The Project

Data Advocacy for All is a CU Next Award project that infuses rhetorical studies with data science and critical data studies in order to enhance data humanities education throughout and beyond the University of Colorado system. With a specific aim to assist the teaching of data advocacy, we have designed and curated an accessible, searchable toolkit of educational resources for teachers and students across multiple disciplines who have no prior data science or computing experience.

The Team

The Data Advocacy for All project has been designed by a team of digital humanities, history, and rhetoric scholars and teachers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Colorado Denver.

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.

Student Showcase

The resources from our toolkit were piloted in several courses taught at the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Colorado Denver between 2023 to 2024. We’ve provided a showcase of student work from these courses in order to illustrate how these resources can be successfully applied in the classroom to help students learn how to build their own data advocacy projects.

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.