CMU-developing-community-led-equity-focused-public

Our team created curricular materials for PIT-related courses alongside communities that are systematically left out of conversations about technologies impacting them. In doing so, we built shared resources and extended the repertoire of PIT approaches taken up within our own educational institution as well as others. Our approach centered on partnering with community organizations and actively listening to community members. The work began with a series of 1:1 conversations with local community leaders and a roundtable discussion with program staff at several local non-profits on the best approaches for soliciting ideas from the community in an authentic way. These discussions centered on empowering the community to educate academics on the topics that were most critical for students to understand before going into the community or engaging in PIT-related careers. The approach we came to collectively involved working closely with our community partners to conduct a set of interviews with community members, focused on issues they felt were necessary for future technologists to grapple with and engage. These interviews were recorded to form a “bank of voices,” which were both analyzed by our research team and made available to a wide swath of faculty interested in incorporating PIT topics into their curriculum. Together with partners, we developed a set of shared commitments and best practices for those seeking to develop community-led initiatives at other institutions. We made our materials available to others in the PIT-UN such that they could scale our content and customize the curriculum for their own needs. In addition to our curricular materials, we also documented and shared our community engagement strategy such that other universities can learn from and build on our efforts. Specifically, we have had direct engagement around this work with colleagues at Northwestern University, the University of Texas at Austin, Georgia Tech, and the University of Washington. Finally, we are in the process of developing a web platform that features our materials, designed to make them available more broadly so they may benefit those outside of the PIT-UN and our own networks. Across our PITUN project, we succeeded in establishing strong community relationships, integrating community members into the feedback process of student projects, and developing an innovative approach to curriculum development for PIT-related training. Toward sharing the insights of this work with the academic community, we are currently drafting an article for a computing research venue, which will be submitted in mid-July.