Late on Tuesday night, I happened to be browsing Twitter and came across an invite to a US-based Computer Science Education discussion group called CS Ed Reading group. I did a quick time zone calculation, worked out that it started at 1am BST and decided it was probably a crazy idea to stay up for it. But the paper for discussion looked very relevant in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter conversations currently taking place and I felt it offered a chance for me to hear and learn more in an area I have done little reading in.
The website said anyone was welcome, so I clicked on the Zoom link, and found myself amongst a group of friendly, articulate educators and researchers in the US. The paper we were discussing was When Twice as Good Isn’t Good Enough: The Case for Cultural Competence in Computing and we were fortunate to be joined by the author, Dr Nicki Washington.
Dr Nicki first of all gave us some background about the paper, explaining that the title comes from something which black girls are frequently told as children: that they have to be twice as good to be half as recognised. Her ideas were shaped from a point of career frustration where she was denied promotion due to reasons rooted in racism and racist attitudes.
The paper is written through the lens of higher education as a single author, position paper and our first group task was to split into smaller breakout groups and discuss our ideas about what cultural competence means. Our group picked up on one theme in the paper around algorithmic bias in machine learning which was incredibly relevant given the news this week that Microsoft’s AI-drive image classification had muddled up two members of the group Little Mix and incorrectly used an image of one girl with mixed-race ethnicity instead of another.
Back in the main group, we began to delve deeper into section 2 of the paper, looking at the skills, attitudes, awareness and knowledge which in combination make up the concept of cultural competence. One concrete example of this was institutionalisation of cultural knowledge: it’s so easy to fall into the trap of running a course or completing an audit around diversity then mistakenly conflating ticking a box with making geniune change.
Another area of cultural competence is the skill to adapt to diversity. It was interesting to hear that the K-12 CS Framework explicitly includes Fostering an Inclusive Computing Culture. This requires teachers to “develop students’ ability to understand, appreciate, and appropriately build upon and respond to others’ cultural strengths and uniqueness.” To the best of my knowledge, I cannot find a similar code of practice within English computing curricula and I would welcome a commitment to diversity and inclusion at the heart of any computing initiative along with some careful thinking about how racial narratives or stereotypes might play out in computing pedagogy, for example with pair programming.
We ended the hour on a note of hope: the cultural competency assessment defined in the paper is currently in the process of being validated, and should be ready to use later in 2020. On a practical note, a discussion of the same paper will be held on Twitter next week – check out @talkcsed for more information.
Taking part in a CS Ed discussion with a group of educators from a different country was enlightening. In my opinion, the US is further along the way to developing a sense of cultural competency among members of the CS Ed community than the UK because it is actively taking steps to surface the issue regularly. There’s much to learn from this approach and to think about how we can embed cultural competency in UK computing communities.
CSEd PhD 