How did you get into CS?

My path to computer science was rather atypical. My research focuses on equity issues in schools; I specifically look at race issues and other social factors that affect the educational experience of students in schools. I was invited to participate in a grant with Dr. Moallem (chair of the Educational Technology department) at Towson as an evaluator and to provide my perspective on equity issues. The grant focused on computational thinking for pre-service teachers and aimed to make a series of related modules. In the past, I considered these topics to be distanced from my research (the tech department was its own department, and I was housed in elementary education). But there are so many ways in which computational thinking, computer science, and the different themes related to them intersect quite visibly with issues of equity and race in schools, and we're now on the third grant related to this topic.

What are some successes and challenges you’ve experienced along the way?

I think the biggest challenge is related to teacher education programs. Our grant project looked at infusing these topics into undergraduate teacher education; of course, there are already many graduation requirements set out by the Maryland Department of Education, so finding ways to add these concepts to an already jam-packed list is very, very tough. Adding things as their own separate course is the biggest challenge, even though we value it as something that teachers should learn. The solution to this (and the second challenge) is finding ways to get faculty to buy in to adding these topics to existing courses when there isn’t room to add a whole new 3-credit course on CS. What would it look like for computational thinking to be taught to early childhood educators as they're teaching kids how to recognize patterns? Or to add decomposition into social studies as we look at a map of how different districts voted on election day? There’s so many possible uses.

What do you find compelling about CS?

The world has been moving in this direction for a while, but generative AI is probably the most interesting thing happening right now. I’m very curious about AI. It feels like every week, I'm in a new webinar about something related to it, and I’ve added technology as one of my research interests. There's so much fear surrounding the plagiarism and intellectual property side of it, but what I’m finding is that you can either resist something that's happening or embrace the ways it can be used helpfully, and I've found really good uses for it in both helping me to teach better and helping my students to learn and write better.

What are you working on now?

In the newest phase of our grant project funded by MCCE, we're looking at the ways in which library media specialists, librarians, and libraries can also be looped into this work. Libraries of course care a lot about intellectual property and the dissemination of knowledge, so instead of positioning things related to AI as antithetical to the library, we’re looking at how AI and CS can be helpful to that field and finding ways to invite them into the training process. Elevating librarians and library media specialists, positioning them as frontrunners along with teachers in spreading this knowledge, is really exciting to think about.

Do you have any advice to share?

My first piece of advice would be to embrace the ways that other people's research interests might intersect with yours. For a long time, I pushed technology off to the side; there was a whole other department that handled that and I thought it had nothing to do with my own work. But in the way that life happens, there are so many ways in which CS, computational thinking, AI, and other concepts intersect with my own courses. I think that a good piece of advice for scholars, educators, and people in the CS field in Maryland is to be careful of compartmentalizing. 

My other piece of advice is to not resist the ways in which AI could be helpful to your teaching and knowledge. We're still in the beginning of it, and I think jumping on board and at least seeing the ways in which different resources can be used is a good step for now.