2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Culturally relevant experiences have been an important factor for Indigenous populations and integrations in the curriculum. Even though research surrounding Indigenous integrations in the STEM curriculum exists, little work has been done to compare teachers’ experiences of professional development initiatives to infuse Indigenous factors in the curriculum, specifically when the curriculum is developed through a research practitioner partnership (RPP) approach. This paper describes the details of the activities within the code.org platform undertaken by a diverse set of high school teachers with no prior computer science (CS) experience. The results of surveys conducted to obtain feedback regarding their professional learning experiences, specifically comparing pre-post professional learning that aims to improve their CS skills. Multiple modalities were utilized for the teacher's professional learning activity (online/in-person / cohort). Findings (survey and code.org statistics) reveal that professional development has improved the teachers’ confidence in teaching and willingness to teach and integrate CS within their current courses. The contribution of this work is in sharing the findings as they relate to the multiple modalities and identifying areas of challenges and improvement for future work.