Gayithri Jayathirtha, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oregon
Gayithri Jayathirtha is a Computing Innovation Fellow at the University of Oregon, Eugene (USA), where she works with computing teachers to think about and develop critical computing materials. In April 2022, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences, concentrating on K-12 computing education. Prior to pursuing her doctoral program, she earned her master's degree in Learning Sciences and Technologies from the University of Pennsylvania and her undergraduate degree in Computer Science Engineering from Bangalore University, Bangalore (India). Gayithri was a K-12 math teacher and teacher workshop facilitator in India for six years before starting her graduate studies.
As computing is moving into K-12 classrooms, even becoming a graduation requirement in several school districts, numerous examples of technologies perpetuating and amplifying harm to marginalized communities make it imperative to approach computing critically within teaching and learning spaces. My scholarship attends to this crucial call by expanding how we view teaching and learning within computing classrooms, questioning what we teach and value within our classrooms, and how we include teacher voices, perspectives, and experiences in designing tools such as curricular materials. During my talk, I will draw on Kafai and Proctor’s (2022) framing of computational literacy development as a sociocultural and sociopolitical phenomenon and discuss what it means for high school computing education research through two example studies. The first study highlights the sociocultural nature of conceptual learning within computing classrooms, and the second pushes the disciplinary boundaries by engaging teachers at the intersections of societal and technical concepts in a professional development session. I then discuss how my current co-design work with teachers lays a foundation for my future work within critical computing education—studying teacher agency and empowerment while co-designing curricular program, teacher participation within the professional development of the revised program, and disciplinary teaching and learning within classrooms at the intersections of technical and societal issues.
