Niyati Vijay LIS 202 Book Chapter Review – Chapter 5 Introduction The book that we have been assigned is Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race and Computing (2008). Written by Jane Margolis, a senior researcher at the UCLA School of Education and Information studies, this book and most of her work revolves around the varying inequalities and segregation in academia, especially in the computer science field. Another book written by her is Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing; while that one focuses on the gender gap, Stuck in the shallow End talks about the different racial gaps in computer science. She is now an advocate for uplifting and raising the voice and identity of marginalized high school students. The chapter I was assigned was the 5th one, ‘Teachers as potential change agents: Balancing equity reform and systemic change’. In this chapter, the author reiterates and imposes upon the fact that teachers require ample resources, support, and guidance to be successful educators in the computer science field. She also argues just how important it is for teachers to be provided with adequate training, and thus, through her research, comes up with an initiative to test her findings. I personally believe that this chapter is quite refreshing as it talks, in detail, about the possible solutions of these problems rather than just stating them, which makes for a very engaging dialogue. Summary of the content Chapter 5 talks about how Jane Margolis and her team of researchers came up with a reform initiative that revolved around the professional development of computer science teachers at a summer institute for LAUSD. Their project was designed to help provide the teachers with “the necessary content and pedagogical tools they needed to teach computer science” (pg. 97 Chapter 5). In essence, the project was designed to make teachers change agents. A lot of plans were implemented through the CESA, which was an interdisciplinary K-20 partnership, to test the strategies that the researchers came up with and see what results yielded as an outcome of this. Some of the strategies were, finding the right set of diverse teachers and giving them the opportunity to teach a subject that was primarily under offered, expanding the curriculum beyond programming and finding a way to make the syllabus more engaging for students, and ensuring that foundational, in-depth help was provided to these teachers to guarantee revolutionary success in this course. Jane also talks about how intricate these issues are and how so many more challenges, namely “the overarching political context of urban schooling” (pg. 115 chapter 5), need to be overcome, in order to ensure a satisfactory end-result. Evaluation As previously mentioned, Jane Margolis is an educational researcher at UCLA. In addition to her being an award-winning author for both of her books, she has also been recognized, in 2016, by former President Barack Obama as one of nine Computer Science Champions of Change, for her attempts and research into normalizing and easing access to quality education in this field. In 2018, she was also awarded the UCLA optimist award. Moreover, she has received her Ed.D. from Harvard University, in 1980, as well as an M.A. in psychology from the Harvard University Extension, in 1985. The publisher of this book is the MIT press, which is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their mission is to drive and push the limits of scholarly reporting, and in doing so revolutionize what a university press can really be like. The MIT press is the largest university press in the world and is quite credible since it publishes nearly 200 new books every year, on science, technology, art and design. The fact that this book was published by them is a testament to the factual accuracy and reliability of the content written by Jane. In class, we have thoroughly discussed how important it is for teachers to become progressive teachers to better enhance their performance and become educators who leave a long-lasting impact on their students. Freire’s fourth letter talks about how there needs to be certain qualities possessed by educators to make them actual change agents. The entire CESA initiative explicitly focuses on ‘finding gold’, i.e., finding teachers who are passionate about what they want to teach, and are willing to impart their knowledge to unknowing yet determined students. The necessity of having teachers like Ms. Pai and Ms. Olear highlight how important it is to give individuals access to avenues that will help them shine bright and achieve their goals, since opportunity is the first steppingstone to success. There is a need for less isolated computer science departments, since teachers need more institutional and peer support to create safe intellectual spaces. In the same way that teachers, and their schooling and backgrounds need to be diverse, there is also a need for the representation in Computer Science AP classes to be diverse. This introduces the second key concept that has been featured in this chapter which is the topic of diversity. Through her research, Jane realized that despite there being a certain trend for the student population rate, it wasn’t matched by the AP CS course participation rate. The minorities were seriously underrepresented in their engagement in this field, and the reason for this was the lack of options presented to them. It also necessary for students to see people in this field that look like them which is a key racial factor that is noted worldwide, in all matters, and not just in education and computer science. The 400% increase in enrollment in the course, as a result of just getting the word out there, clearly shows how even small steps taken in the right direction, will lead to a significant improvement. Concepts including the need of more well-informed teachers and more diversity in harder classes, are phenomenon that have been going on for many years. Grave steps have been taken to lessen the racial gap in education, in general, but the quality of education at certain majorityblack schools still can’t be matched to those of expensive predominantly white schools. So many educational institutes around the world, are ranked so highly, not because of the use of cutting-edge technology or unparalleled infrastructure, but because the teachers at these places, provide insight, knowledge and a certain spark that can’t be found elsewhere. Conversations such as these aren’t restricted to only computer science courses, but any hard STEM course around the world, because the expectation of the type of student that would fit into this mold are so narrow. Opinion on the chapter I found this chapter slightly denser and more informational than the other chapters in this book, since it was focused more on the consequences of the authors’ research, thus, I believe, that as a result of this, I found the chapter slightly more complicated to read. On the other hand, though, this chapter was quite engaging since it described and then analyzed the procedures of the entire experiment and showed the real-life application of all her research, helping us see just how accurate her theories were. The argument of wanting to find a way to make consequential change in the way computer science was taught and approached was made extremely clear, and the statistics shown further helped us in believing this. The clear connection to the themes of the course because of the racial disparities and the need for better teachers, that was displayed through the experiment, made for quite a factual take on what the author had been talking about in the four earlier chapters, thus making the book full circle. Rather than making me reconsider my thoughts and feelings, this chapter has only further deepened my already existing opinion that constitutional change needs to be brought about in our approach to our educational system. The strength of this chapter is how well-analyzed and detailed it is, but the limitation of it is how difficult it could get to interpret for a common reader, because of how factual it is. Conclusion I personally though that this chapter was quite insightful. It was quite interesting to see her hypothesis play out in real time and see what came out of it. It touched on issues that have been considered before, but never so deeply investigated and thought about. Being an international Indian student, I have many friends who are Computer Science majors and thus, this book and especially this chapter, opened my eyes to quite a few realities of the Computer Science field. Personally, I would recommend this book to all of my peers and friends, especially those who are currently majoring in Computer Science, since they could relate and potentially also share an opinion that could probably be unique to mine. I also think teachers, curriculum setters and educators all around the world should read this book so that they get a better understanding of the way that complex subjects such as high school level computer science should be approached. References ] Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race and Computing by Jane Margolis https://seis.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directory/jane-margolis https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Margolis https://mitpress.mit.edu
