2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Your Voice is Power is a curriculum that seeks to promote racial equity and increase interest in computing careers by integrating elements of computing, music, social justice, self-expression, and entrepreneurship. The curriculum consists of five modules lasting 60-90 minutes each. Students engage with music through lyrical analysis to extract and explore present themes of social justice using the OUTKAST Imagination framework. Students then engage with musical concepts from a computing perspective to create their own remixes using EarSketch, a web-based, learn-to-code through music platform developed at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). These elements are further supported by discussions around racial justice and the pathways to equity. The program culminates with an optional online competition with student submissions judged by industry professionals. This program has been ongoing since the 2019-2020 school year, and program evaluation efforts have been undertaken since the program’s inception.

Participatory evaluation framework principles were followed, including a process to obtain input from program leaders and staff to create program goals and a logic model that maps out the program’s activities and how these link to the goals. The evaluation includes the collection of data from all program participants (i.e., teachers, students, and judges) via online surveys conducted immediately after the conclusion of the online competition. In these online surveys, we gather participants’ feedback on various aspects of the competition, as well as their perspectives on their motivation to participate. Additionally, the survey is designed to measure the impact that program participation has had on them (and on their students, in the case of teacher participants). Program evaluation results from the first two years have suggested that, in general, participants in all three groups find Your Voice is Power to be a valuable experience, one they would repeat and/or recommend to a friend or colleague.

For the year three data collection, following the past years’ evaluation findings, we further investigated two areas of interest to program leaders: 1) students’ experiences with a framework (the OUTKAST Imagination framework) [1] included in the curriculum to guide students through a detailed analysis of a song’s lyrics and their meaning, and 2) teachers’ self-efficacy for and attitudes around teaching on racial equity-related topics, including the specific pedagogical approaches non-racist teaching, culturally relevant teaching, and anti-racist teaching. This paper will present the results of the current evaluation with a specific focus on these two newly added areas of inquiry. Results indicate that students and teachers found lyric analysis and the OUTKAST Imagination framework to be a useful and valuable tool, and that teachers are generally comfortable with, and seek opportunities for, teaching on race-related topics, but they vary in their self-efficacy for specific pedagogical approaches to teaching on race-related topics.