My Favorite ICER 2024 Paper: How Media Artists Teach Computing

March 9, 2025 at 3:00 pm

I’m hesitant to state a preference for my favorite paper at the International Computing Education Research (ICER) Conference in 2024. There were so many cool papers (including some by my students!). But it’s an easy choice if I use the heuristic, “Which paper have I still been thinking and talking about the most after the conference?”

My favorite paper of ICER 2024 was Alice Chung and Philip Guo’s paper “Perpetual Teaching Across Temporary Places: Conditions, Motivations, and Practices of Media Artists Teaching Computing Workshops.” It’s a study of real media artists who teach computing in workshops. The first sentence of the paper is “Why and how do new media artists teach computing?” I love this question, and the answers are fascinating.

One of their observations is that media artists teach as part of their practice. They’re always learning new tools and practices, and also always sharing them. Let’s contrast this with software engineering. How many professional software developers also teach software development? How many consider it integral to their practice? Or swap the question — how many CS1 instructors are also professional software engineers?

Our study finds that artists strategically understand and respond to these conditions, developing what we call perpetual teaching – reframing the internalized duty or responsibility of perpetual training into pedagogical frameworks

So why? Why would media artists spend their time teaching? It’s about trying to be critical about what they’re doing.

We found that artist-educators are motivated by creating spaces to unlearn ineffective conventions and incubate new cultures rather than by technical knowledge transfer alone. Furthermore, they intended to design their workshop materials (e.g., prompts, activities, reading lists) to prepare participants to create critical interpretations of computing outside of mainstream tech career pipelines.

This is such an interesting goal and a contrast with computer science education. Artist-educators want to make new things and explicitly contrast with traditional technology paths. They want their students to be media artists who are critical of what’s happening in the rest of computing. Explicitly, media artist-educators are focused on alternative endpoints in computing education.

The paper goes into much more depth with examples and quotes from the artist-educators about their goals and motivations. I highly recommend reading the whole paper. It’s well-written and grounded in education literature.

I have had more conversations about this paper than any previous ICER paper that I am not co-author of. In most of the conversations, a computing education researcher was critiquing the paper, and I was defending it. The biggest critique I heard is that the paper does not speak to CS educators’ issues and offers them no solutions to their problems.

I mostly agree, but that’s what’s why I’m so excited about this paper.

The International Computing Education Research (ICER) conference should be about more than computer science education. Of course, it’s important to study CS1 classes, CS majors, and how to produce great software developers. We need good CS education, and we need research on what’s going on in CS education and how to make it more successful — which includes studies of teachers. But there will be far more people programming than will ever take a CS1. Studying how people learn computing beyond CS and how to make their learning successful is important for our modern society. That’s computing education, and ICER needs to have more papers like this one that explores the much larger world beyond traditional CS education.

But in the best possible world, this paper does speak to CS educators, too. Alice and Philip write:

New media artists view teaching as a means to promote greater diversity in computing cultures, emphasizing education’s role in broadening participation and challenging traditional narratives.

Wouldn’t we wish that to be true of all CS educators, too?

Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: computing education research, computing for everyone, PCAS.