The Need for More Justice-Oriented Courses in Undergraduate Computer Science Curricula
Sukanya Kannan Moudgalya, Amanda Zeller · 2024
There is a pressing need for practices that work toward broadening Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) participation in computing, harness computing for BIPOC community goals, youth civic participation, activism, wealth generation, self-advocacy, and disruption of harmful biases and racist ideologies in computing. Thus, we first justify the need for justice-oriented courses in undergraduate Computer Science (CS) curricula. We then explore the current status of such courses in undergraduate CS. We do this by conducting a document analysis of the learning objectives, stan- dards, and CS course descriptions of the top 20 ranked universities in the U.S. We found that most courses that speak to the human and societal impacts of computing fell into the category of "Human- Computer Interaction". CS courses that explicitly focused on ethical issues, gender, racial, accessibility, and environmental justice were present at much lower numbers. Less than 50% of the top-ranked universities had such courses. If present, the proportion of such courses within a university's curricula was less than 5%. Most of the top-ranked universities subscribed to ABET's standards, which have a curricular requirement of understanding the local and global impacts of computing. Given our pressing needs, there is a need for more justice-oriented courses in undergraduate CS curricula. We describe possible ways to achieve this goal, such as hiring interdisciplinary CS faculty with African-American, Chican@, Indigenous, or gender studies, instructor professional development programs like AiiCE, and considering deep social impact standards, and better alignment with such standards