The increased interest in promoting CS education for all has been coalescing around the idea of "computational thinking." Several framings for promoting computational thinking in K-12 education have been proposed by practitioners and researchers that each place different emphases on either (1) skill and competence building, (2) creative expression and participation, or (3) social justice and ethics. We review each framing and how the framings structure the theory space of computational thinking. We then discuss how CS education can leverage the explanatory potential that each framing offers to the implementation and evaluation of learning, teaching, and tools in computing education. Our goal is to help CS education researchers, teachers, and designers unpack and leverage the complexities of this theory space (rather than ignoring it) while also addressing broader educational concerns regarding diversity, providing new directions for how students and teachers can actively participate in designing their digital futures, and directing current computing education efforts towards a more humanistic orientation.

As a first step, we identify and describe three prevalent framings of computational thinking that we have found within the larger landscape of CS education:

1. Cognitive computational thinking seeks to provide students with an understanding of key computational concepts, practices, and perspectives thereby emphasizing skill building and competencies which will be useful in college and future careers;
2. Situated computational thinking stresses personal creative expression and social engagement as a pathway in becoming computationally fluent building on youth interest in digital media and production; and
3. Critical computational thinking recognizes that computing is not an unequivocal social good, and proposes an analytical approach to the values, practices, and infrastructure underlying computation as part of a broader goal of education for justice.

We illustrate each framing with examples from various studies and discuss how these framings of computational thinking have functioned as design heuristics that provide specific directives for curricular initiatives that inform the design of learning and teaching tools, materials and activities.We then consider how these framings are an integral part of the larger theory space of efforts promoting K-12 computational thinking and how they should be considered in dialogue with one another rather than in opposition. Based on this understanding, we offer suggestions for how to proceed forward with a more holistic view of not only what computational thinking should be, but also directions for it might be studied or taught moving into the future.