Defining the Epicenter: Teaching Bilingual Students to Center Themselves While Learning Data Science in the Pandemic

We are presenting a project overviewing a collaborative unit that involved designing virtual interaction by utilizing translanguaging pedagogy practice in a computer science-focused science class at a NYC-based middle school. One science teacher collaborated with us to rethink her class experience design, supporting her Spanish/English bilingual students through multiple layers of challenges: the pandemic, virtual engagement, English as a new language for many of them, and computer/data science literacy learning. In this interactive “poster” presentation, we showcase the types of virtual engagements that we tried. We describe aspects of the specific context for learning in NYC, and some of the prior design work we had done before the pandemic, using a framework we call syncretic computational literacies (or “the three circles”). We also describe how we engaged with the teacher in our project to do codesign and some co-teaching online, including changes we had to make in the middle of the unit in response to challenges that arose. Finally, we talk about how what we observed seems to align with the connected learning framework and offer reflections on our own experiences. This spotlight-style experience report presentation consists of several virtual ‘posters’ within a Prezi shared by three interns on the project who supported the design, teaching, and observations, with an interview and commentary by the classroom teacher.