During the academic year 2023 – 2024, the ethi{CS} project at the Tang Institute continues its collaboration with Professor Aria Chernick at the Duke University Social Science Research Institute. Broadly, our project — termed Hello, Ethi{CS} — is an interdisciplinary effort that seeks to understand how the implementation of open design practices and collaborative efforts can impact attitudinal shifts among educators and move these educators toward equitable educational change and the effective teaching of ethics-centered computing.
There are a number of moving parts to the project and a diverse set of educators who are involved. Throughout this year and next, we have been working on moving the needle of effective education forward in practice by working with K – 12 educators teaching across disparate grade levels and subject matter, as well as Duke University undergraduate students interested in the ethics of technology and education, in order to facilitate the co-creation of lesson planning that can bring digital ethics into the classroom in a way that feels engaging and inclusive.
Toward that end, we here at the ethi{CS} project have met weekly with our Duke and Durham counterparts to provide our expertise on ways to make collaborations between K – 12 educators and the Duke University students as fruitful as possible, as well as ways to best incorporate the normative ethics content in question within the specific lesson plans that are being co-created. In this area we seek to contribute what we can regarding principles of effective pedagogical practice in general — in addition to the more finely-grained specific normative ethics and computer science content we have experience bringing together.
Beyond enriching classroom experiences in the here and now, we also hope to measure and better understand how these kinds of collaborative practices can impact student learning. Hence, the Hello Ethi{CS} project runs a social science research project in parallel to the applied collaborative efforts here outlined. This research project will seek to quantify and make sense of how co-creation of lessons by interdisciplinary sets of educators can lead to changes in perceived and measured learning — both on the part of the educators involved and on the part of the students being taught and evaluated. As we move into summer and the next academic year, we will focus more finely on this aspect of the project. The members of the ethi{CS} project look forward to further developing our collaboration.
