Fiction and Speculative Thinking for Critical Posthumanist Literacy Pedagogy: Three Cases From a Middle Grade AI Ethics Unit

• In Event: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Literacy Education

Abstract

Although AI instruction has long been the purview of computer science in both schools and in research, it is increasingly crucial that literacy researchers and practitioners treat learning with and about AI as an integral part of instruction for students to become critical readers, writers, and digital citizens. But what should this instruction and pedagogy look like? In this paper, I draw on critical posthumanist literacy theory (Author, under review; Author & Leander, 2020), to offer one way of incorporating AI into literacy curricula as the occasion for speculative thinking and storytelling.

In particular, this study draws on data, including student writing and transcripts of class discussions from a quarter-long AI and Ethics unit in a 7th and 8th grade class, to address the following research questions:

How can educators leverage reading, writing, and viewing science fiction to understand AI and its (present and future) impact? To foster agentive participation and ethical engagement around AI?

(How) might approaching AI ethics from a speculative/imaginative perspective strengthen student engagement with and understanding of AI?

I used a combination of traditional qualitative research moves, like open coding (Saldaña, 2016), sorting and organizing using software, and transcribing spoken words into written text (Ochs, 1979), and less concrete and procedural moves like “thinking with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013). As I analyzed the instances where students engaged with science fiction, I found that it was serving several distinct functions: as a foil for thinking about current technology and “real life,” as a space for ethical experimentation, and as a way to prepare for or practice responding to future technology. For each of these functions, I describe focal examples from the classroom: a discussion about a science fiction movie, a cautionary tale written by an 8th grader, micro-fiction in response to utopian and dystopian prompts, and a student project describing a blog from 2035. I also explore the other factors that are essential for making science fiction pedagogy joyful, impactful, and effective: peer dialogue, supportive structures, and rich texts. I conclude with students’ and my own reflections on the benefits and drawbacks of using fictional AI to help us understand AI more broadly.

One overarching goal of this project was to expose students to AI in ways that were not dependent upon computer science expertise and equipment. Science fiction was an obvious choice, given its appeal, my disciplinary background, and its pedagogical history (for example, the MIT AI and Ethics middle grade curriculum (Payne, 2019) also incorporates speculative fiction writing as a teaching tool). Of course, this is also another way to read and write with machines, not as the medium of composition or production, but as the (imagined) subject/object/character. By writing and reading about or as (in the case of those who chose to write from an AI’s perspective) an AI, students gain yet another perspective on what it means to do critical posthumanist literacy, and to shape the world with AI.

Author

• Sarah Burriss, Vanderbilt University