[ANova Recap #4] Teaching Toolbox and Inequity in Tech
By: Berkeley Anova
Tags: Education, Bay Area, Volunteer, Mentorship, Computer Science

General Meeting #4 Recap

ANova Halloween pumpkin carving event!

In this week’s general meeting, we had a former ANova alumn, Christina Ong, come in as a guest speaker! Christina currently teaches computer science at Oakland Tech. During her talk, we went over different teaching strategies that take into account differences in learning styles of students. In particular, we talked about the idea of scaffolding in terms of curriculum development and teaching. The main takeaway from our discussion on effective teaching tactics is learning with the students. The processes of teaching and learning are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are subsets of each other. We also talked about the main pitfall in the classroom, inequity, and the ways in which we as instructors can minimize inequity. We did smaller discussions about common problems run into while teaching and potential solutions to each of these problems. An example of this would be when a student makes an unclear or hesitant comment, to which a potential response by the teacher could be encouraging that student to speak up and speak through their idea, prompting further discussion about the comment among students thereafter. We concluded our general meeting by summarizing our “Teaching Toolbox”, which contains the strategies and tactics discussed throughout the general meeting and how we as instructors and efficiently and effectively implement them on a day to day basis at site.

Small Group #4 Recap

In this week’s small group, we focused on the cultural aspects of gentrification and tech. For example, we discussed elitism in gentrification: the belief that the culture that is replacing is inherently more sophisticated than the culture it is replacing — a sort of cultural Manifest Destiny. We talked about the ways in which we can abstain from replacing or changing or belittling the cultures present in the communities that we enter, specifically in regards to entering the tech space. We also revisited the topics from our last small group, discussing tech companies’ responsibilities, with regards to creating more housing in the Bay Area and their contributions to the growing inequality in the Bay Area by outsourcing their labor. We concluded our small group discussion this week by reviewing the forms of resistance we can employ to help people who are being kicked out of their homes and communities, and discussed the ways in which we as individuals are responsible for helping these communities, even if we do not personally belong to them.

Site Recap: Fremont High School

This week’s site highlight is Fremont High School, which is another new site for ANova this semester! 4 mentors go to Fremont on Tuesdays, and 3 mentors go on Thursdays. The classroom has 7 students, all of whom are juniors in high school. Because of the smaller ratio of students to mentors, the class is able to break up into groups of two to three students with one mentor, which has facilitated the teaching process for the mentors and allows for the maximum retention of content by the students. In small groups, the mentors are able to most efficiently relay the information to the students while considering the ways in which those specific students learn best, which is considerably more difficult when teaching an entire classroom of students. In this past week, the students at Fremont have been working on a dice rolling project, which utilizes a combination of the recent skills they have been developing in Python: using random numbers and comparators. While working on this project, the mentors noticed that most of the students were struggling to complete the project on their own, so in the upcoming weeks they will be reviewing the concepts that are causing the most trouble and will revisit the project in smaller portions when they feel the students are ready to tackle it again!