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Creating a Disciplinary Commons in Computer Science

Josh TenenbergUniversity of Washington, Tacoma

jtenenbg@u.washington.edufaculty.washington.edu/jtenenbg

SIGCSE 2006 Special Projects Showcase

March 3, 2006

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Teaching as a private activity

• Privatized teaching spaces

“Aside from his syllabi and fading memories, he had no real record of what happened in those award winning courses”

• Cross-institutional border skirmishes

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Deprivatize teaching: Faculty meet on common ground, and the practices and artifacts produced become “common property”, available for use and adaptation by others.

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From private to public: creating a scholarly community

• ~12 CS teachers meeting face-to-face, monthly throughout academic year

• Crossing institutional borders: CS faculty from different institutions engaged in common practices and common goals but with different contexts

• Talking about teaching

• Parallel construction and mutual critique of Course Portfolios (idea from Sally Fincher)

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An Examined Life of the Teaching Self

• The course portfolio, “focuses on the unfolding of a single course, from conception to results” (Hutchings, 1998). It provides a coherent narrative connecting course goals to instructional elements to student learning.

• Constructing a course portfolio is both archeological dig through self- and student-generated artifacts and reflective interrogation of taken-for-granted beliefs about thinking and learning.

“Watch ... any teacher ... and you'll be struck by how much of what they do is steered by notions of ‘what the children's minds are like and how to help them learn,’ even though they may not be able to verbalize their pedagogical principles.” (Bruner, 1996)

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Sessions & Portfolio OverviewWashington Instantiation

• Sept: Course Objectives• Oct: Institutional and Curricular Context• Nov: Course Content• Dec: Teaching Methods• Jan: Rationale (Situated Teaching Philosophy)• Feb: Evidence of Student Learning• Mar: Grading• Apr: Self- and Peer-Observation• May: Lessons Learned & External P’flio Review• June: Complete Portfolio

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Two Parallel Instantiations

Washington State– Leader: Josh Tenenberg

– http://depts.washington.edu/comgrnd/

United Kingdom– Leader: Sally Fincher

– http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/saf/dc/

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SIGCSE Special Project Funding

• Program Evaluation– Collaboration between project leaders of both

instantiations and external expert in SoTL(Jennifer Meta Robinson, Indiana University)

• Generalizing the Model– To other contexts and disciplines– Comparative data with parallel instantiations– Developing a broader Commons in CSEd

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Acknowledgements

• Sally Fincher has been a collaborator throughout this project

• Funding has been provided by the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, the University of Washington Tacoma’s Institute of Technology, and the UWT Founder’s Endowment.