UC Merced, UC Berkeley, and Laney College are collaborating to create interdisciplinary “course modules” with socially-centered data applications to be taught in a variety of introductory courses in math, computing, and data science.
A complete “course module” will be a coordinated, open-sourced collection of instructional videos, computing labs, small-group discussions, projects, assessments, instructional pedagogy guides, and other curricular materials that can be adopted partly or wholly as 1-3 weeks of coursework. Each scaffolded course module will provide baseline training in core computing, statistics, and data science concepts alongside intentional, justice-centered data case studies and their essential historical, ethical, and social contexts.
Project activities include in-person project workshops, team-driven curriculum development, professional faculty development, course deployment, classroom evaluation, and project collaboration evaluation. CalTeach teachers will help pilot module components and address pedagogical challenges to teaching computing and math concepts alongside behavioral and social science concepts.
This intersegmental (UC, Community College) and interdisciplinary (Math, Computing, Behavioral and Social Science, Education) collaboration will not only build curriculum that attracts and empowers students from a variety of sociocultural and academic backgrounds, but also it will develop each institution’s faculty expertise in building equitable, ethical, and effective data science curriculum for the modern classroom.
