Teaching assistants (TAs) play a critical role in computing and HCI education, yet little is known about how they perceive and use AI tools or imagine their future pedagogical uses. We report on a series of design workshops with 131 computing (CS) TAs across two U.S. universities. These workshops invited TAs to reflect on current AI use and envision future AI-enhanced tools and practices. Drawing on surveys and design artifacts, we (1) develop a cross-institutional typology of situated TA uses of AI, revealing opportunities and tensions; (2) show how TAs’ visions of AI are shaped by disciplinary norms, institutional structures, and their intermediary position as student-instructors; and (3) reveal ethical dilemmas. Our findings contribute to HCI by positioning TAs as AI-supported knowledge workers in the education domain; illustrating how design and speculation are shaped by people’s situated understandings of AI and their institutional contexts; and identifying a core tension in which TAs simultaneously preserve and erode the human dimensions of their work, with implications for future instructional tools and human–AI collaboration.

Teaching assistants (TAs) play an increasingly vital role in computer science (CS) education, particularly amid rising enrollments, expanding instructional modalities, and the emergence of generative AI tools. In this evolving landscape, CS TAs are taking on greater responsibilities and often serve as the primary point of personal interaction for students, particularly through recitations, lab sessions, and office hours. However, many CS TAs receive limited preparation in inclusive and responsive teaching practices, limiting their ability to effectively support students from diverse cultural and educational backgrounds. To address this gap, we developed and delivered a series of responsive pedagogy workshops at two diverse institutions. These workshops aimed to deepen CS TAs' understanding of inclusive and responsive teaching strategies, support their implementation in practice, and create space for co-design by positioning TAs not only as learners, but as partners in imagining how responsive pedagogy principles could be more effectively integrated into the courses and contexts in which they teach. In this experience report, we describe the design and implementation of these workshops with 117 TA participants, share workshop materials for broader adoption, and reflect on key findings related to integrating responsive pedagogy into CS education through TA training.

Computer Science (CS) ethics coursework is required at many institutions for undergraduate CS majors. However, little is known about how students perceive the addition of this topic into the CS curriculum which is otherwise largely technical in nature. To understand perceptions of CS ethics as a course, we included questions about CS ethics instruction on a survey of 88 graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs) at two institutions in the United States. We found that learning CS ethics was not a universal experience for all TAs, but that a majority of TAs felt that CS ethics is a vital curricular topic. We recommend further research with a wider study population to better understand the perceptions of students of CS ethics coursework.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in the role of teaching assistants (TAs) in computer science (CS). This interest is due to the vital role CS TAs play in supporting student learning and their expanding responsibilities driven by growing enrollments in CS programs worldwide. While much of this research focuses on the technical and pedagogical aspects of CS TAs' duties, researchers recognize the need to further explore the unique value human CS TAs provide, particularly with the rise of AI tools and assistants. In this paper, we use qualitative methods to analyze 109 survey responses collected across two different institutions in the United States as part of a larger design-based research project to make two contributions. First, we illustrate how CS TAs adopt humanistic stances and demonstrate care in their roles, thereby expanding prevailing understandings of CS TAs. Second, we detail similarities and differences across CS TAs' experiences at each institution that underscore the importance of understanding CS TAs as they are situated in different institutional contexts. We conclude by discussing implications of this work for computing instruction and TA training, emphasizing the importance of foregrounding the roles and values brought by TAs.