The graduate school at OSU is considering adding a new learning outcome for all graduate students as a mechanism for reducing an observed rise in discrimination in our graduate program (based on surveys).  The desired learning outcome is based on the Difference, Power and Discrimination (DPD) program that has all our our undergraduates take a course that has a DPD designation.  The proposed graduate learning outcome (LO) is:

Recognize difference, power and discrimination within social systems and their influence on people of diverse backgrounds both inside and outside their discipline.

There are a dozen pilot programs across campus this year to experiment with methods of delivering a DPD curriculum to our graduate students.  I volunteered to pilot one in EECS and am doing so by way of a 1-credit (1 hr/wk) class devoted to this LO along with a “responsible conduct of research” LO (that is currently required by our graduate school).  I have around 40 students (~1/3 of our incoming MS, MEng, and PhD graduate students) and had my first class yesterday.  You can see the course webpage here (which is subject to change).

I was more nervous going into this class than most classes.  This is my first time teaching non-technical material and there are a lot of unknowns.  At what level should I try to engage the students?  Will our largely international group of students have a harder time with a discussion-based class?  Will the students want to engage in thinking about these questions?

To motivate the LO, I started with a short history of computer science with a few motivating questions.  I started with the black points (right) and talked a bit about the discrimination that Turing experienced due to his sexual orientation and asked: What advances would Turing have made if not for discrimination and his ultimate suicide?.  I pointed out that the history (in black) is stunted both by colonialism and patriarchy.  I added in the blue points, pointing out that computation devices existed before we had computers (abaci) and that positional number systems are requisite for computation.  We see that these contributions are non-Western and we can ask the question: What advances would Mayan mathematics have made had their civilization not been decimated by colonialism?.  Finally I added the red points acknowledging some contributions by women to computer science and asked: What research and development would we be pursuing if women were equally represented among computer scientists?

Thankfully, there were a few good questions after this introduction, which helped to make me less worried about teaching this class.  This intro was definitely CS biased; I hope to make it more inclusive to ECE for the future, since both CS and ECE students are in the class, but I will need some help with that.

I then did a ice-breaker of sorts (since these are incoming graduate students).  I asked the students to write down what they were afraid of as they start their new graduate program.  I collected the (anonymous) sheets of paper and shuffled them and handed them back out for each student to read one out aloud.  I was worried that folks would hesitate to be honest here, but very quickly, there were tears welling in my eyes as fears of being forgotten by their loved ones back home, loneliness, being able to express oneself in English, adjusting to US culture were voiced.  There was a lot of overlap between fears and I hope that hearing their peers’ fears will help the students feel less alone.

So that was week 0.  I hope to update as the quarter progresses and am happy for constructive feedback.  If you do so anonymously, please indicate if you are a student in the class or an outside observer.