SIGCSE 2024 trip report: always hallways
Four years ago, I took the train from Seattle to Portland to attend the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. The day after I arrived, the conference was canceled, and the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. The community was in a bit of shock for long while — all of the networking and the presentations that didn’t happen, and all of the ideas that weren’t exchanged—were just gone. I remember being the only one with a mask on the train down, and on the way back, the only one on the train in general. Those two days punctuated the start of the COVID-19 pandemic for me permanently.
Traveling to Portland this time, then, was a bit of a do-over. I took the same train, had the same pleasant walk in the son across the steel bridge, and settled in the same hotel lobby. But I also came a different person. A person far more engaged in equity and justice work, far more loving of myself after many decades of self-loathing, and some ways, far more energized and excited about the conference. In 2020, most of my conference work was presenting research papers. That’s certainly happening this time (see Jayne and Megumi’s award-winning work on computational embroidery), but far more than that, we are organizing community. Our community at the University of Washington is organizing four birds of a feather sessions on capitalism; disability; neurodiversity; and LGBTQ+ community. We have decided to organize a University of Washington social, to invite people Friday night for food, drinks, and connection. And I came to host two very full ACM Transactions on Computing Education paper sessions, and a community lunch between them, to more strongly interweave the journal into the community.
And so as strange as it was to return to Portland under very different public health circumstances, it was also surreal to come under very different intellectual experiences. I was excited to see how we might change the community’s ideas, and how the community might change ours.
Tuesday: LEVEL UP
My conference really started on Tuesday afternoon, when I joined for the CRA LEVEL UP workshop. It’s core mission is to try to leverage everything we’ve learned about inclusive computing education through research and practice, and try to apply it to our undergraduate programs across the country. The goal was to produce a list of things that programs should do, a list of things to investigate further, and a list of infrastructure we might need to make all of this change happen. It brought together a very broad spectrum of voices, including Broadening Participation in Computing alliances, as well as NSF, ACM, and IEEE, key foundations and organizations for shaping curriculum frameworks and best practices.
This was the last workshop (after D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, and Denver), so we had both the disadvantage of being last, but also the advantage of recency bias, maybe being the most memorable. The workshop was structured as topical breakouts; I joined the groups focused on domestic PhD enrollments on Tuesday, and an accessibility breakout on Wednesday morning.
Before the Tuesday breakouts, NCWIT founder Lucy Sanders gave an opening keynote at the workshop. She started with the question about whose voices are missing from computing. She talked about how their work benefits non-majority groups, and tries to bring their voices into computing. (I cringed as she said this, as I was invited to the NCWIT Summit to speak, and declined to speak in person because the Summit was being held in Missouri, where 43 active bills in its state legislature threaten to outlaw my ability speak in the state). She also talked about the need to measure not just representation, but also influence and activation, as forces for making systemic change. She gave examples of women only and mix-gender patent teams and computing awards as an example of influence (but using problematic name-based gender inference algorithm). She went on to talk about the importance of systems thinking, intersectionality, and partnership.
My afternoon breakout focused on domestic PhD enrollments, facilitated by Ran Libeskind-Hadas (Claremont KcKenna). We talked about a range of challenges about why so few domestic students pursue doctorates in computer science, from culture, pay, admissions bias, and more, and identified many concrete remedies, including faculty professional development, better marketing of high quality resources about pursuing research, changing incentives for pursue research, and redesigning curriculum to better respond to students’ values and connect those values to research. My favorite remedy was my own: just give non-domestic PhD students citizenship, problem solved. (I’m not joking: the U.S. has a very long history of granting citizenship for all kinds of reasons. Why not PhD students?)
Wednesday: LEVEL UP again; new educators symposium
After a quiet morning munching on a breakfast sandwich and cortado at at Flour Bloom, I had breakfast with LEVEL UP attendees and nerded out on K-12 policy and budgets. After a huddle with the whole group where each of the breakouts reported out on their findings, we went to our second breakouts; mine was accessibility, facilitated by my colleague Brianna Blaser (UW, AccessComputing).
Our group talked about the extensive gaps in disability and accessibility literacy throughout computer science, and computing education more broadly. These included issues of basic knowledge, but also structural issues in assessment, curriculum, funding, tools, pedagogy, and more. My favorite intervention ideas were ones that centered on checklists that teachers and advocates could use to ensure that they are doing accessible policy and pedagogy, but also finding ways to make the world more accessible through computing.
After the workshop, I went to the new educators symposium to speak on creating equity-centered communities in computing and information learning contexts. I spoke about a nine phase model for change, including committing to equity (and the identity work necessary to do that), building capacity for equity, finding co-conspirators, examining the status quo, envisioning change with key stakeholders, executing change, reflecting on successes and failures, recovering, and then doing it all over again.
After, I went out to dinner with several of the new faculty at Cliff’s PDX, a cute little bar off MLK. We talked about the many challenges of doing scholarship, valuing teaching in research dominant contexts, valuing education research in computing research contexts, and, of course, food! It was great to hear about the new faculty’s fears about conservative politics silencing their teaching and scholarship, and the opportunities they saw for equitable teaching.
Thursday: Keynote, TOCE, and birds of a feather sessions
In the morning, I went to Tiny’s Coffee for a simple latte and breakfast sandwich to do some journal editing work, and then head to the Oregon Convention Center for the opening plenary and keynote. The conference chairs and SIGCSE board opened the conference, highlighting the (yet more) conferences that SIGCSE has added to its roster. (I’m not a fan of fragmenting our community’s limited service capacity across even more events, when we can barely sustain the ones we have, but appreciate the goals of reaching across the globe and online. I hope in the future SIGCSE, ICER, and other existing communities will just be more global and online).
Keynote
Todd Zakrajsek (UNC Chapel Hill) was the keynote speaker. He had a range of perspectives on teaching and learning, including active learning, lecturing, and online learning. He talked about the scale of impact of our community in reaching nearly a million students even in the coming year. He talked about being a first generation college student and wanting to be a Michigan state trooper; he did not do well in class at the start. He had support from his parents, but not help, since they had not been to college. But after a hard first quarter, and an attempt to drop out, he had one professor that refused to sign his withdrawal papers until he had tried to learn with the right resources, including knowing the hidden curriculum. That led to him finishing college, a masters, and a PhD.
In the center of his talk, he discussed teaching students how to learn, caring for them, and providing clear signposts to know what to pay attention to (e.g., scaffolding). He also talked about lectures, and the crucial role of combining lectures and active learning to account for neurodiversity in people’s preferences for information and interaction-centered learning. He discussed the many problems with group work (e.g., social loafing, time management), and how wonderful they can be if students are taught how to do group work (how to schedule meetings, how to balance work, how to plan). He also centered the importance of attention, and getting it, for any learning to occur, and that attention is primarily driven by someone seeing value in what is being learned, from their own perspectives. Overall, I appreciated his humor, and the way it engaged the audience in basic foundations of teaching and learning.
ACM TOCE sister sessions
After the keynote, I went to set up for a flurry of ACM Transactions on Computing Education events, including two paper sessions, and a lunch with board members and authors between them. Lauri Malmi presented on our use of theory, Leen-Kiat Soh presented on implicit intelligence beliefs, and Andrea Vasquez and Federico Meza presented on a Spanish-language programming assessment. We then went to Pine State Biscuits for an informal journal gathering. We then came back for three more talks, one by Miranda Parker on structural barriers and supports in schools for CS education, and Melissa Perez on women’s reflections on computing careers. Alvine Belle was going to present, but had to cancel last minute due to a student strike, and so I presented her work on her behalf, and led small discussion groups to decide how to act upon the work’s guidance on racial justice for Black students in CS.
Birds of a feather: Disability, LGBTQ+ community
After some strategizing about Reciprocal Reviews with Jérémie Lumbroso, and a practice talk with my students, I started a sequence of birds of a feather (BoF) sessions. The first was on Disability and Accessibility, and the second, Cultivating and Celebrating LGBTQ+ Community in Computing Education.
At the disability BoF, organized by AccessComputing, we had 60+ attendees who wanted to connect about a range of very specific topics, including accessible AI, more accessible programmable media, teaching accessibile computing concepts in K-12. I was so enamored to see how conversations have evolved: our disability BoF used to attract people with only general questions about disability, but conversations have moved beyond to the concrete issues of making more accessible computing.
At the queer BoF, organized by Joselenne Peña, my doctoral students Megumi Kivuva, and Mara Kirdani-Ryan, Fracisco Castro, and myself. We set up a bunch of stations for different activities, ranging from direct action, talking about our pets, playing board games, connecting around our identities, and more. It was such a joyful gathering of laughter and connection, and many of us continued to connect during the reception that followed.
The reception was a flurry of networking. I had some deep conversations with students from around the country, surprising connections to faculty colleagues attending SIGCSE for their first time, reconnections with colleagues I regularly see. I talked with all of them about AI hype, graduate school admissions, Wordplay, activism, writing open books. I was so absorbed in random conversations, I forgot to meet up for the University of Washington photo.
Friday: Keynote, Mentoring, Capitalism, Culture
I slept in a bit after the long reception, did some email, then had a leisurely breakfast with a student in the community, talking about life, purpose, fear, and values. We talked about what it means to be liberated from fear, and how fear can shape our choices in life, careers, and research in unwanted ways. We then walked to the keynote.
Jandelyn Plane (University of Maryland), winner of SIGCSE’s inaugural broadening participation award, spoke about direct action. She started with a metaphor of adding a drop to the river, reinforcing that everyone has something to give to equity, and that only when we do can we make change. She talked about her early efforts organizing women in computing, and then larger efforts going to Rwanda to help grow capacity to manage Unix operating systems for key Rwandan infrastructure. She then talked about a project with Kabul University where she wanted to help several professors to earn their masters degrees. There she learned about the importance of learning about what is needed from the communities, rather than assuming. She taught them CS concepts, pedagogy, research skills, and English. She shared several other projects that engaged students, sharing advice of sharing knowledge, and finding win-win strategies that support and grow communities in compounding ways. She then talked about consolidating all of these efforts under the IRBE Initiative for Inclusion and Diversity in Computing and the Maryland Center for Women in Computing, and the importance of building partnerships to grow impact.
Her commitment to such a broad diversity of direct action was inspiring; I wish I was focused enough to build some of the initiatives that she has. I did find some of her efforts outside the U.S. had an unavoidable tinge of saviorism, intentional or not. It made me think about power, and who decides what change happens, and what resources are brought to bear on those changes, and from where. She talked about this in Q&A, and how much she learned by adventuring outside of her familiar contexts. One of the audience members from Africa asked about how to connect with Africa more intentionally; she talked about leveraging networks that exist, which was reassuring.
After the keynote, I did some change work around Reciprocal Reviews, coordinated with my Dean briefly, had lunch with an undergraduate RA joining our lab this summer, and then helped run a BoF on Capitalism. The BoF was very well attended; more than 60 people joined and had wide ranging conversations about markets, political economy, neoliberalism, and their ties to computing. We generated dozens of research questions and ideas for action, which we hope to follow up on in the coming year.
Immediately after, I ran over to the physical computing session, where my students Jayne Everson, Megumi Kivuva, and Camilo Montes De Haro presented their award-winning experience report on computational embroidery. They’re talk was bursting with energy, evidence of engagement, and fascinating insights on the capacity of hand and computational embroidery to engage students in their cultural identities. The audience had fascinating questions about gender identity, the opportunities for paid work doing embroidery, and how to cultivate classroom community.
After their talk, Luis Morales-Navarro talked about troubleshooting in physical computing projects. They examined how troubleshooting strategies changed over time in an Exploring Computer Science unit held during pandemic lock downs. Many defects were interactions between code and circuits, and this shifted after learning to spread more comprehensively across the whole system, more effectively found multiple hypotheses of the causes of defects, and become more specific about articulations of defects.
David Magda then presented The Integration of Computational Thinking and Making in the Classroom. This was a multi-institutional study that examined partnerships between Texas A&M’s integration between making and science, using Arduinos. They examined how much computing they could learn through integrations by designing and assessing computational thinking in 6th grade. Sequences and loops turned out to be the easiest, but struggled most with functions and conditionals. Most importantly, however, prior programming skills did not appear to be transferring, and there was some negative transfer. Many of the results might be explained by the teachers being inexperienced student mentors.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in hallway conversations. I recruited someone to Reciprocal Reviews, talking about the various engineering needs coming this summer. I congratulated Jayne and Megumi on their excellent talk, and chatted with folks from UIUC about Portland. I stumbled upon a new colleague, and his unexpected peer, and we debated the many reasons for teaching CS, the hegemony of industrialized teaching, and why we settle for lesser worlds that don’t serve us. Later, I had a nice walk over to Lil America Food Trucks with an undergraduate to join our semi-public UW social, which drew nearly all of our UW attendees, AccessComputing partners, and many other friends and colleagues we haphazardly invited throughout the past week. (I think we might have overwhelmed the 8 trucks, but I business was good!) After a tasty vegan corndog, a cheesy chorizo mulitas, and some fried Oreos for dessert, a few of us took the bus to CC Slaughters, one of Portland’s oldest gay bars, for community, laughter, some drag, and music. It was nice to end the nice cozy and connected.
Saturday reflections
By the weekend, I was ready to be done. Four solid days of highly social community building was my limit. I grabbed a simple cortado at Crema Coffee, snuck in a short breakfast with a student at Flour Bloom about careers and activism and organizing in faculty life. I missed the closing keynote, and then sat quietly in the hallways and expo to speak to whoever I stumbled into, talking about LLM hype, our moment of optimism and growth in computing education research, and the broader threats of Christian nationalism in education.
I went to one last session, a panel on what the CS for All movement can teach us about how to center AI in education. Deborah Fields introduced the session. Shana White talked about centering ethical implications of AI and marginalized communities, and particularly heeding the warnings of Black women in CS. She centered goals about minimizing risk, mitigating harm, and working toward defining equity in CS that centers racial justice. She offered one definition, which is equipping students to critically interrogate ethical and equitable development, deployment, and impact of AI, and questions of who and why. Yasmin Kafai talked about her work on Scratch, classrooms, computer clubhouses, and her reflections on the individualized perspectives inherent in this work. She discussed the need for broader social, structural, systemic perspectives on AI education that are missing in the hype discourse. Shuchi Grover talked about Cathy O’Neil’s centering of power in discussing what algorithms are and who shapes them, and also data literacy and agency. Finally, Carla Strickland talked about synergies between research and practice, and trying to do equitable curriculum and instructional design at this boundaries. She talked about the realities of time and money in teaching, calling back to Shana’s point about key equity gaps in public education, and the importance of centering teaching expertise.
The discussions on the panel were wide ranging. They talked about basic inequities in society, the limitations of fancy tools and curricula, and the arrogance of colonizing strategies for teaching interventions. They talked about the importance of enabling tools that making powerful ideas simple to access. They talked about teacher support, and the often useless professional development they are coerced to do. They reinforced the critical principle of being community-centered and teacher-led, focusing on teacher time and money, and acknowledging the broader context of schools (e.g., pandemic fatigue, teacher attrition, Christian nationalist attacks on teachers and youth). My co-advisee Rotem Landasman also asked a great question about centering hope in this work, and the Carla talked about centering students’ worlds and future worlds, and framing knowledge of harm, and creative empowerment, can improve the world.
After the panel, I walked and trained to the Saturday market with some of my lab get some lunch and catch my train back to Seattle. While I did, I remembered last year feeling more than ever like I needed my community gatherings to better reflect my values and my students’ values. Ie left Toronto feeling there just weren’t enough spaces to talk about CS critically, to connect around identity, to push the boundaries of discourse, and to find others who felt the same. I’m so proud of my students, our many co-conspirators — and of myself—for making the time to create these spaces this year. From the community building around ACM TOCE and Reciprocal Reviews, to connecting around disability, neurodiversity, queer identities, capitalism—and food—this was the SIGCSE I’ve always wanted to have. And having it in Portland, my home town, made it all the more comfortable.
At the same time, I recognize that all of these efforts only distanced me further from the mainstream discourse. They keynotes and the overwhelming stream of papers chipping away at the status quo instead of reimagining the world, felt far away, as if there was an entirely different community having a different conversation, but in the same physical space. It’s one thing to organize spaces to connect in our community’s largest gathering. It’s another thing for our niche discourses to make the main stage, leading the community’s thinking.
At the same time, I’m not sure that the main stage is where the best work happens. The one on one conversations I had is where I felt I had the most impact. I remember one attendee standing up after a quiet chat at a hallway table saying something to the effect of, “I’ve always thought of myself as radical, but I think you’ve radicalized me more than I thought possible.” And while to they said that, I felt not like I had “won” or “convinced” them, but found a partner in change, shifting the community toward liberation one person at a time.
