CSforALL Focuses on Anti-Racism and Injustice

CSforALL Pledges to take Seven Initial Actions Inspired by Voices and Messages from the CS Community #ShareTheMic #BlackLivesMatter #CSforALL

As an organization committed to equity in education, CSforALL acknowledges the systemic racism that permeates our society. We continuously work towards the learnings that need to happen for us as an organization and as individuals to do our best in the education systems space, while supporting organizations who support the critical education of youth, especially black youth and non-black youth of color.

We are taking this moment, not to invent new messaging, but instead to look back and listen to black leaders in our community who have taken the time to call for reform, challenge the community, and tell us how we need to do better. We present and adopt our initial ‘Black Lives Matter’ commitment based upon these learnings. This is just the beginning, and with our commitment to learn we anticipate ongoing addition and revision of these commitments.

We will share the voices of black leaders with #ShareTheMic posts to lift up these critical messages for the Computer Science Education community. #BlackLivesMatter #BlackVoicesMatter

CSforALL Pledges to the Following 7 Initial Actions:

1. We pledge to use our words with intention, to infuse equity and anti-racism into our resources, writing, commitments, workshops, reports, and tools built for the community.
2. We pledge to advocate for, and lift up, high-quality examples of curriculum focused on the impacts of computing, especially in communities of color, and be explicit about its inclusion in K-12 classrooms.
3. We pledge to double-down on Culturally Responsive Pedagogies and, more importantly for CSforALL, Culturally Responsive School (and organizational) Leadership and include high quality examples in webinars, newsletters, reports, and convenings.
4. We pledge to repeatedly speak out against our historical pedagogies and approaches to computer science instruction that are grounded and designed to weed out all but a small prerogative subset of the US population.
5. We pledge to help the community look beyond only STEM based examples of integrated CS and computational thinking to broader implications for the humanities as well, and include these examples in publications, community webinars, and convenings.
6. We internally pledge to create an inclusive, unlearning and learning environment for all employees that includes fundamental readings and videos about racism in society, education broadly, and computer science education for all staff — the reading list will be shared publicly.
7. We pledge to be an organization and a movement focused on anti-racism and inclusion for the long haul, to lock arms, work with collaborative partners, and NEVER assume that one size fits all.

With these seven initial pledges, we acknowledge this is the very beginning of our work on anti-racism and injustice. As of today, we’re actively engaged with these pledges. In the coming months, CSforALL will develop and roll-out a larger campaign that will broaden our non profit focus and mission.

At CSforALL, we need to keep a critical eye on the fact that the education systems we are working with are biased, unequal, and in many places struggling to find the resources to serve the students and families in their community.