Blogs (4) >>
Fri 22 Mar 2024 14:35 - 15:00 at Oregon Ballroom 204 - Ethics & Social Justice Chair(s): Emanuelle Burton

There is a pressing need for practices that work towards broadening Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) participation in computing, harness computing for BIPOC community goals, youth civic participation, activism, wealth generation, self-advocacy, and disruption of harmful biases and racist ideologies in computing. Thus, we first justify the need for equitable and justice-oriented courses in undergraduate Computer Science (CS) curricula. We then explore the current status of such courses in undergraduate CS. We do this by conducting a document analysis of the learning objectives, standards, and CS course descriptions of the top 20 ranked universities in the U.S. We found that most courses that speak to the human and societal impacts of computing fell into the category of “Human Computer Interaction”. CS courses that explicitly focused on ethical issues, gender, racial, accessibility, and environmental justice were present at much lower numbers. Less than 50% of the top-ranked universities had such courses. If present, the proportion of such courses within a university’s curricula was less than 5%. Most of the top-ranked universities subscribed to ABET’s standards, which have a curricular requirement of understanding the local and global impacts of computing. Given our pressing needs and ABET standards, there is a need for more justice-oriented courses in undergraduate CS curricula. We describe possible ways to achieve this goal, such as hiring cross-departmental CS faculty with African-American/Chican@ and gender studies, instructor professional development programs like AIICE, and considering deep social impact standards, and better alignment with such standards.

Fri 22 Mar

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13:45 - 15:00
Ethics & Social JusticePapers at Oregon Ballroom 204
Chair(s): Emanuelle Burton College of Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago
13:45
25m
Talk
Do Embedded Ethics Modules Have Impact Beyond the Classroom?Global
Papers
Diane Horton University of Toronto, David Liu University of Toronto, Sheila McIlraith University of Toronto, Nina Wang University of Toronto, Steven Coyne University of Toronto
DOI
14:10
25m
Talk
Teaching Ethics and Activism in a Human-Computer Interaction Professional Master's Program
Papers
Veronica Rivera Stanford University, Norman Su University of California, Santa Cruz
DOI
14:35
25m
Talk
The Need for More Justice-Oriented Courses in Undergraduate Computer Science Curricula
Papers
Sukanya Kannan Moudgalya University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Amanda Zeller University of Tennessee, Knoxville
DOI