Talks and presentations

As the tech industry has exploded in the 21st century, so has K-12 computer science education. However, I argue that instead of teaching kids how to code, we need to teach them how to understand how computing influences their lives. Computers and algorithms are reshaping society, for better and for worse, but all the focus in CS education has gone into teaching programming. Our students need to be informed about how computational systems profile us using our data, invade every aspect of our lives, and exacerbate existing injustices. Instead of worrying about Terminator-like AI, I want young people to analyze how technology is already exploiting marginalized communities and what they can do to help. I want computing curriculum to draw upon the work of women and scholars of color who have been sounding the alarm for years about algorithmic bias that reinforces racism and sexism. My research aims to make this a reality by collaborating with K-12 computer science teachers to integrate these concepts into their teaching using real world examples. More kids would like CS class, if only it was less about writing code and more about building a better world.

Many Indigenous languages are endangered, and revitalizing them is a major part of decolonization. Educational technology may be able to help, but the unique needs of Indigenous communities need to be taken into account. In this talk, I describe my experience with the Lushootseed language as a case study to explore these challenges and opportunities. Lushootseed is a Coast Salish language from the territory around the modern city of Seattle.

Me and two other PhD candidates in our program were invited to speak about the process of planning and executing our practicum projects. The panel was a part of the class CEP 955, which is a required class where students plan their first independent research projects. I talked about the challenges I encountered in my practicum (which was eventually published at SIGCSE), and offered some advice to the class of mostly 2nd year PhD students.

I shared my perspective, focusing on critical theory and scholars who have been questioning language models for a long time, like Emily Bender who was recently profiled in this great article. It uses very accessible language, while also retaining a lot of the nuance in Bender’s stance. I ended by incorporating a technoskeptical perspective, taken from Civics of Technology’s curriculum. I wanted to build on a question that came up in a breakout room along these lines of “Who is harmed and who benefits from the technology?” In this case, who benefits and is harmed by chatbots like ChatGPT?

As issues of ethics, criticality, and social impact become more important in computer science, so does the need to teach them in CS classes. Despite the recent growth of academic writing around ethics in CS and a push for teaching ethics in post-secondary CS classes, the K-12 space has largely been ignored. To explore integrating ethics into K-12 CS classes, we interviewed a diverse group of current US K-12 CS teachers and conducted a thematic analysis to understand how they conceptualize ethics in CS and see potential opportunities and barriers to ethics integration in their classroom context. We found that teachers initially associated ethics with digital citizenship and gender/race imbalances, but were largely unfamiliar with issues of algorithmic bias, injustice, and techno-solutionism. After being introduced to these ideas and presented with examples, the teachers started to broaden their perspective of CS ethics. However, there are still barriers to teachers integrating ethics into their classroom (e.g. curriculum, time constraints). We discuss potential future for K-12 CS ethics including through integrating ethics into digital citizenship.