R 4 All: Welcoming and inclusive practices for teaching R

With rising interest in data science and programming, those of us teaching (with) R can now reach a larger audience than we ever thought possible. As educators, it is our responsibility to ensure that while we are building interesting and challenging curricula for these students, we also do it in a way that is attractive and engaging for a diverse audience (both in terms of computing background and in terms of demographics) as well as supportive enough to minimize the number of students who strunggle and fall behind and can't catch up. Adopting welcoming and inclusive practices can enable these students, whatever their background and circumstances, to achieve their potential and grow and engage with the larger R and data science community.

In this talk, we highlight a collection of pedagogical considerations, tips, and tricks for designing a welcoming and inclusive curriculum for teaching (with) R. In addition, we demonstrate tooling and infrastructure solutions for making it as straightforward and painless as possible to put these approaches into practice in the classroom. We also discuss how we put these tips and tools in practice in the newly launched Introduction to Data Science course at the University of Edinburgh.

While the talk is designed around teaching R, the pedagogical points apply to teaching programming in any computing language and many of the tips and tools we present can be used in teaching of a broad range of STEM and non-STEM disciplines with minor modifications (e.g. building a student dashboard based on data from a pre-course survey, datasets that don't encode gender as binary, tools livecoding, etc.).

Transcript

1. 4 all mine çetinkaya-rundel minebocek mine-cetinkaya-rundel cetinkaya.mine@gmail.com bit.ly/r4all-ltc welcoming + inclusive practices for teaching R
2. bit.ly/r4all-ltc so, you want to teach R? ✔ learner personas ✔ learning goals ✔ list of topics ✔ resources ❓ … ✔ syllabus ✔ computing infrastructure
3. Think back to when you were first learning R, or the first programming language you learned. What about the instruction made it more challenging for you?
4. get students interested keep curriculum challenging enough to make it worthwhile for the students ensure curriculum is supportive enough to minimize number of students who fall through the cracks prepare students for the next phase
5. bit.ly/r4all-ltc get to know your students 1
6. bit.ly/r4all-ltc get to know your students forms.gle/La4UfDjNLkyKR45B9 …
7. bit.ly/r4all-ltc forms.gle/La4UfDjNLkyKR45B9 get to know your students
8. bit.ly/r4all-ltc student dashboard
9. bit.ly/r4all-ltc class dashboard
10. bit.ly/r4all-ltc ✨ minecr.shinyapps.io/student-dashboard bit.ly/student-dashboard-code
11. help them get help 2
12. bit.ly/r4all-ltc help with ?help > ?mean
13. bit.ly/r4all-ltc help with ?help socviz.co/appendix.html#a-little-more-about-r 3 1 2
14. bit.ly/r4all-ltc help with ❌
15. bit.ly/r4all-ltc help with ✅
16. bit.ly/r4all-ltc help with searcher offers preliminary support for automatically or manually searching errors that are generated in R. github.com/r-assist/searcher
17. bit.ly/r4all-ltc help with searcher
18. bit.ly/r4all-ltc help with searcher
19. bit.ly/r4all-ltc help with reprex forces students to fulfil the technical criteria so the instructor can focus on the help that only a human can provide "Robot Pedantry, Human Empathy” mikemcquaid.com/2018/06/05/robot-pedantry-human-empathy reprex.tidyverse.org
20. bit.ly/r4all-ltc sans ❌ reprex
21. bit.ly/r4all-ltc ✅ with reprex
22. live code early & often 3
23. bit.ly/r4all-ltc ❌
24. bit.ly/r4all-ltc ✅
25. bit.ly/r4all-ltc livecoding tips use default appearance and font styles zoom in and use larger fonts ✋ avoid keyboard shortcuts, unless carefully narrating test your physical space / back of classroom test it on the smallest screen ⏺ + record + broadcast
26. leverage visuals 4
27. bit.ly/r4all-ltc twitter.com/hadleywickham/status/643381054758363136
28. bit.ly/r4all-ltc jennybc.github.io/purrr-tutorial/more-resources.html
29. bit.ly/r4all-ltc github.com/allisonhorst/stats-illustrations
30. bit.ly/r4all-ltc and leverage non-visuals twitter.com/KStackWhitney/status/1143497505654677504
31. define & pronounce terms 5
32. bit.ly/r4all-ltc define > ?double
33. bit.ly/r4all-ltc Felienne. “Explicit Direct Instruction in Programming Education” resources.rstudio.com/rstudio-conf-2019/opening-keynote-day2 pronounce
34. highlight diversity 6
35. bit.ly/r4all-ltc significancemagazine.com/624 > EU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Survey > European Network for the Investigation of Gender Incongruence > LGBTData: repository by Drexel University School of Public Health > Population Research in Sexual Minority Health (PRISM) Data Archive > US Center for Disease Control (CDC) data gender diversity
36. bit.ly/r4all-ltc language diversity
37. bit.ly/r4all-ltc highlight values Fisher’s iris, published in Annals of Eugenics allisonhorst.github.io/palmerpenguins
38. provide instant feedback 7
39. bit.ly/r4all-ltc R Rmd Does my Rmd knit? Am I pushing extraneous files to my repo? rundel.github.io/ghclass github.com/rundel/ghclass-actions
40. bit.ly/r4all-ltc R Rmd Am I following style guidelines? periodically
41. bit.ly/r4all-ltc repo_style(repo = "ghclass-demo/hw-03-ncbikecrash-ghclass-anya", files = "*.Rmd", draft = TRUE) #> ✔ Created branch 'styler' from 'ghclass-demo/hw-03-ncbikecrash-ghclass-anya'. #> ✔ Cloned 'ghclass-demo/hw-03-ncbikecrash-ghclass-anya@styler'. #> ✔ Created pull request for 'ghclass-demo/hw-03-ncbikecrash-ghclass-anya (master <= styler)'.
42. bit.ly/r4all-ltc
43. bit.ly/r4all-ltc take a note from praise, also comment on positives don’t just point out negatives
44. invite peer feedback 8
45. bit.ly/r4all-ltc make expertise “contagious” within your class help students see their work through another’s eyes, without instructor having to point out flaws peer review
46. bit.ly/r4all-ltc peer review with ghclass rundel.github.io/ghclass
47. amplify diverse voices 9
48. bit.ly/r4all-ltc Julia Silge Omayma Said
49. bit.ly/r4all-ltc
50. make room for creativity 10
51. bit.ly/r4all-ltc analyse your own data
52. bit.ly/r4all-ltc ugly ggplot2 themes
53. Do you have other tips or resources you’d like to share?
54. 4 all minebocek mine-cetinkaya-rundel cetinkaya.mine@gmail.com bit.ly/r4all-ltc welcoming + inclusive practices for teaching R Illustrations by Desirée De Leon, @dcossyle bit.ly/r4all-github