Browsing by Subject "Equality"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Breaking Down Barriers: Supporting Minoritized Learners in Undergraduate Computer Science Courses
    (2024) Bartsch, Juno; Murphy, Chris
    This work addresses the structural inequities that prevent minoritized learners from succeeding in introductory Computer Science (CS) courses at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges (the “BiCo”) and beyond. In this work, I conducted a literature review, surveys, and interviews of students in introductory CS courses. I was able to survey 43 students with various backgrounds, identities, and experiences in BiCo CS courses. I found that first-generation and low-income students reported feeling underprepared for CS1 and had significantly lower ratings of self-efficacy. More broadly, minoritized students struggled with finding a sense of belonging and persisting in the CS major. Many students felt supported by the TAs, but a significant portion of students reported not having a support system beyond their peers. A number of students reported that CS1 was too difficult, time consuming, taught in ways that were not understandable to them, and inaccessible due to classroom policies. Based on these findings, I made the following recommendations: implementing CS0, standardizing CS1, improving training for CS peer educators, improving departmental coordination, as well as shifting the CS departmental culture. Following through on these changes will make CS more inclusive, accessible, and welcoming toward minoritized students.
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    Navigating Health Care Worlds: Community, Belonging, and Care at Haverford College During the Covid-19 Pandemic
    (2024) Komatsu, Naomi Bleier; Sertbulut, Zeynep
    The Covid-19 pandemic had a profound impact on how individuals and communities care for one another. It exposed and compounded the structural inequalities that are faced by marginalized communities worldwide. At Haverford College, students, staff, and faculty experienced the pandemic in different ways, depending on their social positions in the community and the wider world. The pandemic made visible an insider/outsider dynamic present within the community, but at the same time offered an opportunity for community members to contest and alter this dichotomy. Drawing on an array of anthropological scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork, including participant-observation and semi-structured interviews, that I conducted at Haverford College in the winter of 2024, this thesis addresses questions of institutional and community imperatives to provide care during the Covid-19 pandemic; what it means to belong in this community; and what care practices that are centered on an awareness of structural inequalities look like. I argue that caring and belonging in the Haverford College community are intimately linked, and involve demonstrating the values of the imagined insider: a person dedicated to social justice, egalitarianism, and community. During the pandemic, students, staff, and faculty came together to organize community care practices in order to bring attention to the social hierarchies and structural inequalities present within the Haverford College community. Through these care practices, they attempted to challenge these social structures and demonstrate their worthiness of care and protection by performing the role of an imagined insider.