RESPECT 2015 Preview: The Role of Privilege in CS Education

On Friday, August 14, the first RESPECT conference will be held in Charlotte, NC — the first international meeting of the IEEE Special Technical Community on Broadening Participation with technical co-sponsorship by the IEEE Computer Society (see conference website here). RESPECT stands for Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology.

We have two papers in RESPECT which I’ll summarize in a couple of blog posts. I’m less familiar with IEEE rules on paper referencing and publishing, so I’ll make a copy available as soon as I get the rules sorted out.

Miranda Parker has just finished her first year as a Human-Centered Computing PhD student at Georgia Tech, working with me. She’s done terrific work in her first year which I hope to be talking more about as she publishes. At RESPECT 2015, she’ll be presenting her first paper as a PhD student, “A critical research synthesis of privilege in computing education.”

Miranda defines privilege as:

Privilege is an unearned, unasked-for advantage gained because of the way society views an aspect of a student’s identity, such as race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and language.

Her short paper is a review of the literature on how we measure privilege, where its impact has been measured in other STEM fields, and where there are holes in the computing education literature. She’s using studies of privilege in other STEM fields to help define new research directions in computing education. It’s just the sort of contribution you’d want a first year PhD student to make. She’s surveying literature that we don’t reference much, and using that survey to identify new directions — for her, as well as the field.