The HCI research community has long centered ethics in HCI research and practice. This interest has persisted as scholars highlight the need for more situated understandings and deeper integration of ethics into HCI. In parallel, HCI scholars and students have become increasingly involved in teaching computing ethics across many different university contexts, bringing in valuable perspectives informed by the connections between HCI and the socio-technical subject matter of computing ethics. Yet explicitly bringing these two threads together – examining the teaching of ethics through an HCI research lens – remains nascent. This paper integrates work in HCI and computing education to focus on the role and experience of computing ethics teaching assistants (CETAs), who are increasingly involved in ethics instruction and whose perspectives are predominantly missing in existing literature spanning HCI and computing education. Drawing on HCI theories and methods, our qualitative study of eleven CETAs at two American universities makes three contributions to the HCI literature. First, we build an understanding of who these TAs are with respect to the unique position of teaching computing ethics. Second, we characterize how CETAs’ teaching and learning is situated and shaped within different communities and institutional contexts. Finally, we suggest several implications for the design of ethics instruction within undergraduate computing programs. More broadly, our work can be viewed as a call to action, encouraging HCI scholars to play a more significant role in studying and designing the teaching and learning of computing ethics.

For decades, determining how to teach computing ethics effectively to undergraduate students has been a major concern. As more universities integrate computing ethics into their curriculum, or seek to further refine existing content, who is involved in teaching computing ethics has come to include both graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs). However, the role of TAs in ethics education is not well-understood, nor are the responsibilities, challenges, and support needs that might distinguish Computing Ethics TAs (CETAs) from their peers in technical computing courses. This paper addresses this gap in two ways, drawing on qualitative and design research methods. First, by interviewing CETAs and their supervising faculty at two universities, we identified common motivations, struggles, and goals among CETAs. Second, drawing on this data, we developed and piloted a cross-institutional support network for CETAs on the messaging platform Discord. Despite challenges in the deployment of the server, our results indicate that cross-institutional online communities have the potential to assist CETAs in professional development, in expanding perspectives, and in strategies for dealing with difficult topics. Furthermore, our platform can be retooled for future use within and between computing ethics courses. We hope that our research will contribute to fostering community and support for CETAs as part of improving computing ethics curriculum writ large.