Interdisciplinary Classes:
Good and Good for Gender Equity
Don Kirkwood
North Salem High School
We’ve got a problem in computer science education and it’s
two-fold.
First, we are the only curriculum area where, as Ed Lazowska said at
this year’s
Computer Science and Information Technology Symposium, equity between
young
men and women is actually going in reverse. Only 17% of the students
who take
the Computer Science Advanced Placement Exam1 are young
women. Beyond
this, in 1984 37% of computer science bachelor degrees were awarded to
women,
but by 1999 this number had shrunk to less than 28%2. Both
of these
situations are unacceptable. But there is another related issue that
directly
concerns high school computer science. Because of a complete lack of
support
for education, classroom size is ballooning. In many districts, if a
class does
not contain 30 to 40 students, it simply doesn’t exist. This
means that
specialized courses in areas such as art, high-level science, math,
and computer
science go by the wayside. Since computer science is almost throwing
away half
of its potential enrollees by not attracting young women, many school
districts
are simply shutting down their computer courses.
Now most teachers have not been just sitting on their hands and
letting this
situation continue. There are many groups from Carnegie Mellon’s
6APT to
the Northwest Girls Collaborative Project that have offered
well-reasoned suggestions
for ways of improvement that many teachers have take to heart. These
cover a
wide variety of areas:
- providing modeling (seek more women teachers, have ex-students on
serve
on panels or as mentors, present advanced students as mentors,
organize clubs
for females)
- recruiting (notice the difference in the way a 6’5"
young women
versus a very bright, advanced math student is treated when she
walks into
your school)
- creating new types of computer problems - women treat a computer
as a tool;
whereas, men treat it as a toy–we need to reflect this more in
the problems
we assign
- stop creating an environment where techno-speak stops students
from exploring
technology
- offering single gender classes
Unfortunately, no matter what options we select, it seems that we
must first
gain enough young women in our courses to create a critical mass of
female students
so that they feel comfortable in our classrooms and research shows
that this
simply hasn’t occurred. My hypothesis is that all of the above
ideas are
effective, but, by themselves, they lack the attractiveness to create
real,
long-term change. A major way to combine the assets of all the above
is to teach
far more interdisciplinary classes.
Over ten years ago, during an educational conference sponsored by the
Association
of Oregon Industries that brought together teachers from China,
Britain, Germany,
Japan, and Oregon, a challenge was given to do something in education
that would
really make a difference. As I sat through the sessions, I heard the
cry to
do something. I don’t find that bureaucracy is very effective for
true
educational change, so my idea had to be small–something I could
personally
handle. I started sketching out an idea to combine the keys of success
for any
student: English, math, and the tools they need to study science,
history, and
art... As I continued to mold the idea I came up with MECA (Math,
English, Computers,
and their Applications). This course, designed for average sophomores
or students
just below track, combines proof-oriented geometry, sophomore English,
computer
programming, and literacy.
Over the ten or so years that this course has been running the
results have
been even more than I had hoped. Many long lasting friendships have
had their
origins in MECA and MECA’s Oregon state test scores in the course
have
been far above our school and state averages. More apropos to this
conversation,
a huge percentage of the young women in my AP CS courses come from
this one
class of 35 students. Although this course consists of less than 10%
of the
sophomores in our school, around 50% of the females in our AP CS
courses come
from MECA. Beyond this, there are at least 15 young women who took
MECA presently
pursuing computer related careers and many times this number who have
graduated
from universities and are working for a wide variety of computer
companies.
I believe the reason for this continuity and growth is several fold.
By having
computers as just one component of the course, many girls join the
class because
of the offering of additional help in geometry or English and discover
that
they are very good at and enjoy computers. They constantly say,
"I wouldn’t
have taken a programming class: because I was not interested, not good
enough,
or didn’t know what even it was." Then, throughout MECA,
they see
how computers can be tools to help them solve problems. By using
computers in
their English class as a presentation, information gathering and
analysis tool
and in their geometry as exploration and organizational tool, they
lose their
fear. As we move into computer programming, they enter excitedly and
comfortably.
They begin to see that their attributes are an asset to both
themselves and
equally importantly, to their group. But by the end of the course,
they are
enjoying themselves, confident in their ability, and ready to jump
over the
next bar.
MECA is just my personal way to get involved with this process. I
believe that
almost any interdisciplinary combination will bring about the same
results.
All of us are attracted to something new and, if it offers real
results, it
stays attractive. Not only this, but if we are teaching something that
we love,
students are drawn to our enthusiasm. So any combination of courses
that contains
computer science, will move more diversity into our field because a
wider variety
of students will enter the courses. This will allow us to practice all
the elements
of research that work for all students and encourage a much wider
variety of
students to continue into the field of computer science.
We have three choices, we can
- say, as unfortunately a few of the writers on the AP Computer
Science list
serve suggest, that it is genetics that make white males far more
interested
and effective in the computer science arena,
- keep hitting our heads against a wall by attempting to apply good
techniques
to a too small sample and therefore lose before we get started,
- try a new approach that subversively gets a wider variety of
students into
a course and then sneaks in the fact that they are all competent and
can enjoy
the abilities that computers bring into their academic and personal
lives
If we don’t find a solution, we will continue down the trail of
smaller
and smaller classes made up of a population with little female
representation.
Then, not only will we all be teaching other areas, but also we will
have lost
one of the primary strengths of our country and that is the fact that
our diversity
brings out a far broader range of solutions to the problems our world
faces
today. We must take a step forward both for ourselves as teachers as
well as,
more importantly, our students.
1 Tech-Savvy:Educating Girls in the New Computer Age
(2000)
2 Balancing the Equation: Where are Women and Girls in
Science,
Engineering, and Technology? (2001)
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