About this Event
Colleagues in Computing Science education across the HE sector in Scotland, and teachers responsible for CS education in schools, are invited to take part in an online workshop, intended to address the problem of significant and sustained gender imbalance across our discipline. Colleagues in government and the charity sector will also be invited.
Overview
We are not going to solve this issue in a single workshop, nor any time soon. However, the outcomes of the workshop are expected to include a shared understanding of the problem, a set of initiatives that institutions might use to improve gender balance in the medium term, and an initial plan for addressing gender imbalance in university-level CS education across Scotland in the longer term.
By exploring initiatives that have worked in other contexts, delegates will come away with ideas that they can put into action at their own institutions. There is also significant value in getting representatives from stakeholders across Scotland to look at this issue together: this is a problem that cannot be addressed by individual institutions in a piecemeal fashion.
Workshop Outline
Three phases of activity are proposed for the workshop, each conducted in groups that mix colleagues from different institutions:
1. An opening discussion of the current gender balance at each institution, and any initiatives that have been undertaken to address it. Groups will then share summaries of their discussion, with a focus on the initiatives discussed.
2. A small number of case studies of successful initiatives to address gender imbalance in CS programmes will be shared in advance. Each group will discuss one of these and then feedback on what, if anything, they could adopt from the case study.
3. The final phase will see a plenary discussion of what we can do in the longer term, perhaps at policy level: what, based on what we’ve heard about here, could we be doing that we’re not doing? What actions can we undertake as a community of CS educators, at national or regional level? What would we need from government, for example?
Contact
Queries may be directed to Dr Matthew Barr (Matthew.Barr@glasgow.ac.uk), Centre for Computing Science Education, University of Glasgow.
Registration
You can register to attend the event here
