SIGCSE 2025: Rumination, resistance
After more than 20 years attending more than 100 conferences, I still get a thrill from 3–4 days of academic networking. Connecting with friends I only see once or twice a year, learning from others, and building community never gets boring, as hard and exhausting as it can be. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium has been one of the communities I’ve invested in over the past decade, and so at the end of every Winter, I look forward to reconnecting.
There are some things, however, that I have to brace myself for each year. The community is generally committed to basic notions of equity, but at the same time, has historically been dismissive and sometimes hostile to deeper conceptions of it. It’s a kind community, but if you’re someone on the margins, the lack of broad cultural competency means that many experience the whole week as a series of micro-aggressions with a smile. And while there is a broad commitment to being “student-centered”, too often the focus on students is on surveilling them, dividing them, and policing them, rather than imagining more liberatory, asset-based spaces that reimagine computing education. Knowing how far ahead learning sciences and education research is on this work can be grating, but I am nothing if not an an optimist, and so I keep coming, doing my part to help the community learn about the broader world of learning.
This year, like last year, I put my attention on that work, investing in growing communities of disability justice, reinforcing the epistemic pluralism in my role as Editor of the ACM TOCE journal, strengthening the community of queer folks in the field, plotting resistance around our authoritarian government, and getting into a few healthy fights about the misplaced attention on generative AI.
For those who’ve read my previous trip reports, I’m going to try something different this time, synthesizing set of themes from the four days in Pittsburgh, rather than offering a chronicle of my play by play. That was partly because it wasn’t possible to entirely unplug from my 40% Associate Dean for Academics role, so my attention was divided; but it is also because I want a commitment device to think more about the field than the specific details of what happened this week.
With that, here are five things I noticed.
A deeper commitment to cultural competence
Throughout the week, there were the usual microagressions (e.g., “Where are you a student? What do you teach? You don’t look like a full professor. Why can’t we leave room for debate on both sides?”). But there were also many explicit moves toward a deeper understanding of the diversity of our community and the students we engage in research and teaching. Required use of microphones for those hard of hearing; pronouns everywhere; far more use of captions than I usually find; keynotes pushing the field toward deeper conceptions of intersectionality; research and practice examining the particulars of identity, class, and systems. All of those efforts over the past 15 years to start leveling up the diversity literacy of our community and its scholarship might just be taking hold, thanks largely to the painful work by mostly Black women and queer folks in our field, and allies. The difference was notable this year, and its resonance with the growing community of undergraduates and new doctoral students was exciting and promising.
More transdisciplinary visions of teaching and learning
While all of the usual CS1 focus was still present this year, there was also a notable diversity of papers, panels, and talks that set aside disciplinary visions of CS for richer conceptions of CS knowledge. There were papers about HCI education, privacy education, integrations with math, science, social studies, political science, art, and sociology. My hallway conversations were framed broadly from a view that the entirety of human knowledge—academic and otherwise—is a resource for making progress on our community’s shared goal of helping everyone learn, even when we agree on what they should learn. This trandisciplinary thinking, while not at all the norm yet, was enough of a critical mass that even the faculty I met most focused on introductory programming were willing to acknowledge the narrowness of their views.
The next generation of scholars is eager, inspired, curious, and driven
I don’t know if it was due to the location, or broader shifts in the world, but I met a hundred or more undergraduates who were engaged in research, knew the discourse, had interesting research questions, and just wanted to find ways to navigate the pathways towards PhD admissions and the emerging threats to those pathways by the U.S. federal government. It made me think back to my first SIGCSE more than a decade ago and how I didn’t meet a single student and they certainly had no awareness of computing education as a research area. This increased visibility amongst undergraduates in computing felt like a strong sign of our field’s maturation. We just need universities and our communities to catch up, finding ways to mature in kind, finding ways to embrace the rich, epistemically pluralist views of the next generation so that their visions can become viable careers.
The field is starting to ask ambitious questions
One of the things I’ve always found most disappointing about computing education as a field is how incremental its questions can be. Making assessment a little better, helping teachers work a little bit faster. I think it must be something about the engineering roots of the field, where many in the community see teaching and learning as something to be optimized. This year, however, I saw so many promising hints of much more foundational questions that have the potential to transform our scholarship and practice. What are the relationships between class, computing, and learning? How do we operationalize intersectional methodologies that center lived experience as rigorous knowledge? In what ways are large language models fundamentally in opposition to human flourishing, and the learning inherent to it? Some of these came up in papers, some in panels, some in the hallways, as I chatted with faculty, teachers, and students. I can see a field that in 10 years is a little less concerned with industrialized conceptions of teaching and learning, and a little more curious about ideas that powerfully explain the nature of computing and learning.
The field is at war, but many are in denial
The major topic throughout the week was of course the U.S. federal government’s direct assault on research and education. Fears of loss of grant funding, budget cuts in K-12, colleges, and universities, and lost jobs pervaded every conversation. In fact, one scholar even received a message today that the verbal faculty job offer they had received was being rescinded by a university anticipating budget cuts. And all of the National Science Foundation sessions were canceled. Despite all of these fears and very real material consequences of federal chaos, I found the community still broadly in a state of uncertainty, and broadly unaware of all of the other people and institutions in the United States already experiencing direct harm. I tried to convey to folks that we are at actual war — people are dying, losing jobs, becoming homeless, dying by suicide— it’s just not the kind of war we recognize as war, and its certainty not a war we know how to fight. I was able to connect with other folks on the margins in the community — attendees with disabilities, Black folks, queer folks— and we all generally agreed that it was the usual pattern: we all saw this coming years ago, called wolf, and everyone ignored us. Now it’s time for everyone that didn’t believe us to suit up and join the fight.
What’s next?
I’ll end with a few words I wrote at the Accessibility and Disability workshop I co-organized, where I lead a short session on the impacts of the federal chaos.
We’re living in a time of authoritarian lawlessness and uncertainty, particularly in the US, but also globally. In history, authoritarianism has not been good for disability rights, and its intersections with race, gender, class, because at its foundations are violent ideas of dehumanization and “fitness”. Some of this is now manifesting: in Trump’s executive orders, in government agencies erasing people with disabilities, or making disability rights conditional upon trans exclusion, canceling employee resource groups, rolling back of education rights, withholding federal funding for the mere mention of diversity, blaming people with disabilities for airplane crashes, calling trans service members dishonest. These are not isolated to the US; other countries are taking similar turns, and other countries are not isolated from US actions. The time to act is now, and to do that, we need to understand where you at emotionally, and what kind of action you are positioned to take.
Now more than ever, computing education is a field that is uniquely positioned to lead this charge. We are at the forefront of the most transformative invention in the past century, but also at conceptualizing how to equitably use it. We prepare the country’s youth and young adults to lead our use of computing in society, and more than most disciplines, we have the ear of industrial power. Despite funding threats, we have far more job security, freedom, and time than most people to hold power to account, to envision better futures, and to build those futures. It is our obligation, duty, and privilege to be on the front lines of resistance, and for one of the first times, I felt like our community is capable of doing that work. We just have to decide to do it.
