↝ pgcert notes ↝

Jumpstart is a series of introductory workshops aimed at all incoming CCI students to develop foundational technical computer skills. These workshops draw inspiration from organisations such as The Carpentries and MIT’s Missing Semester course, both of which emphasise meta-skills for technical learning. Following their introduction last academic year, the workshops are being redeveloped for September with a specific focus on inclusion.

As detailed in my intervention plan, attainment gaps in the percentage of First/2:1 awards on CCI courses are most significant at the postgraduate level between home vs overseas, and home white vs BAME students (UAL ActiveDashboards 2026a). One contributing factor that I have observed is the lack of time during shorter courses for students to ‘catch up’ if they struggle with foundational skills. Adapting to work in a technical computing context can be overwhelming for many students, and this may be exacerbated for students with additional barriers to access.

Last year’s workshops received positive feedback, but suffered from declining engagement over successive sessions. To address this, I organised a series of informal reflective discussions with students, academics, technicians and support staff. I conducted this work with my colleague Mayra Berrones.

The above diagram maps proposed changes and existing positive strategies that were mentioned in these discussions. The majority of feedback focussed on the development of self-directed and peer learning strategies. As an analysis of all dimensions would be too broad, this report will explore two proposed changes that explore this aspect, indicated in bold on the diagram.

1. Multilingual Note-taking

My interest in introductory technical learning stems from personal experiences of difficulty in learning to code as a female student in a male-dominated engineering department. I feel a strong sympathy with students feeling stuck in the early stages of their courses and excluded from a dominant culture. While sharing some similarities, however, many of my students experience distinct barriers to belonging due to language differences, racial discrimination, disability and financial pressures (UAL, 2025).

In light of the home/overseas attainment gap, I wanted to prioritise accessibility for EAL students in the second iteration of Jumpstart. As a native English speaker with neither experience of learning in another language, nor expertise in language development, it felt important to discuss this aspect with colleagues who have more experience of multilingual teaching, and with the Language Development team. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to interview EAL students about this element, something I would prioritise in future work.

One colleague, who uses English as an additional language, mentioned a project she had worked on that framed learning computing as language-learning, acknowledging the unfamiliarity of technical terminology. This metaphor is reflected in Seymour Papert’s account of technical learning in Mindstorms, emphasising that the development of mathematical skills is akin to learning a new language, and that computers have the potential to provide “a context which is to learning mathematics what living in France is to learning French” (Papert, 1980).

After discussing this idea with the Language Development team, we realised that this would require careful framing. Most technical programming terminology uses a (specialised) form of English, reflecting the imperial history of computing and the persistent language bias of the field (Benjamin, 2019). The framing of ‘everyone is learning another language’ risks trivialising the added difficulty faced by non-native English speakers in adapting to this terminology, which can go beyond a simple translation problem. Metaphorical terms such as ‘Desktop’, for example, rely on the English-language referent, which might not exist or have the same significance in another language (Santini, 2018).

In addition to ensuring there would be a language support tutor present, the Language Development Team suggested explicitly inviting students to translate technical terms into their main languages. This reminded me of a method I have previously used, where I would enter new terms into a collaborative notes document shared with the class. In one session, students spontaneously added their own translations to this document, resulting in a collaborative glossary with multiple annotations.

This intervention is well-supported by Universal Design for Learning (UDL) recommendations for cultivating respect across languages and dialects, and including multiple forms of representation (CAST, 2024). Including ‘common-language’ translations of technical terms can involve all students in this task, rather than just singling out EAL students. For Jumpstart, we will formalise this into a dedicated task during the workshops, where students add their own translations and definitions, and also highlight the existence of glosario, a multilingual glossary developed for this purpose.

Students I spoke to about introductory technical learning experiences cited vocabularies and cheat-sheets as particularly helpful, indicating that these resources can be useful to all students. To maintain the integrity of the resource, the resulting glossaries will be merged into a permanent ‘static’ version on the wiki that links out to the student-edited ones.

Ultimately, it can be useful to frame learning as a collaborative linguistic exercise, while acknowledging that English language and references dominate programming instruction. Translational work presents additional cognitive load for EAL students (LaCosse et al., 2020), and making this explicitly part of the class structure could mitigate this impact.

2. Pair Programming

Another core issue for CCI postgraduate courses is a low sense of community, with this section scoring third-lowest (out of 11 total) in the 2026 PTES, and lowest of 9 in years prior (UAL ActiveDashboards 2026b). While the initial development of Jumpstart aimed to create a ‘welcoming environment’ for students, this was somewhat unidirectional and ill-defined. In this context, I define ‘community’ to mean a sense of shared responsibility for learning. Taking bell hooks’ encouragement to see classroom engagement as a collaborative endeavour (hooks, 1994), we wanted to include more opportunities for students to engage with one another in the workshops.

Almost every member of academic staff we spoke to about this aspect recommended moving sessions in-person, citing the relative ease of community-building on-site. This presents a tension, as online workshops have clear benefits for accessibility and inclusivity, particularly for disabled students or anyone experiencing visa issues. Cavanagh and Jacquemin (2015) found minimal difference to grades in online vs in-person learning, though they note that online learning can widen existing achievement gaps. On students’ sense of community, Lu and Zhang (2024) note that learners can feel disconnected in online environments, emphasising the need for specific and targeted community development.

One structured technique for community-building in a technical context is ‘pair programming’, in which students work on coding tasks in pairs or small groups. A ‘driver’ in the pair completes the task on their machine, while a ‘navigator’ listens, observes, and helps, with roles periodically reversed. Pair programming builds community through structured peer learning and dialogue between students. This technique is used in online, in-person, and hybrid environments (Alex, 2026), and it is associated with positive outcomes for learning and collaboration skills (Hawlitschek et al., 2023).

Group work in an introductory context needs to be considered carefully, as it can make the cognitive load of new skills more severe, and exclusive dynamics can lead to marginalised students feeling undermined or excluded (Desvages et. al, 2026). Explicit structure and a “collaboration script” for interaction can address this, while guides such as the Recurse Center’s Social Rules can help to articulate subtly exclusionary behaviours. Many of the UDL recommendations for “Fostering collaboration, interdependence, and collective learning” are relevant here, including ensuring clear responsibilities and protocols, and using community agreements (CAST, 2024).

The literature on pair programming makes it clear that engagement in collaborative learning depends more on instructional design than any specific delivery mode. To accommodate the broadest possible range of learners, both online and in-person versions of the course will be scheduled. Technical exercises in the workshops will be restructured to function as pair programming tasks (while maintaining the option of solo work), with care taken to clearly communicate structure and roles.

Conclusion

Both changes discussed in this report target the development of a culture of peer learning and support in a broader context of teaching ‘meta-skills’ for learning. The involvement of students in building a learning community is an example of a ‘high impact practice’ that is positively associated with student engagement, and is particularly important for students that face intersecting barriers to access (Bamber and Jones, 2015).

As optional courses can risk widening attainment gaps, there is an open question as to whether this material should be integrated directly into classes. As a technician, I am not able to change course content, but it remains important to consider how extracurricular courses can benefit, rather than harm students that don’t attend.

An observation from the Electronics workshop is that when a minority of students develop a skill in an inclusive and friendly environment, they are more likely to help their peers, and standards rise across the board. While this form of interdependence is by no means guaranteed, my hope is that by making these aspects an explicit part of classroom design we can foster a more collaborative and inclusive culture at the CCI.

References

Alex, B., Llewellyn-MacRae, C., Orzechowski, P. and Stephens, L. (2026) Learning Together Across Modes: Online and On-Site Pair Programming in a Fusion Course, in Teaching Programming Across Disciplines. Available at: https://teaching-programming.github.io/book/C23_pair-programming-fusion.html (Accessed: 20 July 2026)

Benjamin, R. (2019), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity Press, ISBN: 9781509526437

CAST (2024). CAST Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. Available at: https://udlguidelines.cast.org (Accessed: 20 July 2026)

Cavanaugh, J., & Jacquemin, S. J. (2015). A Large Sample Comparison of Grade Based Student Learning Outcomes in Online vs. Face-to-Face Courses, Online Learning, 19 (2).
https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/biology/826

Desvages, C., Orzechowski, P., Blankinship, B. and Noè, U. (2026) Structured Group Work With Assigned Asymmetrical Roles and Switching: Lessons From Pair Programming Across Disciplines, in Teaching Programming Across Disciplines. Available at: https://teaching-programming.github.io/book/C36_pair-programming-across-disciplines.html (Accessed: 20 July 2026).

Hawlitschek, A., Berndt, S. and Schulz, S. (2023) Empirical research on pair programming in higher education: a literature review, Computer Science Education, 33(3), pp. 400–428. doi: 10.1080/08993408.2022.2039504.

hooks, b., (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-90807-8

Bamber V. and Jones A. (2015), Challenging Students: Enabling Inclusive Learning, In: Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 4th Edition. Routledge, London

LaCosse, J., Canning, E.A., Bowman, N.A., Murphy, M.C. and Logel, C. (2020) A social-belonging intervention improves STEM outcomes for students who speak English as a second language. Science advances, 6(40), p.eabb6543.

Lu, H., and Zhang, X. (2024). Multi-level students’ sense of community development in hybrid and online learning environments at higher educational institutions: a systematic literature review. Interactive Learning Environments, 32(9), 5397–5420. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2023.2214803

Papert, S.A., (1980) Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic books

Santini, S., (2018) Semiotic internationalization and localization of computer programs. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.04342

UAL (2025) Access and Participation Plan 2025-26 to 2028-29, Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/public-information/office-for-students-info (Accessed: 20 July 2026)

UAL ActiveDashboards (2026a) Postgraduate Attainment and Profiles, 2022–2025, (internal) University of the Arts London

UAL ActiveDashboards (2026b) PTES Results Year on Year Summary, 2026, (internal) University of the Arts London

In her book Race After Technology, sociologist Ruha Benjamin observes that the assumption that technology is race-neutral ensures that “whiteness becomes the default setting in tech development”¹. As the product of a society structured by “interlocking forms of domination”, racial bias is encoded into technical systems in ways that are both overt and subtle: resisting this default requires active anti-racist work (Benjamin, 2019).

Teaching programming and electronics in an anti-racist manner involves both working to foster an inclusive learning environment, and equipping students with the critical faculty to re-envision the technologies they encounter. Although ‘technical questions’ are often seen as separate from more conceptual aspects of student projects, I take inspiration from bell hooks’ insistence on combining theory and practice in ’embodied pedagogy’ (hooks, 1994). One strategy I use in technical tutorials is to ask open-ended questions about the students’ references, and how their values are reflected in a project’s materiality. This allows me to learn more before making recommendations, and also engages students in thinking together about the politics of the technologies they are using.

Sensitivity and clarity is needed when raising critiques of technology in a classroom environment. As a white teacher, lecturing black, Muslim and immigrant students most often subject to algorithmic violence (Ọnụọha, 2018) on their own oppression can flatten the excitement and interest that has brought them to the CCI in the first place. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney observe, academic critique risks “[being] against… without touching one’s own condition of possibility” (Harney and Moten, 2013). I find it helpful to ground political discussions both in a curiosity around students’ own experiences of technology, and to consider my role not as a separate ‘awareness-raiser’, but as someone who teaches from a common commitment to equity and creativity.

Critiques of technology are most useful when they empower students to ask more interesting questions of systems that they encounter, and when this is seen as the responsibility of everyone, not just those racialised by tech. For example, in a class that I teach about databases, we discuss a variety of examples, including the MET Police Gangs Matrix (Amnesty, 2018), Mimi Ọnụọha’s Library of Missing Datasets (Ọnụọha, 2016), and engage practically in querying personal browser history databases. Instead of a system for deciding whether databases are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (Benjamin, 2019) students leave with a set of questions to ask, and technical tools with which to ask them.

It is also important not to trace just one (convenient) history of technology. Imagining technology otherwise involves taking seriously alternatives as they exist today, and disrupting the fiction of ‘linear progress’ that feeds a sense of inevitability (Ochigame, 2020). A core example I use in teaching radio electronics is Fanon’s account of radio in the Algerian Revolution, which demonstrates how a revolutionary movement appropriated a colonial technology to radical ends (Fanon, 1967). Similarly, historical (Haeyoung, 2020) and contemporary (Ziadah, 2026) accounts of industrial action at tech companies reject a common narrative that tech companies’ contributions to warfare and imperialism are not met with serious opposition from their employees.

Ultimately I believe strongly in teaching and learning technical skills, as our society is increasingly saturated in discriminatory, exploitative and mystified computer systems. To have a role in changing this, students of all backgrounds require support both to confront the idea that contemporary technical systems are made oppressive by choice rather than necessity, and to develop a genuine enthusiasm and curiosity for the medium on their own terms.

1. A local example: in my text editor, the name “Ruha” is highlighted red, implying a spelling mistake. “Benjamin” is not. ↩︎

References

Benjamin, R. (2019), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity Press, ISBN: 9781509526437

Fanon, F., trans. Chevalier, H. (1967), A Dying Colonialism (translation of the original published 1959), ISBN: 9780802150271

Graeber, D. (2015), The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, United Kingdom: Melville House

Haeyoung, A. (2020), The Activist Legacy of the IBM Black Workers Alliance, Wired Magazine, Accessed: https://www.wired.com/story/tech-organizing-labor-ibm-history/

hooks, b., (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-90807-8

Harney, S., Moten, F. (2013), The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, United Kingdom: Minor Compositions

Ochigame, R. (2020), Informatics of the Oppressed, Logic Magazine, Issue 11: Care, Accessed: https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/

Ọnụọha, M. (2016), The Library of Missing Datasets, (artwork) Accessed: https://mimi-onuoha-9s0o.squarespace.com/the-library-of-missing-datasets

Ọnụọha, M. (2018), Notes on Algorithmic Violence, Accessed: https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/On-Algorithmic-Violence

Ziadah, R. Henderson, C., Jabary Salamanca, O., Plonski, S., Chua, C., Al Sanah, R., & El Khazen, E. (2026) Disruptive Geographies and the War on Gaza: Infrastructure and Global Solidarity, Geopolitics, 31(1), pp. 453–491. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2025.2510319

Last year, I led the development and delivery of a series of pre-term workshops for incoming students, introducing core technical skills often treated as prerequisites for many CCI courses. A core aim of the workshops is to create a welcoming learning environment for diverse cohorts, supporting attendees in connecting existing knowledge and practices to unfamiliar technical contexts. Alongside the development of specific skills, the workshops emphasise meta-skills for digital learning, open source software, and diverse political, cultural and artistic engagements with technology.

I proposed these workshops last year as I share the concern of many academic staff that students seem increasingly overwhelmed by the introductory stages of their courses. This is a particularly acute issue for students on shorter postgraduate programs, who are expected to master complex material in a compressed time period. There is a persistent awarding gap of 13-18% for international vs home postgraduate students at the CCI, and international students comprise 90% of the postgraduate student body (compared to 20% at undergraduate level) (UAL Dashboards, 2026).

While language data is not collected directly, overseas students are considerably more likely to speak English as a second language (ESL). As LaCosse et al. observe, “the amount of motivation and effort ESL students must expend to master difficult STEM material may frequently be greater than that required of non-ESL students” (LaCosse et al., 2020). Distinct from undergraduate data, there is also a negative awarding gap on CCI postgraduate programmes for students with disabilities, and a more significant gap between Home White and BAME students (UAL ActiveDashboards, 2026). Stress, poor mental health, and alienation are compounding issues that can further affect these students’ attainment (UAL, 2025).

While I received positive feedback from some students after last year’s Jumpstart workshops, the majority of attendees did not report completing the tasks, and the student facilitators hired to assist students requiring extra support were rarely engaged. As such, there is a danger that the workshops could potentially exacerbate, rather than mitigate the stress experienced by incoming students in attendance. Existing measures to promote inclusivity include running multiple sessions at different times (so that students with work or caring responsibilities can attend), making material available in diverse formats, and hiring current students as facilitators to ensure adequate support is available.

My planned intervention is to redevelop aspects of Jumpstart for next year, based on informal conversations with a range of students and colleagues, and from applying theories and techniques learned during the PGCert. In this evaluation process, I will make use of Gibbs’ reflective cycle as a tool for critical evaluation and development (Gibbs, 1988). I hope to use the analytic aspects to understand whether the issues are primarily with the structure and format of the course (e.g. online vs in-person, whether additional accommodations should be made), or with its content.

In revisiting the course content, I want to draw on the work of Seymour Papert (1980), on constructionism, bell hooks’ (1994) writing on engaged pedagogy and classrooms as spaces of possibility, and Paas and van Merrienboër’s (1994) theory of cognitive load. I reference Papert and hooks in particular as both emphasise the idea of pleasure in learning as realised through interactive pedagogical techniques. My intuition is that a decrease in the overall cognitive load of the activities might open up more space for more open-ended and creative learning.

I hope to use this redevelopment to improve the learning outcomes for attending students with intersecting barriers to access, and develop a lightweight framework for evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions.

References

Gibbs, G. (1988) Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Oxford: Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechnic

Hoff, M. (2018) Peer-to-Peer-Folder-Poetry. (online) GitHub. Available at: https://github.com/melaniehoff/Peer-to-Peer-Folder-Poetry/blob/master/two-day-workshop.md (Accessed 11 Feb. 2026)

hooks, b., (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-90807-8

LaCosse, J., Canning, E.A., Bowman, N.A., Murphy, M.C. and Logel, C. (2020) A social-belonging intervention improves STEM outcomes for students who speak English as a second language. Science advances, 6(40), p.eabb6543.

Paas, F.G. and van Merriënboer, J.J.G., (1994) Instructional control of cognitive load in the training of complex cognitive tasks. Educational psychology review, 6(4), pp.351-371.

Papert, S.A., (1980) Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic books

UAL (2025) Access and Participation Plan 2025-26 to 2028-29, Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/public-information/office-for-students-info

UAL ActiveDashboards (2026) Postgraduate Attainment and Profiles, 2022–2025, (internal) University of the Arts London

Within the CCI, we encourage students to contribute to and participate in Open-Source Software (OSS) development. An important ethical concern within OSS is the use of licensing (conditions that determine how software may be used), and its intersection with personal belief.

Licensing choices can have many consequences for the way that software is used in the world. A famous example is the shift in the early 2000s from copyleft licensing (which requires people re-using the software to fully open-source their software) to permissive licensing (which allows people re-using software to do whatever they like with it) leading to pervasive adoption of open-source tools by corporations who wanted to keep their own code closed-source (Asparouhova, 2020).

Another consequence of permissive licensing is that software developed for one purpose can be used for a totally different one, potentially morally at odds with the ideals of the original developers. For example, border cameras developed by American defense company Anduril make use of computer vision datasets originally created for civilian use (Levy, 2018), and open-source drone software developed by FPV racing enthusiasts has been used extensively by both sides in Russia’s war on Ukraine (Kühn, 2022).

I am personally a committed pacifist, and a quaker. A core tenet of quakerism is to live “in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars” (Fox, 1651). As a technologist, this means that I decline to work on any projects in receipt of military funding, or that may be used in a military context. In recent years, I have found this belief more challenging to accommodate, as the line between military and civilian technologies has become substantially blurred through the use of machine learning systems.

While I do not express my personal beliefs directly in my teaching practice, these experiences mean I am committed to helping students of diverse beliefs and faiths to uphold their values in relation to their work. I am often engaged in conversations with students about the politics of ‘dual use’ technology such as LLMs, and tensions within OSS around military and corporate usage (Kühn, 2022).

Intersecting identities can raise the stakes of such discussions — for example, muslim students objecting to the use of a surveillant technology on the basis of their faith might both be disproportionately targeted by that same technology, and be more likely than myself to experience epistemic injustice in response to their objection (Rekis, 2023). I also find it important not to be didactic: people enact their beliefs in different ways, and financial concerns, family commitments and visa restrictions can create additional challenges for students attempting to reconcile a career in tech with their values.

When discussing OSS specifically, ethical software licensing projects offer an opportunity to consider the enactment of belief within a technical context. Two significant examples are the Hippocratic License, which prohibits use in contexts that infringe on human rights (OECA, n.d.), and the Anticapitalist Software License, which prohibits use under conditions where labour is exploited for profit (Nasser and Pipkin, n.d.).

While the enforcement of software licenses in the current legal climate may be difficult, it is not impossible, as two recent cases upholding copyleft licenses have demonstrated (Aldama, 2025). I believe that sincere engagement with these ethical questions in technology — even when no easy solutions are apparent — is an essential part of students’ development of their own attitudes and values within their work. Moreover, an assurance to students that there is a means to uphold their beliefs may be essential for inclusion in courses (such as BSc Creative Computing) where contribution to OSS is a required learning outcome.

References

Aldama, J. (2025), Open Source License Compliance Lessons from Two Landmark Court Cases, FossID Blog, available at: https://fossid.com/articles/open-source-license-compliance-lessons-from-two-landmark-court-cases/, accessed 09/05/2026

Asparouhova, N. (2020), Working in public: the making and maintenance of open source software, Stripe Press

Fox, G. (1651), Quaker Peace Testimony, via Quaker faith & practice: The book of Christian discipline of the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain (2013), 5th edn. London: Quakers in Britain, 24.08.

Kühn, B.M, (2022), Copyleft Won’t Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them, Software Freedom Conservacy Blog, available at: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/mar/17/copyleft-ethical-source-putin-ukraine/, accessed 09/05/2026

Levy, S. (2018), Inside Palmer Luckey’s Bid to Build a Border Wall, Wired Magazine, available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20210414015255/https://www.wired.com/story/palmer-luckey-anduril-border-wall/, accessed 09/05/2026

Nasser, R. and Pipkin, E. (no date) The Anti-Capitalist Software License (v 1.4). Available at: https://anticapitalist.software/ (Accessed: 9 May 2026).

Organization for Ethical Source and Corporate Accountability Lab (no date), The Hippocratic License 3.0: An ethical license for open source communities. available at: https://firstdonoharm.dev/, accessed 09/05/2026

Rekis, J., (2023), Religious identity and epistemic injustice: An intersectional account, Hypatia, 38(4), pp.779-800

“Design can include making something new, but it can also include unmaking the world as it is, or perhaps remaking it, with parts and systems alike.” (Hendren, 2020)

Two ideas really stood out to me in the videos. The first was that holistic support benefits everyone. The second was that having many paths to ‘success’ creates an environment where more people feel able to participate fully in social life. I was particularly struck by Christine Sun Kim’s (Sun Kim, 2023), discussion of the importance of government support, in the form of affordability and free childcare — something on the surface unrelated to her deafness which has given her the space to make choices about her life. Her assertion that it is “easier for you to learn to sign than a deaf person to learn to hear” was also a damning indictment of what inaccessible spaces implicitly demand of disabled people.

There’s also an attitudinal aspect to Sun Kim’s statement — an invitation to reconsider what is possible. What Can A Body Do? (Hendren, 2020), asserts that “all technology is assistive technology” — recasting objects such as phones and shoes as tools that allow us to extend our bodies’ ability to act in the world. Workshop spaces can both enforce rigid social norms through assumptions about users’ abilities, but also question and change them, expanding a space of possibility and learning.

UAL’s 2-7% retention gap (UAL, 2026) for disabled students over the past 5 years is concerning but not surprising to me. Many students I have worked with report overwhelming stress in accessing resources while managing health conditions and finances. A key concern of many students who suffer from chronic illness or mental health difficulties is the ability to complete tasks at home: an accommodation which also benefits students who face intersecting barriers, such as childcare needs, financial concerns, or who have to commute to university.

A core way that we make technical spaces more accessible is creating an environment where there is more than one way to achieve the same goal: having borrowable equipment, finding software that students can run for free at home or on library computers, making information available in diverse formats, and having different prototyping materials available (Steele et. al, 2018). Part of this work is also recognising where adaptations that benefit students with access needs can be good for all. For example, I regularly receive emails from students, artists and technicians in other institutions about the CCI’s open wiki, which we developed to allow students to learn about technical resources from home.

In Live Programming in Hostile Territory (Reed, 2025), Reed and Shank talk about how accessibility tools create a space of possibility rarely considered in software development. Legal mandates for software to be legible to tools such as screen readers mean that even apparently ‘closed’ applications expose a wealth of information, allowing interoperable tools to be designed in contexts “antagonistic to modification”. They make a case for malleability: the idea that systems should be designed to open themselves up to forms of unexpected use.

Often, conversations I have with students are about possibility: balancing constraints (time, current skill level, safety, course requirements) with their goals and desires. Part of this process is helping a student to estimate their ability to complete a project in the time that they have (Wolbring, 2025), but another is about considering how different parts of the world around them (their computer, our technical resources) can be made more malleable.

References

Hendren, S. (2020) What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. New York: Riverhead Books

Kim, C.S. (2023) Friends and Strangers, Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 11, Episode 3. PBS. First broadcast: 20 October 2023

Reed, O. and Shank, C. (2025), Live Programming in Hostile Territory, paper presented at LIVE 2025: Workshop on Live Programming, 20 July 2025. Available at: https://folkjs.org/live-2025/ (Accessed: 6 May 2026)

UAL ActiveDashboards (2026) Retention by Profile, 2019–2025, (internal) University of the Arts London

Wolbring, G. (2025), Ability Expectation/Ableism glossary, https://wolbring.wordpress.com/ability-expectationableism-glossary/ (Accessed: 6 May 2026)