New Research Shows Black Women Who Teach Computer Science Occupy a Unique Role in the Classroom for All Students, Regardless of Race or Sex
A recent study led by Georgia Tech research faculty member Tamara Pearson, the senior director of Research and Programs in the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing at Georgia Tech, focuses on understanding how Black women teaching computer science define themselves and their roles in the larger computer science (CS) education space, an underexplored topic according to Pearson.
Using data collected from surveys, interviews and focus groups with four Black women currently teaching high school CS in Atlanta in a majority Black district of over 50,000 students, Pearson and co-author Pamela Leggett-Robinson of PLR Consulting explored the teachers’ unique experiences and approaches to CS education.
Researchers came to discover that the unique, intersectional identities of the teachers – being both Black and women – were inextricably linked to their experiences as CS teachers.
“Our participants’ perceptions of their roles as CS teachers illustrates how Black women not only model a deep understanding of, and compassion for, student needs, but simultaneously contribute to an on-going mission of racial uplift through their presence in front of the classroom,” Pearson states in the paper.
The authors say that making someone pick one identity – when they live with multiple – doesn’t fully account for how people navigate society or the power structures that they deal with every day.
“These teachers are cognizant that their intersectional identities, as Black women, contribute to dismantling stereotypes of who is smart and who ‘can do’ computer science,” writes Pearson.
The research findings show four themes that emerged as common perspectives from all participants. Based on this cohort from the Atlanta school district, the study shows Black women:
- Care for people
- Are transformational leaders
- Represent possibility
- Expect more
Among the participants, the theme of caring for people was omnipresent, and they discussed the historic depiction of Black women as teachers, nurturers, and caretakers. The participants conveyed how they challenge their students – regardless of race or gender – on what is and is not acceptable and place expectations on the students to be better people.
“This long-standing, multi-generational practice that Black women developed by taking responsibility for the social and ethical development of all Black children continues in today’s classrooms, even when the children are not Black,” Pearson writes as part of the findings.
The other themes – Black women being transformational leaders, representing possibility, and expecting more from students – encapsulate, in part, an ideal that the participants see for their work as CS educators. The themes also show how the Black women view their intersectional identities and value their unique position to provide opportunities for their students, particularly for those who are marginalized.
They do this even when their own acceptance within the CS field is sometimes challenged.
The research found that Black women are highly represented in professions considered to be essential to the daily operation of society but are often congratulated in the moment and immediately forgotten and placed back at the margins.
The researchers plan to continue their work to better understand what sustained success for Black women teaching CS might look like. Future studies will include more representative samples of Black women CS teachers from across the United States.
The research paper, “Unpacking the Unique Role of Black Women Computer Science Educators”, will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s annual technical symposium for Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), taking place March 20-23 in Portland, Oregon.
Demand in Computer Science Ethics Education Grows, Research Suggests Non-CS Teachers Should Be Involved
By Nathan Deen and Morgan Usry
Two surveys conducted by Georgia Tech researchers uncovered a pressing need and a demand for ethics to be taught more broadly in computer science programs nationwide.
Grace Barkhuff, a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing, is leading two separate studies of how ethics is being taught at the undergraduate level and master’s level in computing programs. Barkhuff is advised by School of Computer Science professor Ellen Zegura and mentored by School of Interactive Computing assistant professor Judith Uchidiuno.
Photo by Nathan Deen/College of Computing
Both of Barkhuff’s studies were accepted into the poster sessions at the 2024 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS), March 20-23 in Portland, Oregon.
Barkhuff’s study on undergraduate curriculum found that ethics in computing is typically taught by educators within a computer science department. However, the consensus opinion that Barkhuff gathered from more than 300 educators suggests there is preference for ethics to be taught by multi-disciplinary teams of instructors.
A Multi-disciplinary Approach
Barkhuff believes these findings stem from ethics encompassing a broad range of disciplines, including the humanities.
A multi-disciplinary approach to teaching ethics in computer science could be as simple as a computer science instructor inviting a humanities instructor as a guest lecturer. Another approach would be for two or more instructors from different departments sharing teaching responsibilities for an ethics course.
Whichever approach is taken, Uchidiuno said faculty will need administrative support.
“It challenges how we think about courses,” Uchidiuno said. “Courses are generally taught by one department, so how do you structure a course collaboratively and equitably?
“I could easily reach out to other faculty and ask them to be a guest lecturer in my class, and that would be fine. But for it to be a more long-term, sustainable endeavor, computer science departments need to recognize the importance of ethics.”
Barkhuff’s survey shows strong support for ethics to be taught in a standalone class and integrated across the curriculum.
“This would mean there would be a course specifically dedicated to teaching ethics, and then you have other technical classes like in algorithms or data structures, and they’d have a dedicated module on ethics where it’s relevant to those topics in those courses,” she said.
Barkhuff said many computer science programs could learn from other fields in incorporating ethics into their curriculum.
“There’s a precedence for us to do this,” she said. “One possibility for why ethics is less accepted in computing is that current educators may not have had ethics in their own computing curriculum when they were students. Some think the technical components of their courses are more important for students to get jobs. Some think ethics is a political subject that shouldn’t be brought into the classroom.
“I think times have changed. I think the responses we received show that ethics is an important topic for students and their future careers. It belongs in the curriculum at multiple touch points and should be required.”
What About Master’s Programs?
Barkhuff surveyed associate chairs and associate deans of graduate studies from 81 computing programs in the U.S. Seventy-two percent believe ethics should be a requirement for master’s programs, but only 46 percent said their institution requires an ethics course.
“We wanted to know why there are barriers to add or increase ethics,” Barkhuff said. “The top reason seems to be that adding ethics would displace a technical course requirement. Other faculty believe ethics is sufficiently covered at the undergraduate level or shouldn’t be taught at all. Since many graduate-level students complete their undergraduate degrees at different institutions, graduate faculty may not have a clear picture of their students’ existing ethics training.”
Barkhuff said the master’s level is an ideal time to introduce advanced ethics concepts.
“Students often obtain industry experience at the master’s level, so a course allowing them to go back and reflect on their industry experience would be important to a master’s program.”
How is Georgia Tech Faring?
At the undergraduate and master’s levels, Zegura said Georgia Tech is on par with most computing programs in the U.S.
At the undergraduate level, the College of Computing has a requirement for one ethics course. Zegura said the College’s ethics course was once taught with multiple, smaller sections to help create good discussion opportunities. But as student enrollment has grown, the course has changed to be a large lecture with smaller recitation sections run by student teaching assistants.
Georgia Tech is not alone in using this model of computing ethics courses, Zegura said.
“Large schools have had to move to these models. You can’t afford to have small sections when you have thousands of students in the major,” she said.
There are a few other courses Georgia Tech computing students can choose from to fulfill the ethics requirement. But the majority choose the large lecture course because it is offered every semester.
Zegura said a privacy course co-taught by Interactive Computing professor Annie Antón and School of Cybersecurity professor Peter Swire is a good example of an interdisciplinary course with ethics content. Antón brings a computing and technology perspective of privacy while Swire focuses on the business and legal aspects. Both professors overlap on the additional public policy focus in the course.
Zegura said there are other courses in which ethics discussions vary depending on who teaches them.
Like other institutions, Georgia Tech doesn’t require an ethics course for its computer science master’s programs. The Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program offers a course on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society, but it’s not required.
Challenges and Barriers
Barkhuff said her future work includes creating resources for computer science educators who aren’t sure how to make ethics a part of their courses.
“Those are the people who are excited about the topic or think it is important and they just don’t have the resources to do it,” she said. “We could make sample course materials that instructors can put into their courses to make ethics integration easier.”
Other educators who don’t see ethics as important or necessary to computer science curriculum will take some convincing, Barkhuff said. Those educators may push back on ethics because the definition of the term varies.
“The ethics curriculum is not well defined right now,” Barkhuff said. “Some hot topics are policy, privacy and surveillance, philosophy, inequality, justice, and human rights. But I think we need to do a better job of defining what computing ethics means.
“There’s also a debate whether we should be calling it ethics. When people think of ethics, they often think of moral philosophy, but it’s more than that. Some people suggest we call it responsible computing, which is something to consider.”
March 20 Workshop Employs Lessons from Epidemics to Enhance Computer Science Classes
By Bryant Wine
Computer science educators will soon gain valuable insights from computational epidemiology courses, like one offered at Georgia Tech.
B. Aditya Prakash is part of a research group that will host a workshop on how topics from computational epidemiology can enhance computer science classes. These lessons would produce computer science graduates with improved skills in data science, modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Because epidemics transcend the sphere of public health, these topics would groom computer scientists versed in issues from social, financial, and political domains.
Photo courtesy of Virginia Tech
The group’s virtual workshop takes place on March 20 at the technical symposium for the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). SIGCSE is one of 38 special interest groups of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM is the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society.
“We decided to do a tutorial at SIGCSE because we believe that computational epidemiology concepts would be very useful in general computer science courses,” said Prakash, an associate professor inthe School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).
“We want to give an introduction to concepts, like what is computational epidemiology is, and how topics, such as algorithms and simulations, can be integrated into computer science courses.”
Prakash kicks off the workshop with an overview of computational epidemiology. He will use examples from his CSE 8803: Data Science for Epidemiology course to introduce basic concepts.
This overview includes a survey of models used to describe behavior of diseases. Models serve as foundations that run simulations, ultimately testing hypotheses and making predictions regarding disease spread and impact.
Prakash will discuss models from recent epidemics like Covid-19, Zika, H1N1 bird flu, and Ebola. He will also cover examples from the 19th and 20th centuries to illustrate how epidemiology has evolved through data science and computation.
“I strongly believe that the future of epidemiology and public health is computational,” Prakash said. “My course and these workshops give that viewpoint and provide a broad framework of data science and computational thinking that can be useful.”
While humankind has studied disease transmission for millennia, computational epidemiology is a new approach to understanding how diseases can spread throughout communities.
The Covid-19 pandemic helped bring computational epidemiology to the forefront of public awareness. This exposure has led to greater demand for further application from computer science education.
Prakash joins Baltazar Espinoza and Natarajan Meghanathan in the workshop presentation. Espinoza is a research assistant professor at the University of Virginia. Meghanathan is a professor at Jackson State University.
The group is connected through Global Pervasive Computational Epidemiology (GPCE). GPCE is a multi-institutional partnership aimed at advancing computational foundations, engineering principles, and technologies of computational epidemiology. The National Science Foundation supports the partnership spanning 13 institutions.
GPCE emphasizes outreach and broadening participation in computing because of how widely epidemics can reach. The group’s workshop at SIGCSE is one way that GPCE employs educational programs to train the next generation of scientists around the globe.
“Algorithms, machine learning, and other topics are fundamental graduate and undergraduate computer science courses nowadays,” Prakash said.
“Using examples like projects, homework questions, and data sets, we want to show that the topics and ideas from computational epidemiology help students see a future where they apply their computer science education.”