Quick Supporters/alx
| Quick Supporters | |
| Contributors | Anne Bartilla, Christian Köppe |
|---|---|
| Last modification | May 16, 2017 |
| Source | Bartilla and Köppe (2015)[1]; Bartilla & Köppe (2016)[2] |
| Pattern formats | OPR Alexandrian |
| Usability | |
| Learning domain | |
| Stakeholders | |
Also Known As: Start with People Who Stand Open (Start with People Who Stand Open)
You want to create Awareness Seeds (Awareness Seeds) and you need more people who support you.
It costs a lot of energy and time and might still be unsuccessful in the end if you try to convince people of something they don’t believe in or don’t see value in in first place.
Changing a situation always comprises a trade-off between available time and energy and the maximum possible goal that can be reached.
It is demotivating to be the lone wolf in the struggle for more diversity
Therefore: Start to involve the people in your activities who already stand open for changing the situation and/or are aware of the issues related to it.
Start with identifying the people who stand open, e.g. through observing how they act during discussions on the topic or how they talk about male and female students. Then, when you plan activities that involve a group of people or when you need some support in other ways, approach these people first.
This will help you to create the broadest possible support (in manpower) with the least necessary effort and is a specialization of Early Majority (Early Majority)[3]. These people can then function as Bridge Builders (Bridge Builders)[3] and communicate the issues related to a not-diverse student population and the necessity of changing this situation to other people.
By convincing people in a quick and easy way to support the change you’ll broaden the participation fast, you’re not the lone wolf anymore and can celebrate Small Successes (Small Successes)[3], which is motivating and encouraging.
However, getting support of the people who already are aware of the issue does mainly include your manpower. The other people still need to become aware of the issues, which certainly requires more activities.
At Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, a Code Event was organized where female CS students gave programming workshops to schoolgirls. The goal was to give these schoolgirls a good impression of what computer science is and to do that in a safe setting (meaning that there was no competition with boys involved). They also can ask questions to the present female students over how they experienced being a female CS student themselves, the students were therefore also Female CS Role Models (Female CS Role Models). At this event, also lecturers had to be present, but there weren’t enough female lecturers available. The organizers therefore asked some male colleagues which they knew stood open for this event (and the general idea behind it) to help during the day. Most of them agreed to help, as they saw the benefits of this event.
References
- ↑ Bartilla, A. & Köppe, C. (2015). Awareness Seeds for more Gender Diversity in Computer Science Education. In Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP 2015). New York:ACM.
- ↑ Patlet mentioned in Bartilla, A., & Köppe, C. (2016). Organizational Patterns for Increasing Gender Diversity in Computer Science Education. In Proceedings of the 10th Travelling Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (VikingPLoP 2016). New York:ACM.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Manns, M. L. & Rising, L. (2005). Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas. Addison-Wesley.