Funds of identity and culturally responsive computing: K-5 teachers' adaptations to computing resources

Although computing is increasingly taught to K–5 students, females and certain ethnic groups are underrepresented in examinations and careers. Disparities have been attributed to students feeling a disconnect between their identities and the computing stereotype. Culturally responsive teaching has been used in the US to adapt resources to start to address these disparities, but less so in England, particularly for K-5 classroom contexts. This study investigates the ways in which K-5 teachers in England adapt existing computing teaching resources to be more culturally responsive. Building on ten culturally responsive teaching prompts (called Areas of Opportunity (AOs)) and a sociocultural identity theory, funds of identity (FoI), we ask RQ1: In what ways do K-5 teachers collaboratively adapt resources to deliver culturally responsive computing teaching? and RQ2: What does a funds of identity analysis reveal about computing resource adaptations? Researchers and 12 teachers collaboratively adapted a set of computing lessons. Interviews were conducted with the teachers post-lesson delivery, and thematically analysed to identify seven culturally responsive adaptation themes. Teachers reported that students drew most on practical funds of identity (e.g., football, drawing), but support was needed, e.g., discovering lower socioeconomic background students’ hobbies. Teacher adaptations aligned with other culturally responsive resources and all ten AOs were useful for identifying potential adaptations. But a prompt to foster community development was found to be missing. The significant contribution from this study is to introduce FoI, not used before in our context. We suggest FoI provides a nuanced view of identity that may be useful to teachers, resource developers, and researchers to reduce identity disparities in computing.