"A Key to Reducing Inequities in Like, AI, is by Reducing Inequities Everywhere First": Emerging Critical Consciousness in a Co-Constructed Secondary CS Classroom

Part of broadening participation in computer science (CS) is understanding what experiences and identities students bring with them to the classroom and building upon them. Prior work has often achieved this by connecting CS concepts to cultural ideas and practices. Increasingly, however, youth may be encountering sociotechnical and sociopolitical counternarratives about computing, power, and justice, offering new opportunities to connect CS to students' lives. To understand what role these emerging counternarratives have in secondary CS classrooms, we taught a co-constructed high school course to a racially, ethnically, socioeconomically, and gender diverse classroom, framing the course as both a creative and critical introduction to CS, giving agency to students to incorporate critical themes into their learning. We gathered notes, artifacts, and student responses over the course of 6-weeks, and analyzed the extent to which students brought critical themes into their creative work, developing critical consciousness of CS concepts. We found that before there was space for critical conversations about computing, we had to navigate students' issues of trust, positionality, and the broader inequitable systems of education in which the class occurred. Only after navigating those tensions did students feel safe to have those critical conversations. Once they did, they rapidly embraced the counternarratives, structured their learning around them, and used them to build community and support each other.