About the Project
Mission
Data Advocacy for All is a CU Next Award project that aims to extend data humanities education throughout and beyond the University of Colorado system by offering an open-access educational toolkit for teaching data advocacy.
Whether used by nonprofits to catalyze social action, think tanks to argue for policy change, or organizations to promote legislative equity, data advocacy is an increasingly important means of communication in the era of ubiquitous data. Yet while more and more undergraduate students are being exposed to the technical aspects of data science, too few students are being taught the complex array of data skills, ethical mindsets, and communication practices needed to use data responsibly and effectively to advocate for social change.
Data Advocacy for All addresses this curricular gap by offering a toolkit of educational resources to help students think critically and ethically about data; learn minimal computing and data processing skills; and practice generating data-driven stories and arguments in order to ethically translate data into effective real-world action.
To do so, it is guided by the following data justice perspective:
While coding and other technical skills are important for data literacy, students must also learn how to not only critically examine data issues in the context of existing power dynamics, emerging technologies, and social practices but also rhetorically use data to tell ethical, compelling data-driven stories and participate in ongoing conversations about pressing social matters.
Framework
Data Advocacy for All is built using an overarching framework of critical data studies, data science, and rhetorical data studies:
Critical Data Studies
Best understood as a constellation of approaches, Critical Data Studies applies diverse critical lenses to examine various data issues in the context of existing power dynamics, emerging technologies, and socio-cultural practices. From data ethics to data feminism to black digital humanities, these approaches investigate how data functions as both an oppressive and liberatory force in order to help cultivate “more just, equitable, and livable futures” (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020, n.p.).
Data Science
Data Science is a multi-disciplinary approach to working with data through its various stages—collection, organization, analysis, storage—in order to access, process, and glean insights from data for various purposes. Data Science draws on principles and practices from mathematics, statistics, business, artificial intelligence, and computer engineering to offer reliable practices for collecting, analyzing, and gaining insights from various sized data sets.
Rhetorical Data Studies
As a critical and constructive framework, rhetorical data studies explores how data-driven stories, arguments, and visualizations communicate knowledge, garner public attention, and, among other actions, mediate socio-cultural change in order to help establish more ethically- minded and effective data-informed practices.
The Toolkit
The Data Advocacy for All Toolkit is a collection of open-access educational resources for teaching data advocacy in higher educational settings. These resources have been curated by the Data Advocacy for All team in order to enhance student abilities to inquire with data, communicate with data, and deploy data for social advocacy. The toolkit includes open-access readings, assignments, activities, and other teaching resources.
The CU Next Award
The CU Next Award is an academic innovation program that supports pedagogical development within the University of Colorado system. The CU Next Award requires faculty from a minimum of two University of Colorado campuses to collaborate on a pedagogical project that innovates with technology in order to help “increase the efficacy and efficiency of student learning in courses and degree programs” as well as “reduce technology-related and other barriers for individual and small groups of faculty.” To fulfill this requirement, faculty from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Colorado Denver collaborated to design, implement, and assess the Data Advocacy for All modular curriculum over a three year span as well design this Open Access (OA) digital repository of curricular materials for instructors across the CU system and beyond. You can learn more about the CU Next grant and the other awarded projects here.