Culturally Relevant CS Pedagogy - Theory & Practice

In order to increase the number of students attracted to the field of computer science and to retain the students currently in the pipeline, emphasis must be placed on what students are taught, how they are taught and the environment in which they are taught. Traditional computer science pedagogy has been unsuccessful in attracting, engaging, instructing, and retaining underrepresented students. Culturally relevant pedagogy can be leveraged to instruct a diverse range of computer science students. Culturally relevant pedagogical practices were introduced at Howard University and have had a positive impact. Since starting this initiative five years ago, we have seen an increase in internal and external transfer students (currently 17% of the department), the retention for the department has increased to 94% for underclassmen and we have seen an increase in the number of underclassmen passing the first three classes in the department's sequence. We discuss the theory behind the changes that have been made, what has been done, and the results.