Unscripted Reels Season 2: Alliance for Identity-Inclusive Computing Education

Get to know the Alliance for Identity-Inclusive Computing Education. A group that is doing incredible work and we are pleased to feature their core members in Season 2 of Unscripted Reels.

Episode 6: Access for All

Episode 6: Access for All

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Dr. A. Nicki Washington:

And it’s really true that when you don’t have a diverse group of individuals at the table, then you don’t have everyone thinking about who does this harm? Who does this hurt? Who does this help? Who does this push forward more and who does this push back? So when we don’t create those equitable spaces, we don’t create those equitable and inclusive technologies as well. And we’re seeing that manifest right now, especially in computer science, every day when we talk about the different harms that are playing out from the result of artificial intelligence or facial recognition technology. All of these technologies that are at the forefront of the news every day are the way they are because we lack that inclusion and equity behind the scenes.

Dr. Shaundra B. Daily:

Resilience and rigor are in the same boat for me, I don’t like either term. I mean, if you look at the history of computer science and engineering, you look at the space race. You don’t sleep, you don’t eat. The goal is to win. And so the first computer science department and the space race, all of these things were kind of happening at the same time. And all of that culture got dumped into computer science departments. And so when I think about resilience, I think about, okay, basically, you want me to survive, something that’s quite frankly not healthy for me and probably pretty toxic. And so I would love to come to a place where we no longer say, “Oh, let’s help people be resilient,” or, “Let’s help people persist.” Why don’t we create an environment that people can thrive and be healthy and take care of themselves rather than just expecting people to make it?

Dr. Joanna Goode:

There’s an ethos or a culture sometimes in computer science that it’s for the best and the brightest. And then courses and curriculum are designed to figure out who the best and brightest are and exit out other people. And that is the opposite of inclusion, particularly for folks who have been historically underrepresented or come from underserved communities in computer science or in education, especially students who are comparing themselves to students who come with a great deal of what we call preparatory privilege. They might have robots given to them for their birthdays. They might be attending computer camps. They might have gone to a highly resourced high school with lots of computer science courses. And then when they come into the same introductory course as somebody who has not had all that privilege, sometimes the students themselves, the instructors start mistaking that privilege with ability.

And so you have somebody with a lot of experience and somebody with little experience. And when courses are designed to not take that into consideration, all you’re doing is filtering for privilege. And as long as we continue to design courses, filter for privilege, teach content that feeds that privilege, that identifies and is aligned with that privilege, the folks who are underrepresented who did not have that sense of privilege are going to continue to be marginalized and weeded out under the guise of meritocracy. But of course, it is not a meritocracy, it’s just playing on this sense of preparatory privilege.

Dr. Brianna Blaser:

Somebody in the room has to be the advocate for people with disabilities, whether that’s a person with a disability themselves, somebody who maybe has somebody with a disability in their family, or just somebody that’s an ally. When I came into this work, I didn’t identify as a person with a disability, but I could still go in the room and say, “Wait, wait, wait. Is this accessible? Oh, wait a minute. Do we need a sign language interpreter?” And just having somebody who’s willing to be that squeaky wheel. We talk about things like, if you’re going to have diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in your department, are you including people with disabilities on that committee? Are you making sure that that’s officially part of their charge and they are doing that? But somebody has to be willing to be that person and keep saying it. But if somebody shows up in every meeting and saying, “You have to use the microphone or folks can’t hear,” eventually folks start using the microphone.

Episode 5: How can academia empower marginalized communities?

Episode 5: How can academia empower marginalized communities?

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Dr. Brianna Blaser:

Oftentimes, when I’m in conversations related to broadening participation in computer science, it’s mostly limited to conversations about the gender binary and race and ethnicity, and there’s almost no consideration of identity behind that, and we’re all much richer people than that. I work with people with disabilities, and they’re often left out of that conversation, or if they’re included, it’s like a laundry list of attributes, but it’s not really meaningfully included in those efforts. There’s a lot of programming tools that are inaccessible to blind students, so they go to take, say, AP Computer Science Principles: almost every high school that that’s taught in is teaching it with a tool that’s not accessible, so blind students are not going to be able to participate. So, that’s a really significant barrier to some of those students. Beyond that, we don’t have a lot of good data about how many students with disabilities are taking computer science classes, getting computer science degrees and graduating. And if we don’t collect that data, we just don’t know what’s going on.

So, we talk a lot about getting people with disabilities into computer science, education into employment, but a whole nother piece of it is teaching about accessibility and disability within the computer science curriculum. That’s part of this identity-inclusive computing education. And what we hear from tech companies is that they really can’t hire enough folks that have knowledge about accessibility in order to then build accessible products. So, if we can start teaching students about accessibility in their courses, they’ll develop skills that are useful for industry, but then also it will mean we’ll have more accessible technology. And so, the next generation of students will start with better technology.

 

Dr. Joanna Goode:

I think we know from research that by the time students get to higher education, if that’s their pathway, that their identities are often already created, their sense of future is often already narrowed. And if computer science isn’t part of their considerations, or they feel like they don’t know enough about computer science to even take an introductory course, that knowing computer science in some ways is a prerequisite for knowing computer science, which gets people caught up in that higher education space.

But I think if we put it in K-12 and it’s not a place where we say, “Hey, who wants to learn computer science?”, and we wait for the hands to go up, then that would greatly improve inclusion and diversity. Similar to reading: we don’t ask who wants to learn to read and then teach them. We assume that it’s part of our literacy and introduce it in schools. And I think then you have K-12 students and their beautiful diversity all having access to that knowledge early on, have places to connect to the community and also be able to start forging their own sense of identity, maybe their school identity, maybe their career identity, maybe just their self-expression identity that is inclusive of computer science.

Episode 4: ChatGPT: Friend or Foe?

Episode 4: ChatGPT: Friend or Foe?

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Dr. A. Nicki Washington:

There was recently a case where an attorney decided that they were going to use ChatGPT to try to put together a legal brief, and a lot of the cases that were developed were not even actual cases. What that can mean for someone, especially from a group that’s already marginalized, overly-policed, overly-surveilled, can be extremely harmful.

There are also examples of judges who have been using ChatGPT to help determine what type of decisions that they will make in the penalty phase.

There’s also on the side medical doctors who are using ChatGPT now to try to understand how they can better serve patients. But when you’re using something… And all of these individuals are people without tech backgrounds, so they don’t understand that this data is being fed in from any and everywhere, and there’s no sort of decision-making or determination whether this is valid or not, or whether it’s harmful or not. And when we do that, we continue to exacerbate all of the biases that are already present in society.

So criminal justice is already an issue, healthcare is already an issue for so many marginalized groups, and by not understanding how justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion operate in technology, all we’re doing is recreating tools that are further harming people and further pushing those same identities to the margins in ways that right now are even moving into life-threatening, and even more harmful life-ending. But in 10 to 20 to 30 years, we will see it actually push even more and accelerate.

 

Dr. Joanna Goode:

We’re at the beginning conversations around training data sets and bias, and how can we have a sort of a justice-oriented position towards AI that is not just focusing on the harm, but also asking other critical questions, which is opening up this space.

So I think this foundational approach to computing and really connecting it to community, connecting it to power becomes a really important understanding for students as they’re having these conversations.

There’s no doubt kids are already using ChatGPT and other AI technologies in their other courses, and probably in computer science too. But just like other tools, the Google search engine, it’s having questions and understanding the context and what it can do, what it can’t do, what we should be most worried about, and maybe even for our students, how they might want to participate in AI as it continues to develop.

So instead of AI being done by other people and students being the recipients, how can we give them enough knowledge and critical dispositions so they can see themselves as people who are the next creators of AI in a socially just type way?

Episode 3: Discovering your Computer Science Career

Episode 3: Discovering your Computer Science Career

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Dr Shaundra B Daily:

I will say, honestly, it was something that I kind of fell into. Luckily I was a part of a scholarship program where you had to interview a professor in your field, so I interviewed this professor. He told me he dealt with big things that don’t move. I was like, “Eh, doesn’t sound like fun.” So I did more research on like, “Okay, what is engineering?” I decided to become an electrical engineer, and as I went on, I kept taking on research areas that I thought would be fun that just weren’t, when I actually pursued them.

Fast forward, when I landed in graduate school, the first project that we did at MIT was around dance and robotics. And so we crafted this whole activity where you could put sensors on your body and you could change the animation, you could change the sound, you could change the lighting. You could do all of this cool stuff with movement in your body. And so for me, it was like, “Ooh, maybe I haven’t been doing this through dance, but I’ve been dancing forever now, so I can actually incorporate not just the idea that I want to develop computational technologies, but also these other aspects of myself into the work.” And so from then on, it was like fair game.

Dr. Valerie Barr:

There are a number of avenues that brought me where I am today, part of it is just my upbringing. My mother was very politically active and my father was an electrical engineer and so somehow I am this blend of politically progressive activist, nerdy techie, computer scientist. And then when I went to college, I was studying mathematics and I was advised by a family friend. “The great irony is,” he said, “If you go into pure mathematics, all you can do is teach. But if you go into applied mathematics, you can solve really interesting problems.” So I have become an academic who tries to look at interesting problems. And increasingly, over time, I’ve just become really interested in how we can use technology to make people’s lives better. Because to me, that’s what’s so wonderful about computer science, is that we actually have the capability to really use technology to improve people’s lives.

Dr. Joanna Goode:

I had school district adopted curriculum that was being used. In computer science, I was given the keys to the computer lab and was told, “Good luck.” There was no curriculum available for me. I had to go find something that was available that was the closest match of what I could find. But it wasn’t really the type of materials that I knew would bring the subject alive for students. And so that was the first moment where I thought, “Hey, there’s a real need here for curricular resources just like we’re trying to do in mathematics and other subjects to make sure that it’s inclusive and engaging for students.” So that became one of my impetus to think, “Okay, well what can we do with professional development for computer science teachers so that they can use effective pedagogy, adopt curriculum that is engaging for their students, and be prepared to broaden participation in computing.”

Episode 2: Finding Your STEM Village

Episode 2: Finding Your STEM Village

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Dr. Shaundra B. Daily:

I think I was lucky enough that community found me. So when I was at Florida State University and the engineering college is joint with Florida A&M University. And so when I got to the campus my sophomore year, I just had one class. But it was lucky enough that someone said, “Hey, you should come be a part of the National Society of Black Engineers.” And I had never heard of it before, had no experience with it, and I was like, “Huh, that sounds interesting.” So I started going to meetings, became really involved and that’s really where I found my community, not only while I was in school, but they are still my community today. They’re the people that I know they’ll go to bat for me when it matters. So that’s really, as far as community is concerned, I was really lucky in that respect.

Dr. Brianna Blaser:

One of the programs I work with is Access Computing and we’re one of the National Science Foundation Broadening Participation in Computing Alliances. And we specifically have resources for students with disabilities studying computing fields. So we are always looking to find new folks, bring them into our community, our mentoring community, and hook them up with resources to go to conferences or do undergraduate research. And so we work with students from across the country. So I’d love to find more folks and seek out advocates and allies in your community. There’s probably faculty in your department that have some interest in accessibility or broadening participation. Even if they don’t know anything about disability, teach them.

Episode 1: Building a more inclusive and equitable computing experience

Episode 1: Building a more inclusive computing experience

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Dr. Shaundra B. Daily:

So when you’re thinking about diversity and equity, a lot of times people will come at it from one lens, right? So you are Black, you are Latina, you are a woman, you have a disability, right? And we often forget that intersectionality of it is important. So I’m a woman, but I’m also a Black woman. There are Black women with disabilities, there are Black women who are a part of the LGBTQ community, and all of those intersections of our identity are important.

So I think when we’re really thinking about systemic transformation and really making change for STEM as a whole, we really have to be really tuned in to people’s identities, all that they bring to the table. So race and ethnicity, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, age, all of those facets of identity that people bring to the table, so that when we’re thinking about any kind of intervention or any kind of policy or any kind of change that we want to make, that we’re really thinking about who we’re impacting and how we’re impacting them based on what they’re walking in the door with. Because everybody brings their own perspectives, their own challenges, their own everything to the table when they walk through that door.

Dr. Valerie Barr:

I think that we have to think more broadly than just computer science students. What we need to think about, in the largest sense, is how do we increase the exposure that students have to computing? Who’s having an opportunity to learn how computing applies in other fields, that students have a chance to really learn core concepts of computing?

So work I’ve been doing in other projects is, for example, you have students who take a psychology class and they have to use statistics. So the students accomplish that, but they don’t walk away with any understanding of what the computing concepts are behind that code. So they can’t replicate that ever again. So to me, that’s a missed opportunity. Students in biology, psychology, the quantitative social sciences, digital humanities, none of those students are really learning core concepts of computing. But those disciplines are all more diverse than computer sciences. So we’re missing a huge opportunity there to broaden the diversity of who learns core concepts of computing.

Within computer science itself, I do think that we have a long way to go to greet students with whatever background they bring to the door, and then give them a pathway into further computer science study.

Dr. A. Nicki Washington:

On the policy side, we’re looking at how do we create systemic change through these organizations, institutions on the post-secondary side, K-12 schools and districts, as well as nonprofits on the K-12 side. So those policies will be embedded in places where, in order to meet standards or accreditation, you have to meet those criteria that we include.

The part that becomes a lot more individual are the practices that a lot of us have. For example, I often use this idea of no hat policies that I used to have for young men in my class. And my argument was always that I’m a woman, I’m from the south. When you’re inside of a building, you’re supposed to take your hat off. And often the people who made those decisions about what is professionally acceptable did not look like me, and no one was in the room. Again, contributing to that thought process. And what does it really change in terms of a student’s ability to learn and effectively get through and navigate a course if they decide to wear a hat?

That’s one example of a practice that we’re trying to get individual educators and leaders to understand, because those individual practices may not seem like big deals, but they are in the grand scheme of things when you have a small group of students who feel like they’re not seen or they’re not validated because when they show up, they have to change who they are to be accepted. And that’s really what AIICE is trying to do, is get everyone to understand that it’s bigger than just the systems, it’s also the people as well. And if we can start to at least impact the people, then hopefully the people will create this groundswell of support that leads to better policies in the systemic level.

Dr. Shaundra B. Daily:

All of the things that you feel like you might have to put away to enter the space is probably the things we need in that space in the first place. So this concept of bringing your whole self, it’s not a cliche thing. It actually means something for you to be different in the room. A lot of times in STEM, it’s assimilation. If you don’t look like this, you’re not a proper STEM person. But it’s all of those things that people end up marginalized about that would actually improve what we’re doing in those spaces. So I would really want people to bring those things into the spaces to really impact the future.