech companies' involvement in research grants and educational programs are some examples of neoliberal influences in CS education. It is not only industry and industry-backed not-for-profits such as Code.org that reify neoliberal agendas, but in many cases, our very own communities, educational institutions, and curricula. Thus, a critical and reflective examination of our educational practices is necessary. In this Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session, we aim to conduct reflections and discussions on the role and influence of neoliberal capitalism in computing education. We will explore 1) the influence of deregulation, 2) public-private partnerships, 3) state-subsidized corporate wealth accumulation, and 4) centralization on pedagogy, research, and academic "success". We will discover reflective questions and practices that could help us critically examine our roles and responsibilities as computing educators and professionals. Eventually, we hope to begin a larger conversation and form a community to develop collective strategies and pedagogical ideologies to resist neoliberal influences, reimagine alternatives, and repair damages caused by neoliberal computing education.

As issues of ethics, criticality, and social impact become more important in computer science, so does the need to teach them in CS classes. Despite the recent growth of academic writing around ethics in CS and a push for teaching ethics in post-secondary CS classes, the K-12 space has largely been ignored. To explore integrating ethics into K-12 CS classes, we interviewed a diverse group of current US K-12 CS teachers and conducted a thematic analysis to understand how they conceptualize ethics in CS and see potential opportunities and barriers to ethics integration in their classroom context. We found that teachers initially associated ethics with digital citizenship and gender/race imbalances, but were largely unfamiliar with issues of algorithmic bias, injustice, and techno-solutionism. After being introduced to these ideas and presented with examples, the teachers started to broaden their perspective of CS ethics. However, there are still barriers to teachers integrating ethics into their classroom (e.g. curriculum, time constraints). We discuss potential future pathways for K-12 CS ethics including through integrating ethics into digital citizenship.

In this poster, we will present approaches and associated design principles for integrating computational thinking (CT) into middle school Social Studies, Arts, and Language Arts instruction to enhance disciplinary learning. We used four steps to identify these approaches and design principles: (1) co-design with teachers and experts in computer science and CT education to ideate CT-integrated lessons; (2) identifying initial design principles based on the ideated lessons; (3) consultation with subject matter experts; and (4) conducting a Delphi study with pedagogical experts (e.g., teachers, curriculum writers, teacher educators) to examine the clarity, feasibility and potential impact of the design principles. The process led to three broad approaches to integrate CT into Social Studies instruction that included 14 design principles, three for Arts with 16 design principles, and four for Language Arts with 12 design principles.