Workshop engagement will be approximately 5 hours, split between asynchronous work, a full-group brainstorm session, and small group discussions. Some of these times may change once we know the participants and their time zones.
There are three main parts for the workshop.
- Initial Brainstorming - Discuss accessibility topics to include
- Main Session - Create accessibility education roadmap
- Breakouts - Small group discussions around courses and assignments
These sessions are discussed in more detail below.
Initial Brainstorming - 1 Hour - Async
Overview/timing
We will group participants into smaller teams trying to represent multiple perspectives in each group, based on their participation submission. Each group will have a designated brainstorming space on our collaboration platform (to be determined) with access to other group's spaces as well. We will grant access to the workshop materials and brainstorming platform at least 12 hours before the full-group session.
Before the full-group session, participants will be expected to spend at least one hour contributing, asynchronously, to their group's brainstorming space. They may add new ideas, resources, and/or leave comments on existing material.
Goal
This initial brainstorming will bring together ideas and questions from participants, grouped by topics of interest. The goal of participating in these pre-synchronous brainstorming activities is to begin networking and prime workshop participants for discussion for the full-group synchronous session (below).
Details
Participants will be able to view a participant slide deck with background information about each participant to become familiar with others in the workshop, including what classes others have taught, or what other experiences they bring. Then, before the full-group session, participants will begin adding ideas on learning objectives to the shared brainstorm spaced based on their own experience, external resources, and other participant's posted materials. Participants will be expected to spend at least one hour contributing to the shared space via adding ideas, commenting on others posts, or otherwise engaging with the material.
For this initial brainstorming, people will not be expected to be online at a particular time. However, to facilitate multiple avenues for discussion and engagement, we will have a discord channel in which people can coordinate with others who may be online at the same time to do preliminary brainstorming together. People can discuss across groups but will want to put contributions into their respective brainstorming spaces.
The workshop organizers will put initial brainstorming prompts and topics in each group's space. These prompts and topics will be gathered from prior work, and from different curriculum guides. People will be strongly encouraged to draw upon their own experiences and what they gathered from the workshop pre-work (i.e., looking over other participant's submissions and artifacts) to expand the initial brainstorming. For the brainstorming sections, we will do our best to have the different perspectives represented. This will help encourage discussions about what tier skills belong in with perspectives from educators, industry professionals, and accessibility advocates.
Brainstorm Consolidation - 2 hours - synch
Overview/Timing
Workshop participants will come together for one 2-hour synchronous online meeting to discuss ideas raised in the initial brainstorming toward prioritizing pedagogical implementation. This meeting will tentatively take place on: Sunday from 3-5pm DST (Athens)/8-10am EST/5-7am PDT/10-12pm AEST (Melbourne)/7-9pm (Beijing). During this session, participants will be grouped by topics, as in the Discord/asynchronous discussions, and they will be tasked with (1) prioritizing their domains and topics, and (2) fleshing out teaching strategies to facilitate learning. Before closing, they will share ideas to the wider group.
Goal
With the brainstormed topics completed in initial asynchronous brainstorming, the goal of the synchronous meeting is to (1) prioritize the various topics and domains in teaching accessibility broadly, and (2) to engage discussion to flesh out strategies for teaching specific topics and domains.
Details
Workshop organizers pre-prepare the topics and some known pedagogical strategies based on discussions from the asynchronous brainstorm. Because many ideas may be floated in the asynchronous meeting, our goal will be to focus discussion on items of common focus. Organizing these ideas and sharing them with the group will help seed the synchronous session.
The organizers will prompt participants to discuss how their topics and domains fit within a two-tier curricular consideration. Mimicking the ACM/IEEE/AAAI curriculum organizational structure, we appeal to participants to envision priorities for the different topics. As such, we will ask participants to discuss and decide if their topic falls into one of two tiers: Tier 1 for basic/foundation/fundamental knowledge acquisition, or Tier 2 for enhanced proficiency and subject matter expertise. Organizing topics in such a way can help program instructors to prioritize topics when working to fit content within a limited curriculum.
Next, the organizers will prompt participants to discuss teaching strategies and categorize them into the ABET teaching and learning phases: introduce, reinforce, emphasize. Additionally, because industry needs motivate what gets taught, we add a fourth category: use in industry. Relying on their earlier brainstorm, and ideas and resources they may have or have gathered since their asynchronous meeting, workshop participants will identify pedagogical strategies and then organize them into these phases. Participants will also be asked to include suggestions of where these topics might be introduced in the curriculum, such as if there are commonly taught topics that the accessibility knowledge could be paired with.
The timeline of activities will be as follows:
- 10 min. Introduction to workshop, highlight/reminder of shared materials and platforms, summary of brainstorming work thus far, directions for rest of session.
- 30 min. Participants will be put into breakout groups with their group members. They will be prompted to prioritize their topic(s) into Tier 1 or Tier 2 priorities. They will be instructed to share their decisions on the consolidated brainstorming space.
- 5 min break.
- 20 min. As a full group, review the prioritization and tiers that individual groups decided.
- 30 min. Participants resume their small groups, and will be prompted to brainstorm strategies for teaching their topic, and then to categorize the strategies in one of: introduce, reinforce, emphasize, and use in industry. Groups will be instructed to share their decisions on the consolidated brainstorming space.
- 5 min. break.
- 20 min. Full-group wrap-up. Share highlights from each group. Invite anyone interested to stay in contact to refine into white paper.
The synchronous group meeting will make use of remote meeting technologies, such as Zoom, and online collaborative spaces (to be determined later) to support synchronous sharing and discussion, both within their small groups and the larger group.
Outputs from the synchronous group meeting will include: topics prioritized into one of two Tiers for curricular consideration, and associated teaching strategies for each topic, categorized as introduce, reinforce, emphasize, or use in industry.
Materials and Topics Discussion - 2 hours
Overview/Timing
During a range of 2-hour session slots, participants can join small, synchronous discussion groups around topics such as teaching accessibility electives and integrating accessibility into undergraduate core curriculum. Participants should attend at least one 2-hour session, but are free to choose the session(s) that best fit their interests and timing constraints.
Goal
The Materials and Topics discussion sessions allow participants to discuss more in-depth concrete examples of approaches that have been used (e.g., the artifacts submitted to the conference), ask questions, and gather feedback. These more concrete, activity-focused session complement the other sessions that are focused on creating. These two-hour sessions will allow small groups of participants to dig into overarching curriculum objectives for accessibility education in CS. For these sessions, those that have submitted artifacts, will be asked to open the session by sharing briefly about their experiences teaching accessibility. Then the group will have time to brainstorm and/or workshop new ideas for teaching accessibility. These groups will also help create a community out of participants with the opportunity to discuss more informally their approaches and challenges.
Details
In the pre-workshop survey, people will be asked what topics interest them (with an option to provide their own topic options). They will also be asked to note which time slot(s) they would be able to attend. This will help in our initial planning of how many breakout groups will be needed for each time slot. Due to the range of timings, breakout sessions will happen before and after the full-group synchronous session. We will provide each discussion group with an initial topic, some discussion questions, and potentially tie into the initial brainstorming and artifact documents, as relevant. Participants will be free to move around discussion groups and attend as many of the sessions as they would like.
Proposed timeslots:
- Session A (day before main session): 1-3am Sun (Athens)/6-8pm Sat (EDT)/3-5pm Sat (PDT)/8-10am Sat (DST)/6-8pm Sat (Beijing)
- Session B (right before main session): 12:45-2:45 Sun (Athens)/ 7:45-9:45am Sun (EDT)/2:45-4:45 am Sun (PDT)/ 7:45-9:45 pm Sat (DST) / 4:45-6:45pm Sat (Beijing)
- Session C (after main session): 5:30-7:30pm Sun (Athens)/10:30am-12:30 Sun (EDT)/7:30am-9:30 (PDT)/12:30am-2:30am Sat (DST)/9:30-11:30pm (Beijing)