We might look at CITE artifacts through a number of different lenses to understand if and how they are equitable and meaningful ways to bring computing and digital literacies together with teacher ed.

This protocol offers some prompts that might help you evaluate and describe artifacts.

This repository contains over 250 artifacts logged in 2022 and 2023. You can filter the artifacts by College or CITE Program Team.

The CITE equitable pedagogy framework provides a set of goals that operationalize equitable processes and outcomes, an approach to design, and a set of guiding design principles and moves. Browse this interactive web resource or view it as a PDF, and discuss considerations that are relevant to your planning team’s work.

Some CITE planning teams choose to articulate a shared set of commitments by drafting a vision statement. One Bilingual and Special Education program, for example, wrote:

As part of the department’s commitment to the development of skillful and knowledgeable educators guided by social justice and culturally relevant-sustaining pedagogies, [our] department is dedicated to introducing and engaging all educators across programs to integrate both digital literacies and computational thinking into their own learning and practice. Acknowledging the varied reasons why digital literacies and computational thinking are important to students’ lives, our goal is for educators to understand that these intersect in multiple ways with social justice, equity, literacies, inclusive digital citizenship, innovation, economic development, school reform, school transformation, and, ultimately, personal fulfillment and joy. We believe that teaching is a continual and intentional process that is steeped in a reflection of values, beliefs, and perceptions. 

Our program supports candidates to be knowledgeable and critical about a range of technological resources that both enhance teaching and learning as well as make their own tasks as educators more efficient and to understand themselves as joining a professional community. Given that being a critical citizen is fundamental to democracy, through our program, we emphasize educators to engage in critical digital literacies through a reflection of their own practices and how to share these insights with students. We promote educators’ competencies in creating projects which leverage computational thinking across the content areas, with all types of diverse learners, so that students are able to engage in these practices through a culturally sustaining lens.

In any kind of organized effort to shift our instruction, lots of new terms are thrown around. Until there’s shared language—collective discussion and broad agreement on what certain concepts actually mean, and what they don’t mean—it can feel like there’s just a bunch of jargon without a lot of substance.

In our CITE work, we use terms like “digital literacy”, “critical computing”, “computational thinking”, and many others… but do all our team members define those terms the same way? One college team’s first draft of learning goals included CITE vocabulary (such as digital literacy), but when the CITE planning committee came together to review them, they realized that maybe not everyone was understanding those terms the same way. Furthermore, when receiving feedback on their first draft of learning goals, they realized that readers of the learning goals (who were not privy to their meetings or part of the college community) were not interpreting their use of certain vocabulary terms the same way they were. As shared in this testimony, regularly discussing terms and concepts together is critical to progress in CITE:

“We definitely had discussions…trying to understand the concepts when they felt vague. Like, what is digital fluency versus digital literacy. And we kept making revisions [to our learning goals] based on how we were understanding them…and we were pretty much going one by one, hearing the [external] feedback [on our learning goals], and then determining how to revise it, section by section.” (York College CITE Team Member)