2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Following the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, numerous organizations and people across the U.S. made commitments to racial justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion. This was also true for academia, where the #BlackInTheIvory Twitter hashtag exposed the anti-Black racism faculty, staff, and students experience while navigating historically white colleges and universities.

On June 10, 2020, STEM faculty across the U.S. participated in #ShutDownSTEM, a one-day academic strike dedicated to learning about, understanding, and reflecting on anti-Black racism in higher education and STEM, as well as committing to actionable steps to eradicate it. However, this one day was insufficient in preparing faculty, staff, and graduate students for the important long-term work required to shift this paradigm.

In computing, there were several motivating factors to consider. First, faculty are overwhelmingly white and Asian, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-to-upper-class men. Second, faculty are often not formally trained on identity-related topics (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, class, and their intersections). Next, faculty must better understand these topics to incorporate them into not only their courses, but also their academic environments. Finally, faculty could potentially do more harm than good when attempting to do this work with an inadequate understanding of how people (e.g., faculty, staff, and students), policies, and practices impact students (and colleagues) from minoritized identities.

To address this critical gap in postsecondary computing, the Cultural Competence in Computing (3C) Fellows program was developed to help computing faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and professionals: 1) learn more about identity, intersectionality, oppression, and how these topics impact computing environments; and 2) develop computing courses, modules, and other activities at their home institutions that leverage these topics to not only foster more inclusive and equitable cultures, but also better prepare graduates to develop more equitable and inclusive technologies and cultures.

This two-year, virtual, professional development (PD) program includes an introductory process that provides all participants a baseline understanding of identity-related topics and 10 two-hour sessions in the first year. In the second year, participants must design/implement an identity-inclusive course, module, or other activity and complete two one-hour PD sessions.

The goal of the program was to improve the experiences (and ultimately, retention) of computing students (and faculty) from minoritized groups in computing by: 1) decentering students from non-dominant identities [and instead center the people, policies, and practices impacting them]; 2) providing a closed space for (un)learning; 3) building a community of practice; and 4) ensuring a demonstrable result of program participation at home institutions.

The 3C Fellows began it’s first cohort in the 2020-21 academic year. To date, a total of 117 faculty, 23 graduate students, and 44 staff from 70 institutions/organizations across 3 countries have fully completed the first two cohorts. An additional 78 participants (Cohort 3) are currently completing Y1 activities and 47 participants (Cohort 4) are beginning Y1 activities. Each subsequent cohort was refined based on lessons learned from the prior. We are also exploring extensions beyond computing to greater STEM disciplines and industry.