Nicki Washington is Unapologetically Dope
In this interview with Nicki Washington, we discuss the importance of cultural competency, expanding beyond “diversity” by focusing on creating inclusive and equitable environments, learning from people and scholarship outside of the field, lessons learned working with CS educators across the country, lessons learned while teaching during a pandemic, focusing on the humanity in computer science education, and much more. If you haven’t listened to it yet, check out the unpacking scholarship episode that unpacks one of Nicki’s papers.
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Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary
in this week's episode i'm interviewing
nikki washington
in our discussion we discussed the
importance of cultural competency
which i discussed in the podcast episode
that unpacked one of nikki's papers
titled when twice as good isn't enough
the case for cultural competence and
computing
so if you haven't listened to that
episode yet i highly recommend listening
to it either before
or after this interview so you can have
some more context on some of the topics
we discuss
we also discussed expanding beyond
diversity by focusing on
creating inclusive and equitable
environments
learning from people in scholarship
outside of the field lessons learned
working with
cs educators across the country lessons
learned while teaching during a pandemic
focusing on the humanity and computer
science education and
so much more as always the description
in the app that you're listening to this
on should link directly to the show
notes otherwise you can find them
at jaredlery.com where there's nothing
for sale and no advertisements
there's just hundreds if not thousands
of free resources that you could use
potentially today
in the show notes you'll find links to
many of the publications and
interviews that were mentioned in this
episode as well as
links to connecting with nikki online
with that being said we're now going to
start with an introduction by nikki
good afternoon my name is nikki
washington i'm a professor of practice
in the computer science department at
duke university
born and raised in durham north carolina
my background
is computer science for all of my
degrees
i earned a bachelor's degree in computer
science from johnson c smith university
in charlotte north carolina
in 2000 and then from there my master's
in phd
in computer science from north carolina
state university in 2002 and 2005.
so my career in computing has kind of
been
from college to grad school and then
quickly
into industry with the aerospace
corporation for about one year
post-graduation and then from there
moved to howard university for nine
years
on faculty went through university for
five years and now it do
and can you tell me a story of how you
got into computer science and cs
education
so i was exposed to computing at a very
early age my mom
was a math major and she spent her
entire 34-year career at ibm as a
programmer turned
manager i was exposed to computing at a
very early age
due to her because of course ibm would
have discounted
computers and so my mom would every
couple of years order a new one
and allow me to install the software
assemble it and then the more i did that
as i aged
i started to tinker around more and
learn a little bit of programming
a little bit more programming then
turned into classes in high school
and that was my introduction to
computing but
i originally planned to minor in
computer science and major in something
business related like marketing
and so in my freshman programming course
at johnson c smith my professor dr nagee
batea realized that
i was doing really well in the
programming assignments in the labs and
he asked me
why is it that you are
excelling in this in certain ways where
other students are struggling
i've been taking programming since high
school so it's not new to me it was new
to me to learn
c but the concepts behind it weren't and
he convinced me to
change my major from marketing to
computer science
and consider minoring in marketing and
his argument was
this was 1996 at the time so he said by
the time you graduate in 2000 computer
science will be
a really popular and needed area i think
you'll do really well especially as a
young black woman
you'll have much more opportunities than
you would in marketing
so that kind of segued me into computing
permanently
yeah it's interesting how small
conversations like that can be such a
huge catalyst in somebody's lives and
it's something that i try and
take into account when i'm talking with
somebody that i'm working with whether
it's a kid or an adult or whatever
it's amazing how it may have just been
that one conversation
just completely shifted your trajectory
absolutely and
i felt like there were a number of those
that kept happening
that was the first even my decision to
pursue a phd
i didn't want to but the president at
the time dr dorothy cousin-yancey
she wanted to nominate me for the david
and lucille packard fellowship program
which would be five years of funding to
pursue
a phd and when she called me
to nominate me over fall break i told
her yeah thank you but i really don't
want to do a phd i think i may want to
do a master's because
i didn't know what i wanted to do but i
knew i did not want to work
and so as a college senior i just wasn't
ready to go into the working world and
get on that schedule
but she told me you know i'm going to
nominate you anyway
this is too good of an opportunity to
turn down so
send me your resume and worst case
scenario is you get it and you say no
and so i took the chance and it worked
out
yeah i had similar experiences i hadn't
even considered a phd i was just going
to get a masters
and i was taking a class and i was
writing a paper on this topic and we're
only supposed to
cite like 10 sources or whatever i ended
up citing like 30 or 40
sources because i was just really
interested in the topic and when i
submitted the paper the professor's like
you just basically did
a chapter two of a dissertation on this
topic have you thought about doing a phd
and was like well i didn't even
consider it and it's just funny how that
little conversation it just completely
shifted my trajectory in terms of where
i went
it's fun at least for me to reflect on
like those various catalysts in life
whether positive or negative so like i
i shared with you on twitter like i have
this calvin tattoo of like
trying to play in the rain and like i've
had moments in my life where like a car
accident made it so that
it was really bad in the moment but like
made me focus more on education and it's
funny how
those little things completely shift
best laid plans
absolutely that's what i tell people you
can plan all day and then life happens
and you have to go with it
you know it's funny because i grew up
running track and it was that same thing
that i had this idea that i was going to
run track at a huge d1 school
and all of these and then i played
basketball in the winter
to avoid having to practice outdoors for
indoor and tour my acl
in 11th grade and so that totally
shifted like oh
well there goes track so it was one of
those situations where
even the types of schools that i was
interested in attending
totally changed because before where i
was looking at lsu or taxes
or even carolina that totally shifted
and so now
i'm not worried about sports even like i
just want to be somewhere where i can
thrive and so all of my schools that i
applied to as an undergrad were hbcus
and even people told me some of my
teachers told me well you need to go to
a good school nicki and i kept saying
well what is a good school and you're
equating good to white and i don't want
to attend a pwi
i want to be somewhere where i can
thrive and i don't have to fight every
day yeah
and for people who are listening and
aren't familiar with it hbcu
historically black college university
and then pwa is primarily white
institution so
just in case people aren't familiar with
the terminology now on that
topic what i read on your website is
that at some point you would realize
that
you're growing up as a black woman
surrounded by black engineers was the
exception and was not the norm
and i'm wondering how that realization
has kind of impacted
your trajectory in csncs education yeah
i think i did not realize it until
i arrived at johnson c smith in my
programming courses
and i think because growing up in durham
it's such
a unique city especially at that time
you know you're surrounded by
duke north carolina central and durham
tech and then you've got carolina right
down the road
nc state shaw and a ton of other schools
as well
and it had a rich history of black
excellence in the haiti community and
black wall street so
for me it just kind of was commonplace
to see
representation of myself and always
being told
through my parents friends who also just
happened to be the parents of my friends
growing up
that the only limit is you and whatever
you start you finish
you can be whatever you can do whatever
but when i got to the university i
realized everyone didn't have those
experiences because they're coming from
different parts of the country
and different backgrounds even so they
didn't have necessarily a lot of people
in computing who may have been adults so
they may not have had a lot of college
graduates even in their environment
but it was really important for me as i
started navigating spaces even in
graduate school
that i tried to make sure that
people coming behind me saw themselves
in me so as a graduate student i would
tutor
at shaw insane og
myself and another black graduate
student in electrical and computer
engineering
and then even as i moved into
working in industry at the aerospace
corporation i was doing talks around
graduate school
and the importance of pursuing a phd or
master's degree
at howard in the college of engineering
and it just so happened
that one of these chance encounters
again my closest friend
in college is from dc and he was
teaching at the time at his alma mater
and so
i went out to one of the high school
football games and his cousin
who was a faculty member dr clay
gloucester at the time in electrical and
computer engineering at howard said oh
you graduated that's great i hadn't seen
you in a couple of years and
you want to teach a class at howard and
i thought well that would be kind of
cool
okay and so it
started as this idea of me being an
adjunct professor
but at the time a faculty member left
and
they were looking to fill that spot and
they never had a black woman on faculty
on the tenure track side at howard and
so the incoming chair
who was legane burge was in
clay gloucester's ear saying ask her if
she'd be willing to apply for the
full-time position
and so it kind of worked out again where
i knew that there was something
i really enjoyed the opportunity to
speak
to students and to be in front of them
and encourage them and tell them these
are the things that you need to do
here's the blueprint for how i did it
here's how you can too
and i thought that that would be really
important for students to see one
especially when i realized that
there was never a black woman in the
department and then when i thought back
on my experience
even at an hbcu in the department i'd
never
seen a black faculty member as well so i
never saw a black woman
i never saw a black professor now we had
other black faculty across the
university because it was a black
college
but i knew that in a field like computer
science it would be
important especially for young men and
women especially at howard of all places
to see themselves
in computer science especially to see a
black woman so that was really the
reason
that pushed me into a career in academia
and i think
every space i've moved in every
university since then i've tried to make
sure that
i'm always doing it because there's
someone who looks like me who needs to
see that
they belong they're valued and that
they don't have to do it the quote
traditional way
that everyone sends to tell them yeah
it's amazing
how there's a huge lack of diversity
both
in the k-12 context like 80 of teachers
are white and then
in the higher ed context as well so like
i think all of my k-12 teachers were
white
in college i had one black professor who
i worked with
all four years he was a percussion
person so like i got private lessons
with him for all four years and was
great
and then i had a couple of professors
who were navajo because there's
a lot of navajo in arizona but other
than that all white
and it's amazing how that can have an
impact in terms of
basically implicitly saying these are
the kinds of people who get these kinds
of jobs and do these kind of
things and that lack of representation
can have a huge impact without even
having to say anything about it
absolutely i'm wondering if you could
share the story that you shared with me
about the paper that
i unpacked a few weeks ago the when
twice as good isn't
enough yeah so like i said i started my
career in academia at howard in 2006
and i left in 2015 my dad died and so i
took a position at winthrop for a number
of reasons i thought that
it would be a great fit for me in terms
of doing css
as well as bringing some initiatives to
a state because i'd done some work with
dc public school system and computer
science then as well
and i had a lot of challenges there over
the five years
at winthrop that i've shared very
publicly in a lot of my talks and
writing
and one of the biggest challenges was
moving
into a space where now you're at a
predominantly white institution
you're at an institution in the south
south carolina at that
and having to deal with being
expected to or being asked to
change who you are in order to
make people particularly students
comfortable with your existence and
presence
there's a lot of work around and
research around how
course evaluations particularly impact
the trajectories
of women people of color and those with
intersecting identities being
women who are also of color and that
came to light a lot for me where
i was in situations where i would deal
with a lot of biased student evaluations
that on the qualitative feedback would
talk about she's rude she's
disrespectful she has
no gratitude and having to have
conversations with leadership about
these are issues of bias versus being
told oh nikki students complain about
everybody
and i would have to say but they're not
saying that you don't have any gratitude
they would never write these things
about white men around here and so that
paper was really born
out of my frustration in 2019
i applied in 2018 for promotion to full
professor
which at the university of course it
goes assistant professor
associate professor and then full
professor which is the highest rank so
my first application for promotion was
denied in the spring of 2019.
i got very limited feedback at the time
and the feedback was that it was based
on
student evaluations that explicitly
noted that quote
students have complained that she's rude
disrespectful and mean suggestion is to
vary teaching strategies to account for
different types of student dynamics
and i said well i included an entire
about five-page breakdown
of you know the all of my student
evaluations and showing that for every
one
negative feedback there were two
positive that totally contradicted it
including one student contradicting
themselves who's the same person
didn't matter and i was really
frustrated and
you know for all lack of better ways to
put it i was super pissed
and so i decided to find a way and i
think it wasn't only that it was the
conversation
that followed regarding it where i was
explicitly told
that we need to find a way for students
to like you
and for students to improve your course
evaluations i think you're a great
professor but
are the people that you can talk to
about how to improve your teaching and i
said i'm not going to do that
i'm not going to reach out to anybody
because this is not an issue about my
teaching this is an issue of student
bias
that no one here wants to acknowledge
and i told them you know if you're
asking me
to change who i am for the sake of being
like for
student evaluations then i'll tell you
i'm not going to be here much longer
that was the spring of 2019
in talking with the new provost i was
asked to apply again
in 2019 2020 same thing happened but
i wrote that paper over the spring and
summer of 2019.
my thought was this is not just
happening to me
i know it's not just happening to me
because i have plenty of peers
who are not only black they may be of
other races and ethnicities but they are
experiencing the exact same issues
especially women they're being denied
promotions
they're being denied jobs even because
that follows you when you have to apply
for a new job
in academia you have to submit all of
your course evaluations
and the same thing was happening even in
industry so in 2018 i published the
semester before
unapologetically dope and i'm getting
emails and calls from my former students
a lot of them young women not all but
former howard students who are saying
you know i'm having these issues some of
the same things
and so my thing was why is this still
happening
this was happening to my mom throughout
her career it's happening to me it's now
happening to another generation of young
women it will continue
until we figure out how to stop focusing
on
issues of access and mentoring
that people tend to think that students
from marginalized groups need
and start turning that attention to the
students who are from the
non-marginalized groups particularly
white and asian by race and men
by gender and if we do that then we'll
start to fix these issues because we
keep saying
we need to provide access and resources
for
marginalized students and faculty but
then we drop them into environments
where they're still one of the few if
not the only
there's been no focus or work on the
other people who don't identify
as these groups and so they just
continue what they're doing and
we're all expected to just weather the
storm and push through
but we can't push through we see the
numbers that are happening
in silicon valley we see the numbers
that are happening even in higher ed
and so because of that i started looking
at what is happening
in social science and around that time
i'd already started
reading a number of books that were
coming out and being released
you know race after technology
algorithms of oppression
and then i started to look what are
other places or fields doing
that have to work with diverse groups of
people
so i looked first at education
and healthcare and then they all led
back to social work and this idea of
cultural competence
and honestly cultural competence was a
term
i never really remembered hearing in all
of my education my nine years between
undergrad to grad school and it
definitely wasn't discussed at any point
along the way in my career we've done a
lot of work
in culturally responsive pedagogy or
curriculums and cultural relevance
but nothing about cultural competence so
as i started to study it more
and read about it i kept saying why in
the world are we not doing this
in computer science this is the problem
is that these other disciplines are
making sure that every graduate comes
out and they are able to engage with
people from different identities and
cultures
in ways that ensure that the goal is met
but that they are also respecting and
understanding the differences that they
share
and being able to facilitate
communication in a way that does not
make that vulnerable population feel
less than or minimized so why have we
not done that here
so that was really what it was born out
of it was really my protest
my frustration and my ability to say
well if this is what you're gonna do
then okay
then this is my i'll show you and i'm
just gonna take
this bad batch of whatever it is i was
given and turn it into something that's
a win for me
yeah i don't remember if this made the
conversation or the
cut for the podcast but when i
interviewed joyce mccall
she's a assistant professor in chicago
and
i've known her for several years and she
mentioned all the same things that you
were mentioning in terms
of people just don't get it what it's
like but she's fortunate in that she has
adrian dixon
as like a mentor in the college of
education who has been there done that
gotten tenure and like can help her
navigate it and whatnot so it's very
difficult when you are the only person
in your institution or in your
department
and not have people to talk to about
some of these issues and
for people who are interested in it look
up scholarship on discourse analysis
and the way that people talk about
different races or use different words
in different contexts like the word
urban
in some context is associated with black
with
poor with like all these like negative
connotations the way that people are
phrasing them
and then when they talk about suburban
or rural then they're talking about it
completely differently so
it's a rabbit hole that i recommend
listeners go down but i'm curious with
your
experiences with this and with your
research interests and whatnot on like
measuring
and improving like historically
disenfranchised groups like
what have you learned through this
process that people can do to try and
help
prevent some of this from happening i
think there are a few things
the first thing is to realize that
everyone
operates in a space of privilege the
thing i think 2020
is showing all of us is just how
problematic we all
are in certain ways especially when we
are called on ourselves or our issues
are presented to us
it's very hard for people to talk about
race i've seen that
firsthand now it's usually people who
are
in non-marginalized positions so
honestly that tends to be white folks
for the
better part where it becomes a very
uncomfortable conversation and it's oh
you know it's a lot of defensiveness but
not recognizing that people like me
have had to always talk about being
black because we just don't have a
choice
people who identify as asian may have to
do the same
right people who identify as native also
may have to do the same because
otherwise our voices and our experiences
will never be heard and respected
and i think it's important to recognize
that you have to be comfortable
being uncomfortable there's a lot of
desire to kind of get things over with
quick and fast so we can move on
and that's how we got to where we are in
not just in society but also in the
state of computing and we saw that with
the black and the ivory twitter hashtag
and shut down stem and even the most
recent scholar strike right
they're all of these things that have
been happening because nobody wanted to
talk about it
the second thing is to decenter
yourselves
so i think that there's a lot of
attempts even in the cs education space
a lot of the people who have been doing
the work who have been the most
prevalent who have been the most
prominent and received the most
attention
are again white men and women and the
voices of the people who
identify the same as the students tend
to be
the voices that are marginalized they
don't get the exposure they don't get
the opportunities and the access
to a lot of these opportunities events
conferences keynotes etc so it's not
even about
making space for individuals from
different identities
it's about giving up your space all
together
because a lot of times people say i'm
gonna make space but i'm just gonna make
just enough over here to let you sneak
in but i'm still gonna take over
majority of it and that doesn't serve
any of us any good and i think also to
stop operating
from this deficit mindset of students
from marginalized groups i remember
vividly sitting
it was either conference or some
workshop and someone got up and said
yeah we're doing stuff
at my university for black kids and for
rich kids
and i just paused like excuse me what
did i just hear
and it's this like you said the
discourse analysis and the words that
are used to describe
certain demographics of students how do
you parallel black with rich
and things that when people say for
example you reference things as people
of color
but you're really talking about black
people because you feel unsure about
saying it
i want you to call it out because i am
not like every other person of color
we're not a monolith even black people
are not a monolith
but if you're talking about black people
say it you know one of the great things
and i
shout out dr tiffany williams because
the article she wrote for communications
of acm
earlier this summer about calling people
from systemically marginalized groups
underrepresented minorities and the
racism that's rooted in that it's so
true because we see it but we've all
used that language
because that's what we were taught it
was so ingrained in the
terminology we saw every single day and
even in my class i talked to students
about the fact that every time you see
anything around diversity or inclusion
what is the language in terms of the
target demographics and they'll say
women
underrepresented groups and then
something else
well what if i'm a black woman where do
i fall into this spectrum
when you're identifying and listing all
of these people so there's no
understanding even of intersectionality
and how that plays
an important piece so i'd say everybody
needs to start thinking about those
three things but
also start to learn from the social
sciences and the humanities
and understand critical race theory i
think it's you know absolutely absurd
and disgusting to hear the rhetoric
coming out at the
federal level from the highest person in
office right now
about the divisiveness of critical race
theory
and it's just feeding this narrative
that nothing
is a problem here when we see every
single day that it is for people who
don't
operate from a cisgender white
heterosexual male identity
yeah learning more about critical race
theory and like the other
sub points within that like double
consciousness like when you were talking
earlier
in that discussion i was just like oh
yeah that makes me think of the
conversation with joyce where
we unpack what is double consciousness
in terms of like
when joyce is in a group she also has to
think of herself as black
and view the perspective of a white
person viewing her as black
and like having those two different
perspectives going on simultaneously
like it's mentally draining having to
consciously be aware of that all the
time and it's something that i as a
white individual don't have to think
about and haven't had to worry about
absolutely i'm curious when you've
engaged with us kind of research and
learning from like social work and
things like that were there any
surprises along the way
that you were just hadn't anticipated
the biggest surprise for me
was that this wasn't being done
anywhere that i could find right for a
while gave me a lot of pause
and i spent a lot of time just digging
and digging which is why
that 60 position paper had so many
references because i kept going through
a number of papers and avenues and
looking and saying
surely someone has been talking about
this
at an in-depth level in terms of what
needs to be taught in computing
departments
the first paper i'd seen outside of that
that was discussing anything around
these topics
was paper that just won sig kai's
best paper award that was looking at hci
and critical race theory and hci by a
group of black women authors and i think
the overall majority of them
are grad students even but aside from
that it shocked me
and it shocked me so much because as i
read algorithms of oppression
and race after technology everything
that they're talking about it's just
like they're discussing everything we do
in this field and everything we teach
our students so
why are we not even teaching this and
the more i started to take
little bits and plug it into for example
i've always been on the front end
of the undergraduate experience so i
would teach
the intro to programming or data
structure something around that
i would ask my students you know have
you ever thought about
how different algorithms affect people
differently
and they were floored when i would tell
them that facial recognition technology
doesn't recognize darker skin tones
they've never even
thought about that especially for
students in south carolina
to start understanding that and start
looking
and being hungry for more information
was really impactful but it was also
disheartening because
it says what are we not doing and how
are we failing students across the board
and across the country
yeah this is a topic that should be in
cs education programs but it's not like
you mentioned with the facial
recognition technology i read a paper
that like early uses a facial
recognition technology
the percentages of success rates were
flipped between a light and a dark
skinned
so it was like 90 success with a white
person and then with a black person was
like 90
failure rate and so i did a presentation
recently on
engineered inequalities and one of the
things that i gave as an example is
a video showing a white person putting
their hand under a soap dispenser and
then a black person does the same thing
it won't dispense the soap
so like whether it's in the algorithm or
in the physical devices that we're
creating
like these are things that we need to
talk about and we're not which is why i
was glad to see it in your paper
but it's also like well why did that
just come out in 2020 why haven't we
been talking about this for decades
yeah there are black women even in the
computing space who have been doing this
research around bias and artificial
intelligence so
joy boulevaini timnit gibrou abba
and deb rajni but they are in the
ai space and so if you're not moving
into that space of research
then they don't get the exposure to the
introduction to programming students the
way they should
every student in computing should know
those four women's names
because they are so critical in
everything that's been happening not
just over the last few months with a lot
of technologies being sunset
by places like amazon and ibm but also
just over the last few years because of
the
work they've been doing in this space
and the pushback that they
received but i think that it was
bothersome because
it also spoke to nobody's willing to
dig deeper right even when i had the
idea for this class at first
you know i pitched it and i got the idea
well we already have an ethics course so
how is this different
and i just kept saying well a
medical doctor can be ethical and still
lack bedside manner
it's not about ethics it's about all of
these
other things that you all purport to
really
support and really want to encourage and
foster these inclusive environments
but is it really what you want or is it
just lip service because it's checking
the box and it sounds good if i have to
sit here and
argue with you about cultural competence
does not equal ethics
then that says to me there's already a
bigger problem and that you
lack one of these for sure yeah and then
on the other end of the spectrum if you
get a course like that where
you are talking about these things that
now needs to bleed out into all of the
other courses so if you're doing an
assignment like one of the things that
a professor did that i really liked was
for education majors
they would randomly assign this fake iep
that a student had to prepare for so
you're going to create a lesson
and you have to think okay at least one
of your kids is on the autism spectrum
or at least one of the kids only has one
arm or etc etc so like
just different things to consider when
designing lesson plans and whatnot and i
think something like that
can easily be incorporated into an
assignment like okay you're all assigned
into these different groups
your software or hardware needs to
take into account these different design
considerations and whatnot so
it's an easy way to actually apply the
understandings outside of the class
right and it's easy to dump even
culturally competent modules into every
single current computing course without
creating a course
right and that's what was so flooring
like how is this
not being done how are people just so
unwilling to
even see and the more that things have
happened over 2020
i'm not sure if i still believe it's a
lack of willingness
i think there was a lot of that in place
but i think that for
the other subset of people it was a lack
of knowledge
and understanding and wanting to learn
but not having the requisite skill set
to teach it
do you have any recommendations for
either k-12
or higher ed cs educators about how to
improve diversity equity inclusion
i would say like i tell people all the
time on twitter listen to black women
and believe them you know we tend to be
those canaries in the coal mine
and people always listen to us a little
too late
i would say also taking away the
idea of focusing on numbers right
there's so much emphasis on we want to
get x number of students from this
demographic
and we want to make sure that we have x
number of women x number of black
latina natives that's not representative
of
a good measurement because you can get
numbers but how many people are you
gonna keep
and there's a difference between getting
them in the door and keeping them there
and people don't understand or
appreciate the importance of being
seen i say that all the time like i want
you to
not just recognize that i'm here but see
my experiences
and understand that i move in spaces
differently
than other people i have to you know
like you said with double consciousness
i operate always thinking about a white
gay
sometimes more than others but i need
you to understand that that's a reality
for your students
and also recognizing that your students
come
with a lot of different experiences
right now covet is showing that a lot of
times and it's heartbreaking to hear
some of the stories like
the young kid who just got suspended for
having a nerf gun
in his zoom background and the teacher
called the cops it's those kinds of
issues that are flooring when you think
about
people right now educators especially
tout this idea of diversity and
inclusion and equity but then when
something like that happens
they're quick to do exactly what they've
always done which is pick up a phone
and call the police instead of trying to
stop for a minute and process
and recognizing that diversity does not
mean you have an inclusive or an
equitable environment it just means that
you've dumped a bunch of different
people from different
identities into one pool it does not
mean that
it's an inclusive environment that it's
not a toxic environment
or that they came there from equitable
situations or
you made it equitable get away from
diversity i tell everyone stop
using that word just focus on creating
inclusive
and equitable environments if you do
that the diversity will automatically
come
because it's something like i heard
before where you know diversity is being
invited to the party
but inclusion is being asked to dance
and actually take up space until we do
that we're kind of just all
chasing windmills yeah i like that and i
think
your points especially about the
questions that are being asked in terms
of like the numbers that people focus on
with the demographics like
so i myself identify as non-binary and
that is not
in most demographics like it's not an
even an option to check it's either male
or female
and sometimes there's another option the
kinds of questions you're asking and the
numbers that you're collecting
aren't representative of it but then we
actually go like you mentioned earlier
with intersectionality it's not just the
fact that i have these identities that
are
labeled as silos like it's how they
interact with each other and whatnot
that for me
is extremely important as an individual
and i think it's
really important especially for k-12
educators
even more so to start looking at some of
these
authors some of these social sciences
humanities people
who have written some amazing work
around this space right
and i use myself as an example because
one of the earlier assessments that i
was working on
i used under the gender category male
female other
and i talk about that all the time
because i say when i look at it now i
cringe because it was something
i didn't even think about but i was
moving in a space of privilege again
thinking about how someone who does not
identify as male or female
would feel by having to check other and
that other ring that you create
when you're trying to assess things or
just engage with people
so you have to learn to be very
intentional about every single piece and
recognize that again we all move in
spaces of privilege
when people ask me what can i read even
i tell them start with something like
sister outsider by audrey lord audre
lorde
she's amazing in her writing about
all of her the facets of her identity of
being a black queer woman
and having to deal with these issues of
age
race class gender and sexuality and how
they all
overlap and intersect and how pivotal
they all
are to who she is and her experiences
navigating in the world i think it would
give
so many educators a better understanding
of all of the layers that their students
bring to the table when they show up
either in zoom or if it's back in the
classroom or anywhere else and not only
that like i said
people don't understand enough how the
experiences of
their students who have certain
identities are identical to their
colleagues
if your students are having issues then
your colleagues are as well the
difference
is that your colleagues probably are not
going to share it as much because
you know there's issues like you said
before promotion hiring
just concerns about bias and
discrimination from a number of
different angles be it based on race
sexuality gender but being able to
understand
put yourself in the perspective of
someone else
and understand fully how would you want
to be
seen and how would you want others to
see you and then
move in that way that you are always
making sure that
whoever's in front of you even if
they're not in front of you they are
still
seen in the conversations and the work
you do because
they know that in the back of your mind
you're always thinking about
outside of yourself that's really hard
for people to do but you have to be
very intentional about it like thinking
of that broader perspective
outside of what you're doing i'm
wondering what are some things that
you've learned
broadly speaking from your experiences
like you said you've worked with dc
public schools you also helped
write the k12 cs standards for south
carolina you're also one of the lead
writers for the k12 cs framework
so like thinking about those broad
things like the frameworks and the
standards
how those impact people what have you
learned from those experiences
i think the biggest things i learned
were in the development process
and the convening of people from all of
these different backgrounds so it wasn't
just for example faculty k-12 educators
there were people who were
non-profits or in the government sector
and then there were all of these other
people who may have been
just part of feedback or contributing in
other ways outside of writing
the biggest thing i learned is that not
everybody in cs education gets it
right everybody thinks they do but they
don't and that was very telling because
some of the conversations you know
became some of those
good intentions that just are terrible
ideas
i think the other piece was recognizing
that there is such a difference in the
experience of a student
not just based on their identities but
based on where they are geographically
across the country
so you know i spent 10 years
in dc nine of those years at howard
and while dc is
a diverse city dc still has it still
runs the spectrum
in terms of class and income levels and
so
we actually for a full academic year
myself my department chair lee burge
and four students taught a full computer
science course at the
middle school that howard has on campus
the middle school of math and science
and because it was a charter school they
came from all across
dc but they were all black
and latinx students the entire 300
student population but you got to see
all of these students from different
backgrounds
and all the students had access to
technology and they had access
through the school itself as part of
being at that school you had access to
technology at the school but then you
also got a laptop at home
when i relocate and now i'm working on
the k12 standards in south carolina
there were a lot of conversations from
k-12
educators and district leaders that were
saying
these standards we're developing are
great but we still struggle with
a lot of students with basic digital
literacy
and so in addition to creating the
standards
we also had to create a k-8 digital
literacy standards to ensure
that students had proper access and
understanding of just how to use
technology
before we can start to get into the
computer science aspects and then there
were the issues again of access because
depending on where you are
does your school district even have
enough computers to serve as a lab for a
classroom
in order to roll this out right there
was the goal of that these standards are
across the state and every school will
have to teach these courses
but how does that look in a school
that's severely underfunded right now
so i think that was the biggest
eye-opening experience
for me is that these standards
that are developed they're great but
there's still a lot of work to be done
just to be able to
even implement them properly and that's
still a lot of work
even now that you know covet exacerbated
that and brought it to light
but even still there are issues with
that you know there's students who have
to go to
a mcdonald's or somewhere a public
resource to sit in their car in order
that
to have school all day yeah and the
issues of like what kinds of devices do
teachers and students have access to
like what you can do with an ipad
is different from a chromebook which is
different from a laptop or a desktop
and then do you have access to it at
home cool if you have access to at home
do you actually have internet okay if
you have internet how many people are
using it at the same time so like larger
families
it's a lot harder for them to all be on
a zoom call at the same time
etc etc is such a huge problem and it's
something that has
certainly been exacerbated with kovid
you had mentioned that like
not everyone gets it one of the
questions that i like to think through
for myself is what do i not get right
now that i'm gonna look back
on like five years from now and go wow
i'm doing that completely differently
now and i'm glad i am and
one of the things i like to think about
is like in my teaching when i first
started teaching i used to think
x but now i think why and what has
changed
i'm curious do you have any examples of
like when i first started teaching i
used to think this but now i think
something completely different
so full disclaimer when i started
teaching i was 28
it was my very first time teaching ever
i didn't have any experience with office
hours anything i think my advisor asked
me
to proctor an exam one time and that was
it so
for me it was totally fish out of water
context luckily my dad was a k-12
educator turned administrator so he kind
of coached me through a lot of things
i think i entered the university
making sure i operated in a space of
what worked for me
in terms of how did i best
receive information and not only that i
think i operated also in a space of
making sure because i was so
young and i looked so much like the
students that i was
trying to make sure there was a line of
delineation where
i'm not a peer i'm a professor and i
think i needed that
but i think i also started to realize
that
how i didn't need certain things in
learning
not only because of my exposure
to the concepts at the time but i think
also because
i'd had so much opportunity
over my younger years to participate in
things that were focused around critical
thinking and logic so
a lot of things i just took for granted
and the more that i progressed
i realized that i need to make this make
sense
as much as possible to any student who's
coming in with
zero knowledge and let me make the
assumption that a student's coming in
because of course in those intro courses
for computing majors we're all told
you should if you don't have any
experience in programming then you
should at least have already taken
calculus or be taking calculus well
there's going to be a lot of students
that i learned
especially in my first early years that
have not taken calculus they may show up
and they may be
taking precal at the university so
calculus is going to be maybe the next
semester or the next year down the road
but that doesn't mean that again they're
operating in a deficit
it just means that whatever their
trajectory was it didn't get them the
calculus before they graduated
so you don't need calculus to be a
critical thinker
or to have computational thinking so for
me it was always about
how do i make this make sense in a way
that any student
could grasp this without feeling like
i'm slowing the class down for those who
may be a little bit more ahead
but also that i'm not moving too fast
for those who may not be following this
as easy and i also started to learn
ways to help other students who may be
struggling
navigate and figure out what they're
doing wrong so for me it was always well
you just gotta practice
i was an athlete and so for me it was
always if you practice you're training
your mind your mind's a muscle so
you know just keep doing it and that
would work for me a lot of times in grad
school i would just drill something in
my head and look at it until it just
clicked
and it made sense everyone doesn't
operate in that space and so
i had to learn how to
bring it home to students in ways that
were extremely visual especially in a
programming class and that's
hard to do when you're trying to teach
basic concepts
and you've never taught before but it
helped me learn how to
make things make sense without having to
be in front of a computer and not having
a compiler
and everything i took it and applied it
to all of my lessons where i tell
students
start with the picture if i give you a
problem draw it i don't want to see any
code just draw it out in a way that
makes it make sense and start
building it from there and i think that
that's helped a lot for me
i mean it's helped a lot for students
because then they stop
and they don't think about let me sit
down and start typing something
and one of the other things i would
start to do is i learned how to glean
certain pieces of information that were
actual
constructive criticism from course
evaluations
i tell a lot of people especially junior
faculty
don't take course of vows to heart
because
you know you've got the subset of
students who did well and they don't
care they're not going to submit an
evaluation because they're done
but there's also a subset who are mad at
you about something and they're going to
use that to
lash out so you can't don't look at that
don't look at rate my professor
nothing every now and then there's
something that makes sense like oh i
wish you'd slowed down i just focused a
little bit in on this
and that was helpful so what i would
start to do even
now is check in with students and it was
really important over the last
several semesters and even with kobe
because it became a thing of
my dad would tell me this all the time
is that the students don't care what you
know till they know you care
right and so and i would just tell them
like look
when kobe hit in march i was already
struggling mentally i was just
over everything at everybody anyway but
when that hit
i just shut down and so i emailed my
students and i said look
we are going to figure out how to get
through this together i am overwhelmed
i'm sure you all
are so we're going to do what we need to
do to get through this
and the students i found were so
appreciative of that and i changed all
of the assignments to make sure that
it wasn't overburdening them it wasn't
monotonous it wasn't
something that was just you know
checking a box to make sure we
covered x y and z like and it gave me an
opportunity to learn about
them i learned that you know some of
these students were picking up jobs to
try to make sure they helped their
family for someone who lost income
or you know they're back home and
they're overwhelmed because they have
a younger sibling that they're now
trying to help get through the school
day because their parents are working
and they're trying to navigate their
learning plus their younger siblings so
just having that ability to extend the
humanity part of it and
again i think that that's not what we're
taught in computer science we're
taught you know nobody cares about your
feelings this is what it is we operate
in facts
but you have to move in this space of
feelings
and humanity because life happens
and if we don't again we continue to see
these same situations and these are
students who you could quickly lose
because they start to feel further
marginalized
yep right it's not like oh i'm falling
behind my professor knows this
and she's telling me look let's figure
out a schedule how can you get this in
how can we make this work
or you know she's making it so that it's
asynchronous so that i don't have to
worry about sitting in front of a
computer exactly the same time that my
sibling is
yeah i like that i like the idea of like
the multi-perspective
approach to teaching thinking of
different ways to teach things and then
to approach it from a point of
compassion
i'm curious how do you do that in
larger class sizes so like in the
elementary space my class sizes were up
to 35
kids which that's manageable but i saw a
few hundred
a week because i had several different
classes and whatnot so whether it's
that kind of a context or you're
teaching like a lecture with like 300
people
how do you include all these different
perspectives and like try and be
compassionate with students
so it's funny you ask that because that
was the question that was
asked during my interview at duke
and i was like yeah what's your biggest
class size and i said oh there's about
largest is about 400.
it's interesting because i think you
have to assemble a great team right
and i'm going to say it in two spaces
the first is where you have the ability
to assemble a team of other people who
can assist
right so tas teaching assistants
any other graders whatever it is
understanding that that team is
operating from that same mindset like we
all understand that
this can be a lot for us so we need to
remember it's a lot for the students we
need to move accordingly
we need to make sure that we are
attentive
to any flags or things that may be
concerning about a certain set of
students or one or two students
but if you're in a space where you don't
have the resources of a ta
or any assistance i found that the
ability to
just collect the information a lot of
times is helpful
even if it's a simple google form or a
qualtrics form and it just asks an
open-ended question how are you doing
you know just
somebody asking how you're doing and
then students can submit
and then you can review it and start to
itemize like who needs more attention
right now who's going through something
right now that i need to pay attention
to or flag
you know for me it became overwhelming
even when my classes were about 30 or 40
because i may have been teaching
you know like you said over the course
of like 150 students across four classes
and it's just me and so the easiest way
for me a lot of times was just to
create those forms and let students dump
and it may be
you know every every so often like i
just throw it out there
every month or every couple of weeks
like what's going on
that's going to be critical especially
as we move
forward post 2020 because
we have to rethink how we do
everything and how we engage with
students
i think that we have to rethink
not just how we engage with them but how
we teach them and how we engage with
them should
influence and impact how we teach them
it's easy when you're in front of a
classroom
and you're on a board and you're writing
something and you turn around okay
any questions any comments any concerns
you know you'll get one or two
and then boom you're back to what you're
doing but now in the age of zoom
it doesn't work the same and there's so
many other things that are going on
in a student's mind and even in their
background right you know we still have
arguments about why people are forcing
students to turn on
their videos no matter what the course
size
is i think you just have to take the
time to be intentional and there are
ways to do that
that can make it as least stressful as
possible and strenuous as possible for
you
which is why i say a lot of times that's
where the beauty of technology comes
into place because you can automate that
send it out
but then you can filter that information
pretty quickly
and start to review that and look at how
can i reach those students who need me
the most
but then still also let every other
student know hey i see you
yeah and speaking of like the making it
as least stressful for you i'm curious
because education and like being
professor like there's a high burnout
rate like there's
the job never ends there's always
something else to learn or to do and
i'm wondering how do you personally
nurture your mind body spirit
good question i have actually thought
about this this summer
i think this was the first summer that i
had zero time to decompress so i never
in 15 years of teaching
ever done summer school or anything so
my summer was always my time to kind of
just
do whatever for three months and then
everything with covet packing moving
transitioning to
a new job and creating a new course and
so
i am kind of five minutes
and maybe one more class lecture away
from a full
meltdown but i say for me
exercise so i walk unfortunately i can't
run anymore due to knee injuries but
i try to walk not as much as i should so
i have to get back on a routine but
that's always very helpful for me
music is a huge source of
zen for me i love music and honestly
tv i'm a huge tv junkie so tv shows and
music
and podcasts are kind of getting me
through all of this
especially tv and music more so than
anything
so anyone who sees me on twitter i'm
always tweeting about whatever i'm
watching whatever i'm listening to that
gives me
life right now you know i have to
definitely appreciate things like the
versus series that started over covid
because it gives me a chance to just
remember when and be nostalgic about
music that i enjoy
tv shows like right now i'm watching
lovecraft country and i'm so
caught up in that and then even you know
before watchmen or i watch a lot of old
shows too so i'm either alternating
between
martin king of queens and golden girls
and then during the day i wake up and
it's living single
girlfriends and in the heat of the night
i'm all over the place
and i tell people i'm high key using
twitter kind of as my own therapy
right now so you know i may be talking
about something real serious
at one o'clock but by nine o'clock i'm
talking about something on tv
or something that's popping up and it's
hard because i
feel like i'm an extroverted introvert
so i like to be by myself but at the
same time i like to do it on my
terms so for me being an only child you
know i could be very comfortable being
home so the first couple of months
or first couple of weeks in march oh it
was great i guess just another weekend
for me
but then by april 1st it was okay you
know i've had enough of this
i need to see people and engage and you
know here it is we're
what it's september and we're still not
outside yet so i've had to really find
ways to step away from technology and
just
veg out and for me that's just been
exercise music tv because there's really
not much else you can do yet or we
should be doing
there's a lot that some people are doing
but yeah i'm home
are you listening to music or you're
also creating the music i
well no i'm not creating music i'm just
a karaoke performer i'm not an
actual singer yeah i'd say
listening to music that's it and then
shower singing
yeah my wife and i are both
percussionists and there's something
about just like
hitting a drum that's also very relaxing
it's therapeutic to just like
go put on some music i have this like
funk playlist that i listen to
and i'll just go on drums and just like
jam out and i just like come away from
that just feeling so
relaxed and whatnot it's just i don't
know it's nice so if you have the
opportunity i recommend
making the music as well but listening
to it's also wonderful
i don't think my mom would appreciate a
drum set right now until i got my own
place but yeah
yes good point my parents speaking from
like a point of privilege
one of the privileges that i have had is
my parents put up with the fact that i'd
make music for several hours a day
every day of the week and the fact that
like it was percussion
so i'd be banging a drum in my room or
playing a marimba
and several hours a day the fact that
they didn't kick me out of the house for
that
oh my gosh yeah i can imagine i used to
play piano when i was younger i stopped
after about three years
but my parents it would be the same
thing i just kind of be banging away
and sometimes i do miss it because it
was good therapy you know like you said
just to sit there and be able to just
tap something or do something i'm
curious what do you wish there was more
research on
that could inform like your practices or
inform the field as a whole
i don't even know if this is feasible
but i think that
more research around something related
to faculty
specifically faculty beliefs
faculty engagement and certain activity
i think
something outside of just the
quantitative how many students
who identify as x have you mentored
but actually getting to the root of some
things around
why are you in academia why are you in
computing
in academia what has shaped your
experiences
and your beliefs to date and that's
something that i don't think a lot of
faculty would necessarily be honest
about
unless it was highly anonymous but i
think that it would start
to give better clarity and context to
some of the issues that we see in higher
education
being able to ask those questions that
are not directly related to things
around
race or sexuality or religious
affiliation but things that if they're
asked the right way you could glean that
information and extract it in a way that
you could now start to see the why
and start to better understand how to
engage those specific faculty right
i want to believe and i'm a cautious
optimistic
i want to believe that most faculty want
every student to succeed in their class
i don't believe that that's the case
though
and i think that if we could start to
get to the why that is then we could
start to fix a lot of the issues
that are happening for our students yeah
i know
of some instances especially in some of
the quote harder sciences
there are a lot of professors who are
there for the research and they
begrudgingly
are teaching classes to undergrads or
graduate students
and so they put very little effort into
that and i'm grateful when universities
have like professors of practice who
focus specifically on
teaching and teaching very well and not
just doing the research and teaching on
the side kind of a thing
but it's tricky because like you have
these universities where you're paying a
lot of money to learn from somebody
who's really good at what they do
but they don't necessarily want to teach
those courses at all
and don't necessarily want to t every
kind of student
like i said before you have to come in
exactly how
they were as a college student and
that's all they see
and they don't know how to separate
their experience at whatever age they
are now
because a lot of them are over the age
of 50
to gen z's and millennials who
are growing up in a world where they
never didn't know
a google but they never didn't have a
smartphone
there's all of these dynamics that are
at play
that have nothing to do with race or
gender but it's
age even and just desire
i don't know if that's a problem that
can ever be solved you know i wish it
was there's a lot of research i see that
talks to students and you know looks to
interview students in stem
around these things but i just don't
know how many faculty would be willing
to participate in something like that
i agree with you i think it would need
to be heavily anonymized in order to
actually get
at the root of the thoughts behind that
what about like flipping the question
onto your own research what do you wish
people understood about your own
research your writing the biggest thing
is that it holds
just as much value as anything someone
would consider
theoretical research it's really
frustrating
in this field and it's not just over
this last year
but i'd say leading up to probably
george floyd's murder that there was an
inability for the greater computing
community
to recognize and truly appreciate
education-based research or research
that is not
quantitative and i'd say even in the cs
education space that was the case
because when i submitted
that 60 paper it was a position paper
and i remember when i got the reviews
there
were actually one reviewer who was very
much like
you know i don't see why this is even
here there's no
data that's been collected you need to
collect this data get feedback and then
submit it and
this may be more viable and i said and
you're the exact reason why i wrote this
paper
you know it's a position paper like
otherwise it would have been a research
it's just
but that again speaks to how problematic
that not even just the greater computing
community is but just cs education
there's this issue of if you're doing
this kind of work then it's less than or
it's not as rigorous and it's
not as valuable and then i tell people
well it's really interesting because
after george floyd's death and the black
lives matter protests
sparked up all of a sudden all of these
things that
i've been talking about that my
colleagues who look like me
or who are from other systemically
marginalized groups have been talking
about
all of a sudden all the work we're doing
is the bee's knees
so why did it take all of this
for you to see value in what we're doing
why did it have to be such an explosive
event and such a tragic event for you to
find value
in this and then my biggest issue is
what happens january 1
like all right we made it through 2020
and then yep wiping my hands we're good
we addressed racism again we're back to
business as usual well we've seen this
before right
this isn't new like we didn't live
through the civil rights movement but
my parents did you know my grandparents
did it and so on and so
the same thing happened there where
people felt like okay well
the civil rights act was passed the
voting rights act passed okay we're good
racism is over we
elected obama here we are yeah it'll be
interesting especially
what happens in early november it
frustrates me because i felt like
it shouldn't have taken all of this to
value
the work that we do and it's sad it's
not even sad it's pathetic because i
feel like it just speaks to the
amount of lip service in so many ways
you know
and you see people who are in computing
who are doing this work and this is what
they solely focus on then it becomes
like oh great here's somebody coming to
talk to us about diversity again like
oh like this is really the problem right
and it's annoying to me
because you know i have to tell people
well don't get it twisted
i have three degrees in computer science
i am very skilled at what i do
my thesis was built around optical
network survivability
so i can do queueing theory programming
whatever you want to talk about
but i choose not to because it doesn't
make a hill of beans to me that research
doesn't matter to me
and honestly it never did if i'm being
i've shared that before with others like
i did the research
that my advisor was doing because i
wanted to work with my advisor and i
really value the fact that he valued me
i could care less about that but what i
care about are the things that i'm
working on and i should not
be forced to pivot what i'm doing
to be accepted by the greater computing
community
yeah i like that there was a quote a
professor that i know who was at a
qualitative research conference and was
given the opening keynote and i was like
thank you so much for having me
i hope this is the last qualitative
resource conference we ever have and the
reason why is because i think we should
be asking questions
and finding a method that answers those
questions we should not be focusing on
the design
itself that's being used and kind of
like siloing those things out and so
the fact that quantitative is seen as
like this end-all be-all it's like well
no it you can only answer certain types
of questions with quantitative
and you need other methods to answer
different questions so we need to be
looking at this again from a
multi-perspectival approach
and asking many different types of
questions but the fact that we aren't
doing that it's problematic
absolutely absolutely and it continues
to drive the issues that we see because
everyone focuses on the numbers
that's it nothing else makes sense and
if we can check the box and say well
we've got
x percentage then problem solved i'm
curious if
your answer will kind of build off of
that but do you have any questions
for myself or to the field i think the
biggest question i'd ask
is for anyone what are you gonna do now
that you know
right now that you know because there's
a lot of people who before
said oh i didn't know i didn't realize
it was this bad
be it society or be it in computer i
don't understand how anyone could not
know in computing but
even in society you know now that you've
seen the black and the ivory hashtag so
you know it just wasn't that one black
student or faculty member or postdoc
that was there
now that you all participated in
shutdown stem what are you going to do
with that
how are you going to translate that into
a lifetime
career commitment to creating
a better space and a better environment
for
everyone i don't think that's something
that i would expect anyone to answer
quickly
but i would expect people to be able to
marinate on that and
think right it's gotta go past book
clubs because everybody's reading right
now
right but then you gotta do something
with that so what are you willing to do
and and more so i'd ask how much skin
are you willing to put in the game what
are you willing to sacrifice
in order to make sure that it's met and
the goal is reached that really
resonates with me and kind of
i think it's a great answer even to the
the next question i have which is like
what could i
do to better serve the cs education
community through this podcast
keep asking the hard questions bringing
on the people who are going to make
listeners uncomfortable and it doesn't
have to be someone who's
always you know in the space that i'm
working in
but there are other people who are doing
work that infuses this
right you had shuchi on earlier she does
a lot of that
kristen's doing it you know just making
sure
that there's a good representation of
men women and non-binary people who are
in this space who are willing
to get on the mic and say this is who i
am and this is what i'm doing and this
is why it matters
and i would especially say
get people who are willing to come on
and say i don't fit the traditional
narrative
yeah i like that right because again
we operate in a black white
male female anything else rich poor
that's it
right everything in our world is binary
but
having people who get on the mic and
talk about the fact
that i do not operate or identify
as a cisgender heterosexual
white man right i'm transgender i'm
non-binary
i may have a religious identity that
other people don't necessarily
understand but i want to talk about that
as well
and showing the human part of the
computer scientists and the educators
and letting people see that there are
all of these different identities
working in this space and we have to be
able to bring
our fullest cells every single day i
should not
have to code switch i should not have to
try to assimilate
i should not have to try to pass
as something and someone i am not in
order to be accepted and in order for my
work to be
valued yeah i love that you know i think
about it and i say how many transgender
computer scientists do we learn about
every day or hear about
you know how many people are willing to
to speak to these things because if i
got up here and i never
talked about my sexuality or my identity
as a cisgender heterosexual
black woman and all you would know is i
was a black woman right but i think it's
important that
everyone should be able to hear
different perspectives
everyone should hear about other
individuals who share different
identities
and the amazing work they're doing and
what you can glean
and learn from them and their
experiences and not just their work but
their experience
yeah and one of the things that i've
kind of noticed in different
marginalized groups is
allies who are helping don't
take control of that narrative so like
i'm writing a paper
on transness for music educators to
consider with their students
so i'm an author there's another author
who's a trans
woman a trans man and a
non-conforming person who's also on it
so like we're all
coming at this from different
perspectives within like the trans
community and talking about it
and one of the things that we're
bringing up is there are not enough
people who identify within community who
are actually
speaking about this and that needs to
happen so the narrative has largely been
controlled
by cis individuals which is great to
have the allies but they shouldn't be in
control of the narrative and some of
that is coming into like the black lives
matter
protest where it's like i support black
lives matter but i am not going out
there and
trying to change the narrative and
trying to make it about me as a white
individual
and some of that is happening in some of
the protests which is then
taking away the power from black
individuals and creating a problem
absolutely and i'd say even you know
these are things that
people again have to become
comfortable having those uncomfortable
conversations
and you have to be okay getting it wrong
and apologizing for it learning from it
and moving forward i think there's
always this fear
of being wrong or offending
instead of recognizing that it's okay to
make a mistake but it's not okay to not
learn from it and grow from it which is
why i talk all the time about
you know that assessment and my gender
labeling it was terrible to think about
how someone who identified as
non-conforming
may see that and realize she's othering
me and how could she do that as a black
woman
but it was an honest mistake it was
something that i had to learn from and
accept
and realize that i don't need to change
what's out there because i need people
to see
the change in the work that i do and how
i've progressed
and become better because of it and
that's the only way that
everyone in this community will start to
improve and then like i said everyone
else will feel like
they matter and i can't resonate enough
why it matters to be seen like you said
for people to get out of the way
right if that's not your voice and i
can't speak to this
identity then it's not my responsibility
to i remember there was a question at a
talk i recently gave and someone asked
me about
well how do i navigate spaces as a
biracial person and i said well i can't
tell you that because i'm not biracial
but i can point you to some resources
and
experts who are who are doing this work
but it's not for me to say that right
it's for me as an advocate an ally
whatever that is or activist to be able
to say
i can help bring you to the things that
you need
even if i can't give it to you or do it
for you myself but i'm not gonna
go out here and try to start speaking
for you because i can't
yeah i like that yeah finding ways to
support without taking control of that
and whatnot and not answering for other
people
it's definitely important so the last
question is where my people go to
connect with you and the organizations
that you work with
so there are a few ways my personal
website is just my name nikki
washington.com and i
cki the work that i'm working on right
now
around identity and computing our
website
is identity at cs.duke.edu
that has information on the other
members of the research team
some of the work we're doing right now
the 3c assessment
that i'm working on that i noted in the
paper
when twice as good isn't enough and then
it's also
a place for the 3c fellows program so
we're currently soliciting for that
we'll start
february through june and that will be
for
any educators graduate students or
industry professionals who are
interested
in learning more about identity
in computing how to create courses
around it course modules and other
activities
that can impact their departments and
universities and students
in ways that are more meaningful and
engaging and sustaining
so i would say those are the main two if
anyone's interested in just following
the crazy that is my mind across the day
i'm always on twitter so i'm at dr
underscore nikki ww on twitter
those are pretty much the three easiest
ways to reach me between
any one of those sites i'm always around
and with that that concludes this week's
episode of the csk8 podcast
friendly reminder to visit the show
notes to check out many of the
resources that were discussed in this
particular episode and if you haven't
done so please consider sharing this
episode or your favorite episode
with another colleague in cs education
thank you for taking the time to listen
to this episode stay tuned next week for
another unpacking scholarship episode
and two weeks from now for another
interview i hope you're all having a
wonderful week and staying safe
Guest Bio
Dr. Nicki Washington is a professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University and the author of Unapologetically Dope: Lessons for Black Women and Girls on Surviving and Thriving in the Tech Field. Her career in higher education began at Howard University as the first Black female faculty member in the Department of Computer Science. Her professional experience also includes Winthrop University, The Aerospace Corporation, and IBM.
Recognized as one of Essence Magazine’s “Essence Tech Stars: 15 Black Women Disrupting the Tech Industry,” Dr. Washington has led partnerships with the Howard University Middle School of Math and Science, Google, Exploring Computer Science, and Washington, DC Public Schools to introduce computer science courses and teacher professional development across Washington, DC high schools. She was a lead writer for the K-12 CS Framework (led by Code.org) and South Carolina K-12 Computer Science and Digital Literacy Standards. Her efforts in K-12 CS education have directly impacted approximately 10 million K-12 students and thousands of educators in over 20 states and Washington, DC, and they will continue to impact more nationwide as additional states develop K-12 CS standards.
At the undergraduate and industry levels, Dr. Washington’s efforts to recruit and retain students/graduates of color in computing include creating and implementing the first Googler-in-Residence program at Howard University in 2013. This project led to implementations of Googlers-in-Residence at other HBCUs (including Morehouse, Spelman, NC A&T, Fisk, and Hampton). Her current work focuses on addressing the diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in the tech industry by measuring and improving the cultural competence of students in undergraduate computing departments nationwide, including the development of assessments and courses dedicated to this work.
Dr. Washington has been a guest writer for CSforALL, USA Today College, The Root/VerySmartBrothas, Code.org, and Mama Knows It All, and her interviews have included Essence Magazine, The Atlantic, WHUR’s The Daily Drum, Association of Computing Machinery’s “People of ACM,” and Modern Figures Podcast.
She also provides numerous keynotes, panel discussions, and workshops on diversity, equity, and inclusion in computing+tech for various organizations, including the University of Virginia, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, UC-Irvine, North Carolina A&T, Marist College, American University, Bennett College for Women, Johnson C. Smith University, SXSW EDU, Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., National Coalition for Women in Technology, blackComputeHER, Grace Hopper Celebration, Innovate Your Cool, National Society of Black Engineers, Google, Red Ventures, Wallbreakers, NASA, Advancing the Careers of Technical Women (ACT-W), The DC STEM Summit, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Washington is also an experienced technical writer/editor, with over 15 years of consulting experience ranging from small to large enterprises. She is a graduate of Johnson C. Smith University (B.S., ‘00) and North Carolina State University (M.S., ’02; Ph.D., ’05), becoming the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. at the university and 2019 Computer Science Hall of Fame Inductee. She is a native of Durham, NC.
Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode
Other podcasts that were mentioned or are relevant to this episode
Culturally Responsive-sustaining Computer Science Education: A Framework
In this episode I unpack the Kapor Center’s (2021) publication titled “Culturally responsive-sustaining computer science education: A framework,” which describes multiple courses of action for six core components of culturally responsive-sustaining CS education.
Decolonizing Education through SEL and PBL with Matinga Ragatz
In this interview with Matinga Ragatz, we discuss Matinga’s journey into education, creating environments where kids can learn through struggle, the importance of social and emotional learning (SEL), how schools promote individualism and exceptionalism, the intersections of project-based learning and SEL, decolonizing education, the importance of shared values in education, and so much more.
Discussing Computer Science in K-12 with Shuchi Grover
In this interview with Shuchi Grover, we discuss the importance of having a variety of assessments in a CS class, why we need more research on computational thinking, why educators and scholars should read literature outside of the field, Shuchi’s new book titled “Computer Science in K-12: An A-To-Z Handbook on Teaching Programming,” and much more.
Healthy Boundaries with Siobahn Grady
In this interview with Siobahn Grady, we discuss the importance of self care and healthy boundaries, the impact of education, misconceptions and problematic assumptions people make with HBCUs, misconceptions and misunderstandings of being a professor in CS, lessons learned using machine learning to identify authorship of tweets, exploring the implications of social media and technology with students, the intersections of arts and CS, improving equity and inclusion in computing through action, and much more.
Intersections of Cultural Capital with Kimberly Scott
In this interview with Kimberly Scott, we discuss some of the problems with discourse around grit, students as techno-social change agents, teaching with culturally responsive approaches in communities that are hostile toward culturally responsive pedagogies, unpacking discourse and Discourse, considering both present and future identities when teaching, potential disconnects between theory and practice with intersectional work, comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comforted, and so much more.
Liberatory Computing Education for African American Students
In this episode I unpack Walker, Sherif, and Breazeal’s (2022) publication titled “Liberatory computing education for African American students,” which unpacks and situates the five pillars of the liberation framework proposed by El-Amin within data activism modules.
Racial Justice Amidst the Dangers of Computing Creep: A Dialogue
In this episode I unpack Shah and Yadav’s (2023) publication titled “Racial justice amidst the dangers of computer creep: A dialogue,” which presents a dialogue that problematizes issues around racial justice in computing education.
In this episode I unpack Kallia and Cutts’ (2021) publication titled “Re-examining inequalities in computer science participation from a Bourdieusian sociological perspective,” which uses Bourdieu’s discussions of capital, habitus, and field to analyze 147 publications on CS interventions.
The Shire as Metaphor for Systemic Racism with Joyce McCall
In this interview with Joyce McCall, we unpack and problematize some of the issues around race and racism in relation to education. In particular, we discuss the importance of allies not only showing up to support marginalized or oppressed groups, but staying when conversations get uncomfortable; the Shire from the Lord of the Rings as a metaphor for hegemony and systemic racism; as well as a variety of theories such as critical race theory, double consciousness, cultural capital; and much more.
Trans Voices Speak: Suggestions from Trans Educators about Working with Trans Students
In this episode I unpack Cayari et al.’s (2021) publication titled “Trans voices speak: Suggestions from trans educators about working with trans students,” which provides five suggestions from Trans educations on working with Trans students.
When Twice as Good Isn't Enough: The Case for Cultural Competence in Computing
In this episode I unpack Washington's (2020) paper titled "When twice as good isn't enough: The case for cultural competence in computing," which explores the five elements and six stages of cultural competence in relation to undergraduate computing programs.
Publications mentioned in this episode
Nicki’s book - Unapologetically Dope: Lessons for Black Women and Girls on Surviving and Thriving in the Tech Field
Nicki’s paper - When Twice as Good Isn't Enough: The Case for Cultural Competence in Computing
The SIGCHI’s best paper that Nicki mentioned - Critical Race Theory for HCI
Audre Lorde’s book Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
See the resources for the presentation I did on engineered inequalities
Listen to the interview with Shuchi Grover that Nicki mentioned
Connect with Nicki
Identity in Computing Group, which has more information on the 3C Assessment and the 3C Fellows
Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter