There is great pedagogical value in exploring the hinterland with your students, as I explain in my article for Hello World magazine, issue 17 available as a free PDF here.
I shared a sneak preview of this article last month on this very blog. Now that it’s “out in the wild” it’s had some lovely reactions. Many schools are asking their teachers to add “cultural capital” to their teaching, and it’s a common misconception that this needs to be “bolted on” to the subject. Other conversations I’ve had reveal that many teachers think the “Issues and Impacts” or “Ethical, Cultural… Issues” topic in GCSE Computer Science is the only place you can teach cultural capital, after all it’s where we discuss the impact of tech on education and employment, the effects of eleectronic waste on the environment and so on.
My article (and for further reading, my book HTTCS) shows that there is cultural capital to be found across the curriculum, from linking Ada Lovelace to Byron and Mary Shelley, to Al-Khwarizmi’s influence in 9th C Baghdad, to the conflict between white settlers and native peoples in America’s west driving demand for the telegraph and eventually digital communications, cultural capital is everywhere in our subject. Read about it and share it with your students, your classroom will be enriched.
Alan Harrison 