Quick Post - What Would It Look Like to Love Our Students Into Computing?

Reflections on the SIGCSE TS 2026 Keynote: Love, Learning, and Computing Education

The Pipeline Isn't Neutral

Traditional computing education often uses a "pipeline" metaphor, focusing on attracting and retaining students for technical careers. However, this approach overlooks crucial aspects like meaningful journeys, student belonging, and inclusivity. The keynote advocates for identity-affirming care in computing education. When students can fully engage, they contribute in ways that narrow, identity-stripping classrooms cannot foster.

Identity Stripping Classrooms. When students must hide who they are, learning suffers, and talent is lost. Shows a person who's image looks to be breaking up in fragments

"Whatever Love" in Practice

The keynote highlights practical examples of this philosophy:

  • Kapor Center's Culturally Responsive-Sustaining CS Education Framework: This framework redefines equity-centered computing, viewing students' cultural backgrounds as assets rather than obstacles.

  • Ricarose Roque's work on family and community-centered computing: Projects like Family Creative Learning demonstrate that designing for connection and joy opens computing to a broader audience, leading to a different kind of rigor.

  • Kylie Peppler's scholarship on tools and materials: Peppler's research shows that educational materials are not neutral; they carry cultural histories and implicit messages about belonging. Arts-integrated toolkits can broaden participation and improve learning outcomes.

  • Jayne Everson's ICER 2025 paper, Dreaming of Difference: This paper emphasizes student voice, revealing that secondary students desire distributed accountability, autonomy, community, and collaboration. They seek a redefined rigor that acknowledges their whole selves.

  • Mara Kirdani-Ryan's dissertation on Identity Fragmentation: This work addresses the feeling students have of needing to suppress parts of their identity to fit into CS, identifying it as an environmental issue, not a student problem.

  • Adrienne Gifford's work on language, culture, and CS classroom practice: Gifford's projects, such as Wordplay, illustrate how valuing students' linguistic and cultural identities as intellectual resources can transform research and teaching.

Implications for Learning Design

For those in computing education, the keynote prompts a critical self-assessment: Do our choices in courses, assessments, language, and tools affirm student belonging? This has direct implications for:

  • Authentic assessment in the age of generative AI: Process-oriented evaluation, portfolio work, and student involvement in assessment design are acts of dignity, valuing how students think, not just what they produce.

  • Faculty development: Educators must understand that their choices are not neutral; they either affirm or diminish students.

  • AI in education: The tools we integrate are not neutral actors. "Whatever love" demands interrogating their underlying assumptions before introducing them to students.

A Different Kind of Rigor

The keynote doesn't ask us to lower our standards. It asks us to raise them — to hold ourselves to a higher standard of care, design, and accountability to the people we serve.

What would it mean to design a CS course as an act of love? Not love as sentimentality, but love as Roque and Peppler and Everson and Gifford are practicing it: grounded in evidence, committed to dignity, willing to be uncomfortable in service of something better.

I think that's the question worth sitting with.

Want to explore these ideas further? Watch the full SIGCSE TS 2026 keynote on YouTube, and dig into the scholars cited: the Kapor Center's CS Education Framework, Ricarose Roque's work, Kylie Peppler's research, and Jayne Everson's ICER 2025 paper.

How UDL Helps Us Create Classes Where Everyone Can Learn and Succeed

A few weeks ago we talked about UDL in the conversation around accessible syllabi. This post provides more back ground on what UDL or (Universal Design of Learning) is, and how it can be useful to you when you for the purposes of teaching and learning. The information I am providing was adapted from the work of Flower Darby, author of Small Teaching Online. and the UDL Higher Education Special Interest Group.

Within the higher education landscape, there are unique challenges. Some of these include: differing school models and missions, degrees of faculty’s focus on research (sometimes over instruction), the size of classes and campuses, the connections between faculty and students, the lack of  background in the area of teaching for many individual faculty, the relationship among faculty and other service providers (e.g., disability services), and the impact of legislative accessibility standards (different for different countries).

Although UDL first took hold in K12 education, the neuroscience and the principles that undergird this framework certainly apply to higher education as well, to address the wide variety of students that an institution may serve. When we think about the college context and about today’s students, we realize that other considerations come into play in addition to students’ needs and preferences relating to both learning and technology.

For example, today’s college students [at both the graduate and undergraduate level] are more likely than ever to be juggling at least one of the following challenges, and often more than one:

  • Working to pay for college

  • Raising a child on their own

  • Dealing with mental health challenges such as anxiety

  • Facing food or housing insecurity, if not both

  • Or a myriad of other issues.

Given this reality, it’s important that we build in support and options within the very design of the class. While students  at IU can request accommodations based on need, Newt Miller, Associate Dean at Ashford University has said, we can “accommodate off the bat,” (2020) so that students don’t need to request special treatment, deadline extensions, or opportunities to revise and resubmit, as examples.

General Resources:

This video provides more information about the importance of UDL in our college classes.

Additional Resources