I think you bring up a lot of great points here… And I can’t help but relate a lot of what you’re saying to different ideas we’ve discussed throughout this class. If we want STEM students to be more creative, then we need to motivate and foster that creativity. The best way of doing so is to first get them to care about the class… We need to motivate, engage, and invite them to take charge of their learning. A great way to do that is with PBL case studies, which actually directly call for creativity on students’ part because of their open-endedness.

Speaking more broadly though, I think that a lot of STEM classes need to at least have more examples rooted in students’ reality. Too often, STEM classes rely on obscure word problems that ask us to care for the sake of caring rather than giving us something that we can relate to and care about on our own. If we can give students a problem that they relate to and care about, suddenly, I think we’d see a massive shift in their motivation and, by extension, their abilities.

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I don’t think technology can play a leading role in teaching and still be effective. Just like you said, robots only have a set of specific rules they can follow. They are bad at creativity, innovation, and improv; these are things people are good at. Given the kind of technology that we have now, the closest I see of this becoming a reality is taking the idea of “human in the loop” to the extreme. “Human in the loop” is a term to describe a type of analytical process in which both the machine and the human take part. It calls for the human to drive the machine, and for the machine to respond and even self-correct accordingly. For example, rather than building an algorithm or model on its own and presenting the results to the human analyst, the human plays an active role the model/algorithm building. The equivalent in a classroom would be something like instead of the robot teaching the student from a set of directives that it can’t really deviate from, it instead learns what the student learns and adapts its material according to the student’s abilities and understanding. That is, instead of working off of a fixed model, the robot would be constantly building and adjusting a model specifically for that student. This would actually make the student the leader of their own learning. However, the effectiveness of doing this would be heavily dependent on what degree of adjustment the robot is capable of doing… If there’s little adjustment that is even possible, then it’s highly unlikely for many students to be able to learn effectively from it. Yet, a large amount of adjustment– to ideally be able to work with any student– would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to “program.” Again, teaching does take constant adjustment, learning, and creativity, which are all things machines are terrible at.

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I never thought about it from that perspective… Before I read this, I would say that my work is not political and that I had extended that to everything else in computer science. But thinking back, I realize that my work is far more political than I realized… For example, many of the entities who help fund my lab’s work are government-related, making many of our tools at least applicable to national security issues, which is of course political. There’s numerous other examples besides of how political my work is… Now that I see it, I can’t believe I DIDN’T see it before…. Thank you for helping me realize this!

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I agree… I think critical thinking is something that is being lost in the mix of the ridiculous numbers of standardized tests (and standardization in general). I think it’s long since been time to take a step back and really think critically about education and how to realize the kind of learners– and indeed citizens– we want to see come out of our education system.

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“At the end of the day no class is perfect no matter what guidelines you follow or how much you pay attention to the details.” I love that… I need to remind myself of that more… I’ve definitely been staring at the ever-growing laundry list of things that I should do or pay attention to or try and feeling increasingly daunted by being a “good” teacher. Perhaps it’s time I started thinking about things in terms of being “good enough,” especially when I’m still so new to teaching, and focusing just on trying. With any luck, students will see the effort I put into class and at least learn something from it, if not maybe enjoy some pieces of it as well.

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I have no idea myself… It does seem that many of the methodologies we’ve looked at in this class, critical pedagogy included, are easier to implement with smaller class sizes and smaller or simpler assignments. In my own classes, I’m going to be teaching Computer Science concepts, where everything seems complicated. How can I give students feedback quickly, easily, and fairly (basic teaching needs) while giving them flexibility to show what they know (inclusive pedagogy) and thinking critical about their learning (mindful learning and critical pedagogy) in a way that is hopefully fun and interactive (student-centered approaches) while still covering all the required material (ABET accreditation standards)? It seems like such a tall order, and a daunting task at best. Currently, I think my only solution (since I can’t solve all these problems at once) is to simply be aware of these issues and remain mindful to them as I gain more teaching experience and try out new ideas.

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I think I mostly agree with your comments… Freire’s writing often seemed long-winded, and even repetitive to me. That’s not to say that he didn’t have valid points– he certainly did– but I found myself sometimes wishing he could reach his conclusion faster as I was reading his work. The political nature of his writing just made it worse for me. However, I think in a way he did understand the power dynamic between teachers and students, and he saw a way to leverage that to the benefit of the students. That being said, I would have liked to read more discussion on this particular point since I could definitely see this being a very fine line to walk… How do you use the power dynamic to your advantage without accidentally abusing it or steering students in the wrong direction? Is there a way to tell how much good vs harm your teaching methodologies are doing, especially outside the classroom?

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Thank you!! I really appreciate the positive comments 🙂

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I agree with your comments here… I suppose I never really thought of Computer Science as being political. Maybe I’m too used to the idea that the internet is a free-for-all neutral zone of sorts? But that’s likely because I grew up in a country where there has historically been very little censorship of websites and web content, especially in comparison to other countries like China that are known for such censorship. Even if Computer Science and teaching Computer Science is political, I still think the political ties and influences attributed to reading and writing skills are much clearer to distinguish than those with programming skills, but I will definitely have to think on this more…

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Sorry for the late reply… It’s been a very busy week!

Thank you for the additional information about the IAT and how they score implicit bias… I find this whole topic and research area fascinating! On the subject of the dot-probe task, I’m curious to know how the results from that kind of IAT test compare to the results from the test that we took. I would assume that the results are very similar (it is a rather similar study design after all), but, again, this whole subject is rather interesting to me, so I can’t help but wonder if results would come out differently and, if so, how different?

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