2021-09-24 - Anne-Kathrin Peters SPOTLIGHT seminar

Friday 24 September, 9.00 - 10.00 in this Zoom room 
(PhD students stay on an extra hour, by separate invitation)

The SPOTLIGHT this time is on Anne-Kathrin Peters who joined the Department of Learning in May 2021 as Associate Professor in technology education with a focus on sustainability, especially equality and justice. Anne joins the department coming from the IT department at Uppsala University (UU). There she was a member of the Uppsala Computing Education Research group (UpCERG). She was also the coordinator of the climate change leadership initiative at UU, initiating and supporting cross-disciplinary and -institutional research collaborations on societal transformations. Here, she was part of different groups working on the role of education for environmental sustainability and social justice.

Anne says:

In the Spotlight seminar, I will talk about how research on education for sustainability and equality in education connect. I will do this in two parts, telling about 1) critical work on university education, and 2) conceptions of university education for sustainability.

Higher education today is highly reproductive. I will tell a bit about my research on social identity in computing education, showing how students are socialized and constrained to disciplinary practices, norms and values (see e.g. [1,2,3]). I will point to research on education in other disciplines and university education to give broader perspectives on contemporary university education, especially technology education.

Yet, alternative conceptions of higher education for a more sustainable and just society exist and are being developed, e.g. in environmental and sustainability education research and futures studies. I find this work exciting, and see an as of yet mostly unused potential of feminist perspectives in this work. I will discuss an example, an article by Deborah Osberg (2010) on the role of education to take care of the future.

As a preparation of the spotlight presentation, you can read a 4-page description of a special session, introducing perspectives of care for computing and engineering education [3]. You can read the article by Deborah Osberg [4]. If you have more time and interest, have a look at one of my recent accepted articles, which I will present at the FIE conference in October [5]. In this article, we reflect on a project course in which we applied alternative conceptions of education as “emergentist education”. 

PROGRAM 9.00 - 10.00

• Anne-Kathrin Peters presents her research (20 minutes)
• discussion
• Anne-Kathrin Peters presents her favourite paper (10 minutes)
• discussion

Documentation:

Anne's presentation

In the doctoral hour discussion, we came to mention the work of Amy J. Ko. Please see her keynotes Requirements of Oppression and Deconstructing CS Culture.

For PhD students: 10.00 - 11.00 Continued discussions (separate invitation)

REFERENCES

Articles 4 and 5 will be sent out on email 10 days before the seminar. You can also request all articles anytime from akpeters@kth.se or kristina@kth.se.

[1] Peters, A.-K. (2017) Learning Computing at University: Participation and Identity: A Longitudinal Study, Doctoral Thesis, Uppsala.

[2] Peters, A.-K., (2018) Student Experience of Participation in a Discipline – A Longitudinal Study of Computer Science and IT Engineering Students, in ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE).

[3] Koch-Svedberg, G., Peters, A.-K. (2021) Om utbildningens möjlighet att förändra den mansdominerade teknikkulturen in Franzén, C., Tzimoula, D. (Eds.) Genus och Professioner, Studentlitteratur.

[4] Peters, A.-K., Bengtsson, S., Cajander, Å., Daniels, M., Grande, V., Lönngren, J., Salminen-Karlsson, M. (2020) “Care ethics to develop computing and engineering education for sustainability”, Frontiers in Education conference 2020.

[5] Osberg, D. (2010). Taking Care of the Future? The complex responsibility of education & politics. In Osberg, Deborah & G. Biesta (Eds.), Complexity Theory and the Politics of Education (pp. 157–170). Sense Publishers.

[6] Peters, A.-K., Golay, D., Mats, D. (2021), Making Futures in Computing Education. "Emergentist Education" in an Open-Ended Group Project. Frontiers in Education Conference 2021.