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Research School Irregular
Published: Thursday, 11 November 2021A newsletter for PGR
Research School Irregular - Contents
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Department festive party on Friday 10th Dec - Registration required by 20th November
We’re delighted to invite you to our Department festive party planned on Friday 10th December (3-7pm). We hope you can all take some time to come and celebrate with us at the party. Please note the registration closes by 5pm on 20th Nov.
Register to attend CS Festival Party
On behalf of
Robert Stevens (Head of Department)
Michelle Fox (Deputy School Operations Manager)
Simon Harper
Join us to discuss sense of belonging in Computer Science on Mon 6th Dec at 2pm GMT
Students sense of belonging has been shown to be associated with many attributes such as motivation and persistence. But what makes people feel like they belong in Computer Science? Join us on Monday 6th December at 2pm GMT to discuss belonging via a paper by Catherine Mooney and Brett Becker. [1] This won a best paper award at SIGCSE 2021.
[Please note: Unfortunately there will be no SIGCSE monthly journal club in November, however, we’ll be back in December as usual.]
From the abstract:
Sense of belonging, or belongingness, describes how accepted one feels in their academic community and is an important factor in creating inclusive learning environments. Belongingness is influenced by many factors including: students’ backgrounds and experiences; other people; environments (physical and virtual); academic discipline; external factors such as local, regional, and global issues; and time. 2020 has been dominated by several major events including the COVID-19 pandemic which dramatically impacted education. The Black Lives Matter movement has further raised global awareness of equality, diversity and inclusion not just in society, but in educational contexts. Climate change concerns, and politically charged news are also increasingly affecting our students. We have been monitoring our undergraduate computing students’ sense of belonging for over three years, providing us with a unique opportunity to gauge recent changes during the pandemic. Our results surprised us. We found statistically significant reductions in the belongingness of students identifying as men as well as those not identifying as being part of a minority. However, investigating intersectionality of self-identified gender and minority status revealed more complicated and nuanced trends, illustrating important shifts in the belongingness of our students that we are only beginning to understand.
All welcome. As usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us
References
- Catherine Mooney and Brett Becker (2021) Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Computing Students’ Sense of Belonging. SIGCSE ’21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, March 2021 Pages 612–618 DOI:10.1145/3408877.3432407
Duncan Hull
