Foundations courses typically explore the social, political, and historical contexts for education and learning so they can respond in informed, responsive ways to diverse learners and address the inequities they may face.

Computing and digital literacies (CDLs) can support learning in Foundations courses. TCs might use their time in Foundations to help them build self-efficacy around using technology for their own learning and future teaching. They might leverage particular CDL practices — like data interpretation and analysis, digital representation and reflection — to understand learning theory and contexts for learning.

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Today, children of all backgrounds are interacting and creating with technology from an early age. Popular media can reinforce both the “perils” and the “promise” of technology for youth and child development. Coursework in Child / Adolescent Development can help future teachers nuance their perspectives away from those polarizing narratives, instead grappling with research and evidence to explore the many factors shaping learners’ development vis-à-vis their relationships to technology. These courses might help TCs understand the potential risks and pitfalls of certain kinds of technology use and delve more deeply into learners’ online lives and literacies.

In these courses, teacher candidates might also practice collecting, visualizing, and analyzing data to know and see their learners and to understand their development.

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There are specific computing and digital literacies relevant to educators in Bilingual and TESOL settings. These range from collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about MLL students through asset based lenses, vetting and leveraging technology to make learning more accessible, multilingual, and multimodal, and using digital and computing tools to promote the creativity, expression, sense-making, language and content area learning of populations that can be marginalized in educational settings.

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The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines put forth a framework by which teacher candidates can modify their classrooms and lessons to better support and increase learner agency for not just students with disabilities, but all learners by encouraging educators to design for multiple means of Engagement, Representation, and Action & Expression. TCs can utilize technology to support their design in these areas, as well as to provide more options for students to participate. Assistive technology is another area in which TCs can make their classrooms more accessible. It’s also imperative that TCs don’t lower expectations when teaching CDLs to students with disabilities, thus denying them the same opportunities afforded to other students.

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Literacy today extends far beyond print: it now requires fluent navigation of digital landscapes that shape how stories are told, knowledge is built, and voices are amplified. By analyzing and authoring multimodal texts, ranging from interactive infographics and podcasts to animations, teacher candidates can come to see how digital tools invite new possibilities for expression, inquiry, and meaning-making. Approaches like digital storytelling also enable teachers and their students to center perspectives often excluded from mainstream narratives and the literary canon. These multimodal approaches can cultivate classrooms where reading and writing are more dynamic, participatory, and just.

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Computational and digital literacies in mathematics education can support teacher candidates to deepen their own mathematical modeling and reasoning, problem-solving, and real-world connections, and to support the same for their learners. TCs and learners might leverage computational thinking and programming to explain their problem-solving strategies and carry out mathematical algorithms. Alternating between concrete manipulatives and models and their digital counterparts can help learners bridge concrete exploration towards abstract reasoning. Using computational tools to collect, visualize, and interrogate data about race, gender, school funding, and school segregation positions mathematics as a tool for social analysis in the real world rather than an isolated set of procedures.

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In Social Studies, Teacher Candidates can leverage digital and computational tools and approaches to build their own understanding of sociocultural, historical, and present-day social issues and to actively engage learners in that exploration. By creating computational models, data visualizations, and other digital representations, TCs help students grasp core principles and explore historical contexts in meaningful ways. Additionally, TCs might learn the critical search, media, and information literacies they need to engage in and teach library and archival research. Learning about the historical and present-day impacts of technology is also a core part of New York State’s K-12 Computer Science and Digital Fluency standards.

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Many young folks utilize technology to create and share their art as a form of expression, as well as to participate in communities of similar interests. TCs and their students can use computational literacies to cultivate their art knowledge. As technology evolves, new methods of art creation and analysis become available. TCs and their students have an opportunity to explore the relationship between traditional forms and computational means, and apply critical lenses at the intersection of art and computer science.

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Physical activity and computer science are often thought of as incompatible with each other, where time spent engaging with technology is time that could be used being active (“Kids these days don’t play outside anymore, they’re always on their phones!”) However, physical education and computing and digital education have a lot to offer each other. Computing tools can help students understand their bodies and physical activity more deeply, as learners track data of interest about themselves (e.g heart rate, minutes of physical activity per day, water intake, and so on) through apps and wearable technology, and visualize the data using graphs and charts, and set fitness goals. Meanwhile, unplugged computing activities can leverage students’ physicality to help them understand computer science principles. Students can also use data and computatioanl models to understand phenomena related to their wellbeing and keeping themselves and their communities healthy, such as combatting food injustice and infectious disease spread.

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Preparing CUNY teacher candidates (TCs) to integrate technology and computing requires them to practice related skills in real P-12 classrooms. The settings where CUNY TCs do fieldwork or student teaching vary greatly, making it challenging for all TCs to practice computing integration. A robust placement requires not only a classroom with the requisite technology, but a cooperating teacher with some knowledge of and/or commitment to computing integration, and enough curricular flexibility to allow for TC’s practice in this area. Given these challenges, faculty supporting TCs in clinical settings can get creative.

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Computing and digital literacies are especially helpful to enhance teacher research. Much library research is now conducted online, but finding accurate, reliable sources that can serve one’s particular purposes is no small feat. TCs might learn how to sift through and evaluate online sources for their own CUNY research projects, consider how AI tools can both support and hinder accurate research, and learn how to curate digital texts and media that their future students might use to do their own research. Digital tools can also promote mind mapping and organizing the non-linear nature of the research process, as well as new ways of collecting and analyzing data in action research projects.

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