A brick wall, but at least it’s pink. Credit: Pawel Czewinski

Autumn 2023 wrap: brick walls, boundaries, and breakdowns

One of the things I enjoyed during sabbatical was pausing quarterly to reflect on what I’d accomplished and what I wanted to accomplish next. I found it helpful to keep my focus on the forest and not the trees, but also give myself a moment of praise, to balance out the usual weight of self-criticism I pile on myself daily. Sharing with the world wasn’t mandatory, but it felt like a good way of highlighting the wonderful work of my collaborators with my community. It also felt like a nice form of accountability for my role as a professor at a public institution. The public deserves to know what they’re funding, after all!

So I’m going to keep doing it. I’ll try to post at the end of each quarter, around the same time I reflect. My goal to share — experiences, discoveries, the accomplishments of my students, postdocs, and collaborators—and hopefully give the public more insight into academic careers.

Context

The beginning of this quarter was particularly challenging. I’d just spent 15 months on sabbatical with an immense amount of focus time, collaborating with students, networking across the world, and feeding my creative soul. Around the beginning of September, I felt particularly energetic, optimistic, and renewed, and excited to reconnect with my colleagues at the University of Washington. I also had grand ambitions to set and enforce boundaries around my time and communication, to try to keep some of the focus time and work life balance I managed to achieve while on sabbatical. War, civil rights erosion, and a general sense of civic collapse be damned — I was going to have a vibrant, enriching, sustainable quarter while the world decays!

But being suddenly thrust back into a highly fragmented calendar of 30 meetings a week, a 200 student introductory course with 9 teaching assistants, and more than 1,000 emails a week, was downright overwhelming. It felt like hitting a brick wall. I didn’t handle it particularly well for the first month. I got frustrated, particularly with undergraduates, for not communicating or engaging. I desperately wrote an auto-reply to try to stem the volume of requests for my time, redirecting students to the syllabus and giving others guidance on when I’d reply. I got frustrated at staff who kept sending me task reminders, creating even more redundant email. Some things broke as a result of setting boundaries, and that created more work and conflict. I eventually warmed up those muscles I hadn’t used while on sabbatical and found a good rhythm by the end of October. But then I got my first COVID infection and fell behind two weeks. I’ve struggled since with severe asthma and fatigue.

Fortunately, I’ve been surrounded by great colleagues who made the transition back pleasant. My doctoral students, postdocs, and collaborators (including my wonderful new colleague Ben Shapiro, who recently joined the Allen School), made all of it easier. My ACM TOCE board kept up with the work, minimizing journal editing crises. My INFO 200 teaching assistants were fantastically reliable. I just barely made it out of this quarter with my wellness intact, health challenges aside. But I also ended this quarter with a strong sense of hope and focus, at least in my little corner of academia, while things continue to break in the broader world.

So with that context, here’s how I spent my time.

Research

Many discoveries came to fruition this quarter. Several journal submissions were accepted with revisions, or came back with promising major revisions. We can’t share them yet, but we’re excited to! They broadly examine equity in many aspects of computing education, including help seeking, neurodiversity, academic misconduct, and more. My doctoral students Jayne Everson and Megumi Kivuva, along with our insightful undergraduate Camilo Montes de Haro, also had a SIGCSE 2024 paper accepted on a new vision for culture-centric computational embroidery.

Other student-led works made significant progress. Without disclosing too much, we have exciting projects maturing on assessment policies, fairness in assessments, and the underlying phenomenological forces behind gatekeeping in CS, teacher needs on the margins, and systems perspectives on pre-service CS teacher education. Some of my graduating doctoral students, Alannah Oleson and Mara Kirdani-Ryan, also have exciting culminating works that will be part of their dissertations, and soon to be submissions to conferences and journals. Overall, we have ten submissions in various stages of development, all led by students and postdocs in my lab, and I’m proud of every single one.

My work on Wordplay also culminated in a beta release, which reached a few thousand early adopters who tinkered, played, and helped us find bugs. The vision is an educational programming language that is accessible to all abilities, multilingual, and a celebration of language, scripts, and typography. To help realize this vision, I kicked off a new local open source community of undergraduate contributors, which attracted 65 students eager to strengthen their software engineering skills and contribute to a vision of accessible, language inclusive playful programming. I suppose this could go into teaching — I certainly spent a lot of time synchronously and asynchronously teaching students TypeScript, Svelte, SvelteKit, Firebase, GitHub, and the 150K+ lines of Wordplay implementation— but it felt more like I had 65 helpers pushing forward this vision and its many new visions for educational programming languages. I also spent a fair amount of time fundraising for Wordplay, trying to raise resources to compensate undergraduates in the community, particularly those with disabilities, as well as support teacher partners to explore ways of using Wordplay to include their multilingual students with disabilities. Let’s hope some of it works out, so I can start building out a team to sustain the community and project!

Another part of research work this quarter was envisioning the new structure of computing education research on campus with my colleague Ben Shapiro. We spent a lot of time brainstorming with the community, reaching out to others on campus to join the effort, and converging towards some visions for a center. We’re excited to share more once we’re ready to share publicly, but I’m very optimistic about the future of computing education scholarship on campus, especially at the intersection of HCI, design, learning sciences, and education.

We started a new NSF Researcher-Practitioner Partnership project we’re calling PNW CS Teach. It focuses on everything that comes before and after pre-service CS teacher education, including pathways into CS teaching for students, and supports after graduating and starting teaching careers. We’re particularly focused on diversifying the CS teaching workforce in these efforts. We’re excited for this first year of work!

I also read 40+ iSchool PhD applications and will likely read many more as part of CSE’s admissions. Y’all are so amazing! It’s going to be very hard to choose who to invite into our community, because I want to invite all of you! I’m most excited about students who are passionate about justice-centered computing education research, for many definitions of justice, and want to bring their talents to building a future of computing (education) that works for everyone.

Teaching

I think of my teaching broadly, including advising six doctoral students, two postdocs, two undergraduate researchers, and many more doctoral students around campus. It’s definitely teaching, and some of my favorite work. I’m feeling pretty good about my advising these days, despite all of the many things I’m trying to improve. And its a big part of my teaching effort, spanning at least 8 hours a week of mentoring, feedback, and community organizing.

I also include in my teaching faculty mentoring. At the moment, I’m mentoring about 15 faculty in different capacities, some in the iSchool, some at UW, some at other institutions around the country. Some of this is public, formal mentoring. Some of it is private, whisper network mentoring. I’ve generally tried to prioritize faculty who don’t have other sources of mentoring, or specifically want guidance on navigating academia with queer, trans, and non-binary identities, and their many intersections with race and disability.

The bulk of my teaching this quarter was focused on INFO 200 Foundations of Information (syllabus). I tried something pretty radical this quarter, centered on mastery learning and culturally sustaining pedagogy. The basic idea was this: one due date at the end of the quarter, two assignments centered on building information literacy in ways that were grounded in students’ interests, knowledge, and identity, each repeated up to four times, and rich classroom time three times a week to enable individual student support by the teaching team. I declared an explicit rejection of grades and points, trying to focus students’ attention on their interests and goals. The grand vision was that this structure would address many inequities in typical large lecture courses (e.g., no need for extensions, self-paced). One test of this was that I received 40 accommodations requests and didn’t have to make any changes to the course design to support students with disabilities. Another test was the student work: students submitted all kinds of works that deepened their knowledge about their identities and communities, including analyses of systems of data collection about flooding in students’ home countries, personal accounts of internet addition, and more. And some of our lab sections were full of vibrant peer support and peer learning, including peer reviews, collaboration, and other co-constructed course activities. At one point, I offered extra credit for students to turn in their internet-connected devices each day, and about 90% of the class did, sharing about how much they learned about their addition to the internet, and what learning could feel like if they were present and engaged. It was fun, and different, and countless students said how much they enjoyed the opportunity to center what they know and who they are in learning about information.

While the good was very good, the bad very bad. Because I had no incentives to attend class, only about 30% did (until I started offering that extra credit for device trade in). Some labs only had a few students attend regularly. That was very sad, and a lot of my TA mentoring was helping them manage the emotional toll of not having students reciprocate their teaching efforts. Some students procrastinated until the day before the end of the quarter, admitting that they had never come to class or lab, hadn’t read the syllabus, and were wondering if they could get help on the two assignments (we declined, since the entire quarter had been an offer of support that they had declined). I suspect they won’t pass. My theory is that the small group of students without any self-regulated learning skills simply fell through the gaps, despite all of the supports we offered, because they relied so heavily on points and due dates as an extrinsic motivator. I have ideas about how to prevent this next time; I’m generally optimistic that this course structure is ultimately better for every student, and its just in need of some targeted scaffolding and engagement incentives.

I also prepared for HCID 520 User Interface Software and Technology for our MHCI+D program. I did a redesign to center equity and ability, including similar mastery learning ideas from my INFO 200 redesign, and coordinated a research project as part of the redesign with some students and colleagues.

Service

My service plate is very full. All good things that I enjoy, but very full! Maybe a list would be best:

• This summer 2024, I’m starting as the Information School’s Associate Dean for Academics, overseeing our five academic programs, its 2,000+ students, and it’s 30+ staff. I’ve spent a fair amount of time shadowing our current Associate Dean and planning for the transition. I’ll mostly be swapping teaching with administration, keeping research and service going at my current volume. (Hopefully).
• I’m on our school’s Informatics program committee this year, and helped with Autumn admissions and supervised our two tutors and their tutoring work.
• I wrote 5 tenure and promotion letters for faculty up for promotion (in addition to the 10 letters I wrote over summer), and also presented promotions internally for our own faculty.
• I helped lead CS for All Washington, and its engagement in Exploring Computing Education Pathways (ECEP), helping to guide our data and policy efforts in the state. We’re currently fumbling through emerging legislative efforts to make CS a graduation requirement, and the inattention to equity in these efforts. I also serve on the ECEP board, helping guide its activities with several other wonderful people around the nation. As part of this, I’ve also been consulting a lot with state leaders and school leaders about how to respond to the broad availability of generative AI and its associated hype machine of lies and deception.
• On the AccessComputing leadership team, I helped finalize a co-edited book, Teaching Accessible Computing with our outstanding lead editor, Alannah Oleson. We’re excited to share this with the broader community of computing educators, to help every CS class teach about accessibility! Expect it in January, once authors have finalized proofs. It will be published on bookish.press, a platform I designed and maintain.
• I recruited the third cohort of STEP CS, the pre-service program for secondary CS education I co-direct with Anne Beitlers. It’s our most diverse ever!
• I’ve continued work as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computing Education. Aside from the ongoing struggle to retain board members and recruit reviewers, I’ve also managed to work with my deputy EiC Brett Becker on a new Distinguished Paper Award proposal for the journal, which would be awarded annually.
• I’ve kicked off steady work on Reciprocal Reviews, an effort to build infrastructure to enable sustainable peer reviewing by tracking reviewing communities and reviewing effort and linking it to rights to publish. I’m hoping this infrastructure work will eventually enable us to make peer review more sustainable in computing education research.
• I rallied several folks to offer the first SIGCSE Technical Symposium birds of a feather session on capitalism and computing education. I also helped some students and colleagues plan the symposium’s first queer BoF. I’m hoping both will be great networking events and that they aren’t scheduled for the same time!
• I’ve been running a trans youth group as part of Lambert House every other Monday, along with other ad hoc volunteering for social events.

Phew! The only reason all of the above is possible all at once is because most of the work above moves so slowly. I chip away at one thing, then get blocked waiting for someone to reply, and move on to something else. That takes a lot of solid project management skills, which I feel fortunate to have. But it’s also a lot of context switching. My efforts to try to defragment my time this quarter have helped a little with this, but time zones and others’ fragmented schedules have a way of quickly eroding my calendar boundaries. But it’s just barely manageable.

Reflection

Despite the many challenges, I think it was a good quarter. I’m proud of my advising, mentoring, and teaching. I’m proud of the strategic work I’ve done for future administrative roles, and for my ongoing service work, and I’m hoping it will all pay off in immeasurable ways long term. And I’m proud of the risk taking I’ve done in teaching and research, trying new ways of centering student interests and identities in shaping my bigger questions about computing, equity, and learning. And I’m proud of every one of my doctoral students and postdocs for being creative, resourceful, insightful, and caring, as we all try to envision a more just future of computing through learning, teaching, and play.

Winter quarter will be easier. Forty masters students instead of 200 undergraduates, the end of job searches for two of my doctoral students, one of my postdocs, and one of my former doctoral students, and a much better grasp of my calendar, time, and attention, all promise to keep things much more manageable. I will step in as interim Informatics program chair while our current chair takes a one quarter teaching sabbatical, but I’ve done that for years, and know the drill. And the quarter will all culminate in a fun jaunt to Portland for SIGCSE 2024 where I hope to make many new friends and colleagues who want to make space for conversations about queerness, capitalism, and identity. I’m excited about this short break, and the coming adventures in academia! Even as the world keeps falling apart.

I do wonder sometimes how to reconcile the falling apart with my future focused career. Why teach future generations when democracy might collapse? Why do research that might not have impact for decades if climate change will change everything anyway? Why focus on justice when at every turn, this country takes away civil rights that directly harm me and my communities? I think it’s because I’m fundamentally optimistic. I believe that knowledge, community, and values are power, and that if we harness all three together, we can make the worlds we dream of.