Yeshi letter

What do you think is this student’s greatest strength as a researcher/scholar?

Yeshi’s research is firmly grounded in his lived experience. As a Tibetan refugee who was smuggled out of CCP-occupied Tibet as a child, who grew up in the schools run by the Tibetan Government in Exile, who then succeeded in his undergraduate CS studies in India and his Master’s degree in CS at UB, Yeshi understands the individual and social power of CS and the pathways from early interest-building through graduate study.

Yeshi’s project is to design and implement CS education for Tibetans, both those attending schools run by the Government in Exile in Northern India, and those of the broader diaspora in London, New York, and other cities around the globe. He understands CS as a key pathway toward economic mobility and also as a potential tool for sustaining Tibetan identity and community in the face of modernity–which itself is accelerated by computing technologies. When we visited a school in Northern India, we visited a school’s computer lab–cobbled together from a bank of lead-acid batteries and outdated machines covered with USAID stickers–and I was heartsick to see the students spending their time watching trashy YouTube videos on repeat in between ads for a world profoundly disjointed from theirs.

What would it mean for the Tibetan people to have a technically-sophisticated and culturally-widespread computational literacy? What kind of relationship with modernity might allow the Tibetan people to enjoy the economic, political, and intellectual resources of the globalized world while sustaining their cultural identity? What kinds of sociotechnical futures might the Tibetan people create for themselves? These questions will be urgent for displaced and marginalized peoples all over the world, and also ought to broaden our field’s conceptions of equity and justice, which tend to focus on achieving full participation in the dominant order by overcoming US-specific manifestations of race and gender.

Yeshi has been developing constructs to frame this research, including “Thinking about CS like a Tibetan” and “Culturally-embedded CS education.” He is also creating contexts for enacting and studying these ideas. Last summer he ran a camp for second-generation Tibetan immigrant youth in Queens, New York, which wove together computing with Tibetan language and culture; this summer he is organizing a networked collection of camps across three US cities. Yeshi will present a full paper on this project at this summer’s International Society of the Learning Sciences conference.

What do you think is this student’s greatest opportunity for growth as a researcher/scholar?

Methods. Yeshi is rapidly gaining skill as a qualitative researcher. However, if Yeshi’s project is to contribute to research and practice, I think it will also be valuable for him to learn to design rigorous quantitative studies (both analytics-based description and using statistical models) and integrate multiple data sources into persuasive mixed-methods arguments. From my perspective, the key challenge for K12 computing education is to integrate the community studying cognitive constructs (often quantitatively) with those studying sociocultural and critical constructs (often qualitatively). With an investment in methodological expertise, I think Yeshi is well-positioned to help bridge this gap.

How do you believe this student will benefit from participation in the ICER Doctoral Consoritum?

Aside from mentorship on his research, I hope the ICER doctoral consortium would provide Yeshi with a peer and mentor community in computing education. Yeshi has a world-class scholarly network/community in the Learning Sciences at UB; although we have expertise in computing education at UB (Adrienne Decker, past SIGCSE chair, will be on Yeshi’s committee) but not a large community.The ICER doctoral consortium could offer a community and network to Yeshi which would be of great value during the rest of his doctoral education and would help him understand the international landscape of the field as he applies to faculty positions.

How do you believe this student’s participation in the ICER Doctoral Consortium is likely to benefit other participants?

Yeshi is a thoughtful, gentle, and insightful listener, curious about a wide range of research and able to take it on its own terms while also engaging in generative critique. He cares deeply about his own research and is eager to consider it from new perspectives. He is a highly-valued and respected member of our lab group; if he is accepted into the ICER doctoral consortium, I’m sure his cohort will feel the same way.