↝ pgcert notes ↝

Last year, I led the development and delivery of a series of pre-term workshops for incoming students, aimed at developing 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 them in connecting existing knowledge and practices to unfamiliar technical contexts. 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 year-long programs, who are expected to master complex material in a compressed time period.

Although UAL does not collect this specific data, in my experience, students on year-long postgraduate courses are significantly more likely to speak English as a second language (ESL). As LaCosse et al. reflect, “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). The same may also be said for those with caring responsibilities, disabilities, and financial stressors, and this can be compounded when these barriers intersect. Stress, poor mental health, and alienation are core issues that affect the retention of these students (UAL, 2026).

While I received positive feedback from some students during last year’s workshops, the majority of attendees did not report completing the tasks, and the student facilitators hired to create a less intimidating environment were not engaged by most attendees. As such, there is a danger that the workshops could potentially exacerbate, rather than mitigate the stress experienced by some incoming students.

My planned intervention is to run interactive feedback sessions with current students, and to use these to inform the course’s redevelopment for next year. In particular, I want to understand and improve the learning outcomes of students with intersecting barriers to access, and develop a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions. Existing accommodations 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.

Reflecting on bell hooks’ argument that excitement in learning stems from communal work (hooks, 1994), I want to take a dialogical approach to the design of the feedback sessions. The sessions will be structured as short roundtable discussions, combining structured questions with open-ended conversation. I am particularly interested to learn which learning outcomes students found most useful, emphasising relevant and practical aspects, and reasons for non-participation where relevant.

A concern with this intervention is how to avoid self-selection bias, as the voluntary nature of the feedback sessions means that students in attendance will be more likely to be engaged (Caballero Díaz et. al, 2026). While this may not be entirely mitigated, I hope to address this by including students who did not attend the original course in the feedback session, and prioritising feedback from students who reported more difficulty with the material.

To respect students’ time and contribution, I will apply for funding to provide food at these sessions. To broaden opportunities for feedback, I will also give students the option to respond asynchronously, anonymously and online, or informally in person.

References

Caballero Díaz, D., Amin, A., Musa, P., & Leung, V. (2026). Methodological Choices When Assessing Summer Bridge Programs in STEM Majors: A Scoping Review. Education Sciences, 16(2), 220. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci16020220

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.

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

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 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.

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 the project (Wolbring, 2025), but another is more imaginative — thinking together of modifications that can accommodate a student’s interests and intention.

UAL’s 2-7% retention gap (UAL, 2026) for disabled students over the past 5 years is upsetting 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.

One way to 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 forms and fidelities of prototyping materials available (Steele et. al, 2018).

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.

Whenever we plan technical skills workshops in the CCI, we try where possible to focus on free and open-source tools. Not only are these tools that can be used at home by students at no cost, but they can also be modified and changed. This expansion of the possibility space of software is a necessity for some students, but it can also be a benefit to far more.

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)