The Whova landing page, which kept things simple.

RESPECT 2021: Toward justice-focused computing education

There are a lot of computing education conferences—far more than I’m used to in other academic fields. There’s the (big) SIGCSE Technical Symposium, the (rigorous) International Computing Education Research conference, the (European) Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), the (Finnish) Koli Calling, the (originally German) Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education, the Australasian Computing Education Conference, the (Asian) CompEd, the (North American) CSTA Conference, and I’m sure many others I’ve forgotten. Historically, computing education has been far more regional than most global research communities: perhaps because of the lack of funding or perhaps because of the national and cultural ties to public education.

There is, however, one thing that all of these conferences have had in common over time: a broad disregard for issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in CS. I don’t think that’s as true anymore—the SIGCSE venues above have an increasing focus on diversity, and certainly many existing education and learning sciences venues that have long centered diversity are beginning to examine computing—but it’s still the case that diversity is not central. For anyone who studies diversity in CS, or anyone with a marginalized identity in CS, the feeling of attending a SIGCSE event can be one of disregard. It often feels as if the broader community is tacitly saying, “Yes, diversity matters too, but I really want to tell you about this new tool that raises average grades.” Diversity simply feels like an afterthought. And for many marginalized and oppressed people in CS, it is unavoidably and inescapably a central focus.

This is where IEEE RESPECT comes it. Originally founded by Tiffany Barnes in 2015, the conference was intended to be a venue that explicitly focused on diversity. It began with a slightly more narrow focus on broadening participation in computing, mirroring the many NSF-supported projects in North America that had that same framing. It’s grown over time to draw computing education researchers and practitioners who center diversity, equity, and inclusion in their scholarship and teaching, tending to draw many more education researchers than other venues.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but when I first heard of RESPECT, I naively thought, “Do we really need another conference?” And in some ways, I still think that’s true: fragmentation of a research community is rarely helpful, and splintering diversity work into a separate venue only reinforces the idea that other venues don’t have to deal with it. I certainly don’t have the bandwidth to attend SIGCSE, ICER, ITiCSE, and RESPECT, along with other communities.

On the other hand, there can be great power in focus. After being invited to give the closing keynote this year at RESPECT 2021, I was excited to give diversity my full attention. And as I quickly learned, that focus can be productive.

I watch the opening plenary on my iPhone. It mostly worked!

Sunday: talking about justice

Opening plenary

I was planning on having a quiet morning with the conference opening, but noticed a tender lump on my calf which I was worried was a deep vein thrombosis. So rather than joining from the comfort of my office, I joined from the car, and then listened in while I had my blood drawn and drove home. Luckily, it was a false alarm!

Jean Ryoo and Rafi Santo did an outstanding job setting the stage for the week. They talked about the limited framings of CS for All as simply broadening participation in CS education; after all, if systems are broken, and simply engaging more diverse people in them will only break things further. They talked about various ways of conceptualizing justice, including engaging with broader questions about society, engaging with history, recognizing the role of computing in oppression, and engaging with systems of power. These questions framed the many sessions to come in the week, including keynotes about justice, panels with teachers and students, along with many research papers examining these many perspectives on justice.

The format for the conference was relatively simple: they used Whova for agenda and community, and a basic Zoom webinar for synchronous meetings. They put faith in the community to make the most of Zoom’s limited affordances (and throughout the conference, they generally did: the many existing relationships in the community were quite apparent).

Dr. Scott lays out her critiques.

Allison Scott’s keynote

Allison Scott, CEO of the Kapor Center, spoke about a myriad of issues intersecting with CS education. She began by talking about the broader racial justice reckoning of the past year, the broad disparities between Black and White students in public education more broadly, and the massive equity gaps that have become visible in the past year, showing images of Black youth trying to engage in school outside the local Taco Bell and its wifi. She then turned her attention to five critiques of CS education research and practice:

1. It often ignores deep and systemic racial and socioeconomic inequality (e.g., hardware, broadband, school funding)
2. It focuses on incremental change rather than centering inequality (e.g., focusing on growth in general, rather than racial equity in particular)
3. It often views CS as an apolitical endeavor (despite the abundance of clear intersections between CS and politics)
4. It often views education as separate from other parts of academia (e.g., social sciences, humanities, and the arts)
5. It often ignores toxic higher education and workplace cultures

She envisioned the next 30 years of CS education as needing to center racial equity frameworks, addressing foundational disparities, deeply engaging culturally responsive CS teaching, growing justice-focused CS teacher education, advocating for policies that close equity gaps, and centering the perspectives and experiences of students.

The audience probed many of the ways that the status quo intersects with that vision, discussing the invisibility of integration efforts, the hegemony of AP CS courses, the lack of metrics for tracking progress on justice, the need for career pathways beyond large tech companies, and the need for educating CEOs and power holders in higher education.

Jean introduces Bryan, Shiela, Richard, Laura, and Eboni.

Real talk about justice-centered CS education: the teachers speak

After a break was a panel, featuring four CSTA Equity Fellows. Bryan “BT” Twarek moderated. He began by introducing the teachers by having them give short talks about their perspectives as teachers.

• Shiela Lee, at P.S. 59 in New York, talked about labels and identities, celebrating difference, stereotypes, White privilege with her students, and studying the identities of people throughout CS that have challenged labels (e.g, Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace). She talked about her favorite lesson, where they interview an adult about difference.
• Richard Winn, at Wyoming Indian High School, talked about the low rates of American Indian and Alaska Native participation in CS, even in his state of Wyoming, and how that led him to dedicate his career to teaching Native youth computer science.
• Laura Ramirez, at Buena Vista Horace Mann PK-8 Spanish Immersion School, talked about safe spaces, including affinity groups to build community. She created “Tech Chicas” for middle school girls to hang out at lunch, which eventually grew into a STEM elective for girls, and field trips to companies. She also created a group for trans inclusion to offer solidarity around bullying.
• Eboni Akpan Zook, at Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, talked about supporting African American girls in CS. Her school is 98% African American girls; she started out in a STEM program in high school and was an engineering major, but struggled in Calculus and dropped out, and became a teacher. Her approach is to teach hidden curriculum academic and learning skills, decorating her classroom space with culturally responsive artifacts, and educating families about CS education.

From there, Bryan asked the group what justice-centered education might look like and what teachers need to do it. Eboni talked about not talking CS in a silo, but connected to students’ lived experiences (e.g., immigration, police brutality, or other issues connected to students and CS). Richard talked about the critical role of embracing all cultures, living in the future without losing the past. Shiela talked about the importance of being culturally responsive even outside CS classrooms, to address underrepresentation. Laura talked about tracking resonance with students, having students lead content, and showing up as a co-conspirator, not just an ally.

Bryan then asked about the need for disaggregating Asian American groups, and other identities that are missing at the margins. Richard raised the need to make space for the many different indigenous ways of knowing in CS, and the need to build trust between communities and the public institutions. Eboni talked about the need for bringing collaboration and community in CS projects as a way of being culturally responsive. Laura also talked about English learners and the need to create a culture of taking risks and celebrating mistakes; it’s also a challenge for teachers to translate materials.

Yolanda Rankin talked about K-12 classrooms as a site of violence.

Monday: Racism, power, identity, and CS

While the first day was packed with several exciting sessions, I could only attend the first because I needed to teach. But what a powerful way to start the day!

Perspectives on racism, power & identity

This panel session invited authors of the ACM TOCE special issue on Justice-Centered CS Education to present their work. Michael Lachney chaired the session as one of the guest editors of the special issue (which should appear before December). They began with lightning talks on their papers:

• Yolanda Rankin (Florida State University) talked about saturated sites of violence in CS education, along with co-authors Jakita Thomas and Sheena Erete. The paper puts into perspective Black women’s experiences in CS, at the intersection of race, gender, and class. They provide the vocabulary and tools for describing how power plays out within computing and more broadly in its applications. They found three sites of violence: K-12 classrooms, predominantly White institutions, and internships.
• Sheena Erete (DePaul University) talked about transformative justice to engaging Black and Latina girls, with Denise Nacu and Nichole Pinkard. She talked about the Digital Youth Divas program, which she created with Nichole Pinkard, which was structured as an act of resistance to the negative experiences they’ve had in CS. They specifically focused on countering different forms of structural, disciplinary, and hegemonic oppression by addressing local histories of injustice.
• Sara Vogel (NYU-Steinhardt) talked about language injustice, which often perpetuates hierarchies, gatekeeps knowledge, and ties into inequities in computing education tied to English proficiency. She talked about how youth often have lived experience around the intersections of technology, language, and justice. She imagined critical a translingual computing education that develops students’ positive identities as communities, interrogating dominant language ideologies.
• Ian Arawjo (Cornell) talked about intercultural computing education, with Ariam Mogos, and the Nairobi Play project. He talked about the theory of intercultural computing, through a comparative analysis of computing programs in Kenya and the United States. He framed it as an orientation for “diverse” classrooms, where students of diverse cultural backgrounds face social tension, and positions this tension as a resource for change.

After the presentations, Michael posed questions about the intersection of theory, research, and activism. Sheena made an interesting point about avoiding “adultification” in critical pedagogy, letting youth just be themselves to explore, rather than forcing them to face the social realities of the world. Ian also talked about attending to majority groups, including students and White tenured faculty, who often reproduce bias without intervention, and hold structures in place. Yolanda talked about creating safe spaces for people to share, especially those whose voices aren’t being heard.

June Mark and her team talk about trends in AP CSP enrollment.

Student perspectives on motivation

After teaching for 2 hours and a quick lunch, I dropped in for an afternoon session on student motivation. I could only stay for a half hour before a block of meetings administrative meetings, but I learned a lot in a little time:

June Mark led a team that studied why students enroll in AP CS Principles. Their ongoing researcher-practitioner partnership focused on AP CSP in New York City, with the goal of increasing participation of girls and Black and Latinx students. They administered a basic survey, finding five major reasons: 1) wanting to learn more about CS, 2) wanting to be a better programmer, 3) perceived fun, 4) college prep, and 5) being placed in the course by advisors. There were clear racial mediators: Black girls were more likely to say they were placed in the course, whereas Latinx girls were more likely to say they wanted to be a better programmer. Parents had surprisingly little impact on any group.

Kimberly Ying presented a paper on the CS1 gender gap. Her team considered to what extent students are aware of the gender gap, what students’ perspectives are, and how perspectives vary by gender. Men were slightly more likely to feel there shouldn’t be an effort to reduce the gender gap; women were more likely to see a need for support women in CS.

Tuesday: Teachers, structures, change, and racism

Carol introduces CAPE, Bryan, Leigh Ann, and I.

CAPE Panel

On Tuesday I joined a panel organized by Carol Fletcher on applying the CAPE framework to broadening partiicpation. The other panel attendees were Bryan Cox and Leigh Ann DeLyser. We each spoke about our experiences with the framework’s ideas, which are essentially encoded in the acronym: Capacity to offer CS (e.g., teachers, hardware); Access to take CS (e.g., students know about learning opportunities, have the incentive to engage them); Participation in CS learning activities (e.g., equal and equitable engagement); and Experience (e.g., learning resonates with students’ identities and interests, all students successfully learn).

I was asked to reflect on my experiences from a higher education perspective, especially from my perspective as the program chair of our undergraduate degree in Information. For example, here are some of my questions and answers:

• How am I using CAPE to examine equity issues in higher education? I use CAPE to think about ways of measuring these four facets. I consider Capacity from a faculty and staff hiring perspective, considering our dependency on guest faculty and our (in)ability to meet demand, which often affects students from underrepresented groups most. I use Access to examine our pathways and admissions policies, trying to identify communities with robust pathways, and those without robust pathways. I consider Participation by tracking enrollment and progress to degree by gender, ethnicity, and ability. I consider Experience by gathering annual data from our diversity climate surveys, as well grades.
• What data am I collecting to evaluate potential inequities in capacity, access, participation, or experience in CSEd? I use data at every stage, and often create new data pipelines when the data we have is inadequate. For example, after three years of advocacy, our university is finally gathering disaggregated data on disability, allowing me to identify fine-grained barriers in our admissions and degree progress by disability, helping me diagnose classes, curriculum, and faculty that are barriers. I also use anonymous surveys and student interviews to understand the barriers that the aggregate data reveals.
• When you began looking at your CSEd equity work through the lens of CAPE, were there any new insights you discovered? The most powerful impact of using CAPE was helping me not forget one of its four facets. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by capacity, since faculty hiring and course assignments can be such consuming and challenging activities. But experience is equally important, and easy to forget. Keeping a CAPE mindset ensures I don’t ignore a critical area of equity consideration.
• What actions have you taken as a result of applying CAPE to your work? One of the biggest things we noticed by examining experience was how our Informatics degree was largely viewed by students as the computing and information degree that actually talked about people. This is a huge draw for many, but students also felt really strongly that our reputation didn’t match reality, and this led many Black, Latinx, and Native students to change majors, despite their interests in technology. We recently integrated topics of equity and justice into all of our core curriculum and wrote a new book for our introductory course that centers these topics in our discussions of computing and information. We’re hoping that this, plus our curricular revisions, address the retention problems arising from experience issues.
• What challenges should people be prepared to address when applying the CAPE Framework to their equity work? It’s not prescriptive, and it shouldn’t be. Every institution has its own unique cultures, contexts, and challenges. I find it most useful as a thinking and planning tool, but not as a tool for action. Without support for ideating actions that can meaningfully make change, and practices for verifying change, nothing will change.

Bryan talked about the many challenges of addressing CAPE challenges in K-12 administration, which is tangled in a thicket of politics and law, and Leigh Ann talked about funders and their role in shaping what work happens, how quickly it happens, and how much time they allow for long-term sustainable systems change. We then went into breakout groups and talked about funding, higher education, and K-12 from a CAPE perspective, sharing current efforts and brainstorming opportunities for equity efforts using the CAPE framework.

The panelists introduce themselves.

Panel: Infusing equity and inclusion in K-12 CS teacher development

Right after the my panel, I joined another panel, this time on CS teacher education. It included:

• Charity Freeman, Associate Director of Teacher Training at the Discovery Partners Institute at UIUC, focusing on in-service teachers.
• Michelle Friend, Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. She prepares teachers to teach CS, both pre-service and in-service.
• Maya Israel, Associate Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Florida. She focuses on students with disabilities in CS.
• Lilibeth Mora, Equity Teacher Leader at Vallejo City Unified School District.
• Meg Ray, CS Education Consultant and Founding Teacher in Residence at Cornell Tech.

The panel covered a lot of ground, but here are some of the key things I learned:

• The CSTA Teacher Standards are a great resource for developing or refining pre-service programs; they touch on equity and inclusion in their focus on fostering an inclusive of culture and examining impacts of society on computing. (We’re using them as a checklist for our pre-service program at the University of Washington).
• Many pre-service teachers come with rudimentary ideas about inclusion (e.g., including pink things to welcome women). This requires a lot of learning that might not be about CS content knowledge.
• We have to teach teachers about their positionality in order to prepare them for doing equity and inclusion work. One can’t ask students to be reflective about their positions without doing it themselves.
• One can’t just develop one-size-fits-all curricula and materials; culturally sustaining materials requires knowing who students are. That means preparing teachers to design instruction that responds to youth, rather than strictly selecting material.
• In pre-service, it’s really critical to create time and space for teaching simulations, where they can practice complex interactions without the risk of harming students.
• Teachers never stop learning; its key to make lifelong learning a clear expectation. And yet many new CS teachers are new to CS, new to inclusive practices, and often new to teaching, and they don’t realize the volume of learning that’s coming.
• Teacher learning needs more than just reading; it also requires planning for action. That planning is part of learning as well.

Dr. Washington and Dr. noble prepare for their chat.

Nicki Washington and Safiya Noble discuss bias

In a unique session, Dr. Safiya Nobile and Dr. Nicki Washington came together to discuss the film Coded Bias, and related issues, around justice and computing education. Here are some of the idea highlights from their discussion:

• Safiya talked about the history of change. Arguing that algorithms and data can encode racism 10 years ago was screaming into the void; about 5 years ago, there was an explosion of books and scholars who really made space for this, including research and books. The change has been rapid, at least within the social sciences, and increasingly in computing. But in the process, most of the people who launched ethical AI scholarship have been erased, with companies taking over the narrative, committing money and lip service, but at the same time, doing nothing about their underlying exclusionary culture.
• Many Black women scholars don’t want the job of talking about race and technology. If there wasn’t racism, that work wouldn’t be necessary, and they’d be free to do work that wasn’t so challenging and personally exhausting. (This resonated strongly with me as someone who often has to advocate around trans rights, even though I don’t want to, just to protect my basic civil rights).
• For far too long, people have been dismissing research on diversity, equity, and inclusion in CS as “cute”; the murder of George Floyd made some space for this work, but there’s a long way to go before such work is validated and recognized. Academia is still obsessed with compartmentalization of scholarship and scholar identity.
• Lots of non-Black people read a lot, but now aren’t taking action. As a result, many Black women scholars feel discarded.
• So many engineers are ignorant of racism, sexism, class, poverty, immigration. The result is that their design and engineering choices are simply ignorant. And algorithms reflect this ignorance, but even more so, because of how reductive they are.

Rafi Santo, conference co-chair, brought a question from the chat discussion about what kind of CS literacy the world needs. I made the case that learning to code isn’t really the only necessary skill; others chimed in on the need for advocates, activists, community-oriented, justice-centered designers. Safiya argued for double majors in CS and social sciences as a baseline, pointing out that many CS majors test out of humanities and social sciences from 12th grade AP classes.

Jakita talks about the need for just-in-time scaffolding.

Wednesday: Learner-centered pedagogy

I had a short day on Wednesday due to morning teaching again, but I was able to join for a panel on Learner-Centered Pedagogies for Equity and Inclusion in K-12 Introductory Programming, which focused on how to make progress on broadening participation in computing. Shuchi Grover moderated, and the panelists included:

• Jill Denner talked about a free toolkit for pair programming, which builds on evidence that friendship can be a critical resource, but pairing needs to account for prior knowledge and attitudes toward collaboration.
• Jakita Thomas talked about supporting Black girls to economic mobility while disrupting neoliberalism, countering the exclusionary and oppressive gendered anti-Blackness interwoven through STEM. She described youth creating games that centered social issues, which they submitted to national game design competitions.
• Deborah Fields talked about 5–6 years watching teachers engaging equity through e-textiles. She highlighted the importance of agency, combined with constraints and scaffolding, that balances creativity and depth. She found that as youth pursued their individual projects, it develops distributed expertise that facilitates peer pedagogy.
• Maya Israel talked about neurodiversity and disability, and the ways that teachers often attribute failure to disability and success to external factors. She talked about the need for projects that have multiple entry points, to prevent students from getting stuck in particular problem solving ruts. Her experience showed that practical experience with universal design for learning requires sustained professional development over time, especially around teaching debugging and metacognitive strategies.

The discussion and questions surfaced many interesting insights:

• There’s a big tension between creative vision, project management, and skills. Many teachers are initially uncomfortable offering constraints to guide this. It’s a different kind of classroom management.
• There was some discussion of the false dichotomy between creative work and explicit instruction. Maya talked about building creative freedom within structured activities. Jakita talked about the need to create just-in-time scaffolds at the end of every day to fill newly discovered gaps in knowledge and teaching.
• The panel talked about the high need for scaffolds around creativity, critique, project management, collaboration, and other aspects of creative coding.
• Jakita talked about the need to be reflective and reflexive in being inclusive, examining their own positions, so they can focus on the assets that students bring rather than bringing a deficit mindset.

I gesture wildly about segregation at my keynote. Credit: Shana V. White

Thursday: Keynote and reflections

My keynote: Deconstructing CS culture

My keynote opened the last day of the conference. When I was first asked, I was a bit trepidatious: my work on diversity, equity, and inclusion in CS education only began a few years ago, and most of the audience had been engaged in broadening participation for far longer than I had. I didn’t want to feign authority on topics on which I had none. Instead, I decided to talk about something that I know well: the dominant groups in CS.

I know these groups well because I was seen as part of the dominant group for so long: a White and Asian man, who started coding as a child, who went to an elite private university for a Ph.D. and now is a professor at a top CS university. My idea was to try to complicate this story, not only by looking at my transness, but also my urban/rural low-income family. I used this as way to start a conversation about the other forms of hidden marginalization that many in dominant groups in CS have long experienced—stigma for being Autistic, trauma from bullying for violating strict norms of masculinity, rural queer youth, and toxic, constraining expectations of Asian parents. I felt that telling these stories was an important part of examining equity and inclusion, but also the power that people in CS from these dominant groups hold, and why they might not be inclined to give it up.

The overarching argument of the talk is that CS is a refuge to these groups, and one defined by social segregation, and then complicate broadening participation efforts by showing how uprooting that culture of segregation poses psychological and intellectual threats to dominant groups who are marginalized in their own ways.

Below I’ve included a practice talk I recorded; I believe the organizers also recorded the live talk, but it may only be available to registered attendees.

My IEEE RESPECT keynote, entitled “Deconstructing CS Culture”.

I was really excited to see that throughout my talk, attendees shared their own experiences in CS, as Black men, Autistic girls, less masculine men, and more. It was so exciting to see how my own vulnerability made space for others to share as well. Once we got to Q&A, the audience had many powerful questions:

• “Your comment about CS culture being a refuge for autistic people — male autistic, yes, but girls?”
• “ Given that CS culture has been an escape from bullying for many, how do we reconcile that with the toxic masculinity that dominates much of the CS professional workspace?”
• “ Why is there an assumption that they don’t want the power that they wield? because they’ve said it? or it is more the responsibility that is attached to that power (mark zuckerberg is a great example of this)”
• “ From your work, do you think the dominant groups in CS are ready and wanting to honestly talk about the need to change CS culture?”
• “ One of the tensions in CS that I am aware of as a lived experience is how often gender is named in interventions and research results. Research focused on girls/women… Research focussed on black boys… Can you speak to how we can simultaneously acknowledge gendered experiences and expansive gender?”

Most of my answers centered around themes of vulnerability, empathy, and strategies for overcoming ignorance.

Naomi talks about the theoretical framing of her work.

Identity, environments, and community in CS Education

After a brief break, I ducked in for three final talks, before my lunch break and afternoon meetings.

• “”I am worth my grain [of] salt”: Women of Color Navigating the Hostile Environment of Computer Science Graduate Education”, presented by Nuria Jaumot-Pascual. They analyzed the literature and found that many faculty publicly humiliated women of color, doubted their intelligence, and even physically assaulted them.
• “Honoring Black Women’s Work: Creating a Parent and Caring Adult Community to Support Youth STEM Engagement”, presented by Naomi Thompson and Miranda Standberry-Wallace talked about Digital Divas, a STEAM program that partners with community groups to offer mentorship to Black and Latina girls. One of the key strategies they shared was participating deeply in a community.
• “Female Scholars in Computer Science: The Role of Family and Other Factors in Achieving Academic Success”, presented by Jodi Tims, discussed a survey of women faculty. They didn’t find differences in productivity, but women did spend more time taking care of children.

Sara Vogel discusses the trends.

Multilingual students in CS

The final session I was able to attend (I only missed the final community meeting) was on the assets that multilingual learners bring to CS classrooms. This panel talked about many of the ways to leverage these resources in teaching, taking a broad view on culture, history, and community. Four panelists presented:

• Sharin Jacob (UC Irvine) talked about elementary multilingual students, finding that computational thinking curriculum that make space for personal interests can change perceptions and identity around CS, and that this was largely mediated by children’s friends, family, and communities.
• Sara Vogel (NYU) talked about the massive diversity in New York City and the researcher-practitioner partnership, and their efforts to examine critical thinking about language in CS, including students who are monolingual. She discussed systems change, language policing, the use of code to express social critiques and understand science.
• Rose Pozos (Stanford) discussed inequity in academic literacy and family access to digital society, and her researcher-practitioner partnership’s goal of offering digital literacies that will help them address critical issues in their communities. They offer a K-8 computational thinking integration, family engagement, and a local CS advisory committee.
• Patricia Ordóñez (University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras) talked about decolonizing computing, and a project that focuses on indigenous systems of knowledge to computing, examining computing as a child of the military, by highlighting stories like the Navajo code talkers, and the environmental cost of computing.

Reflection

After spending five days in conversation with a community of scholars explicitly focused on diversity, there is something quite powerful — and safe, honestly — about only having scholars who center diversity at a conference. There’s room to deepen thinking, to share work that might be wrongfully dismissed by the broader CS education communities without adequate expertise, and to attract a diversity of scholars focusing on diversity work. I learned so much, and felt far more included than I ever have at other CS education conferences (even ones that I run!)

While I don’t feel like I got to meet a large number of new people due to the virtual format, I do feel like I know the community much better than I did before, and am excited about attending again, hopefully in person some day. It’s a community that’s truly leading conversations on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in CS education. And who would want to be at the center of that universe? :)

Going back to the segregation themes I raised in my keynote, I wonder about the future of RESPECT. Should it ultimately be reintegrated with the broader CS education communities? Is it ultimately beneficial to keep it segregated? How long will we need RESPECT as a safe space for conversations about equity and justice, and does its existence demotivate making the broader community a safer space? I certainly don’t have the answer to these questions, but I do know that this community is well-positioned to find them.