Co-designing Equitable AI for Collaboration: Forefronting Relational Imaginations towards Expansive Technological Possibilities

• In Event: Co-Design as a Means of Creating Inclusive and Effective Technology-Enhanced Learning Experiences

Abstract

Objectives
We describe our efforts to co-design – with historically minoritized youth – equitable possibilities for education and artificial intelligence (AI) based learning tools. Deeply entrenched inequities in US K-12 schooling have closed off opportunities for learning and designing for historically minoritized youth; we have an ethical obligation to engage their hopes, dreams and concerns around the use of AI in schools. However, imagining new possibilities for technology alone is insufficient as those technologies become embedded within complex organizational contexts where expansive ideas may be appropriated instead into the status quo. Thus we ask: how do we create co-design contexts for historically underserved youth to imagine both technically feasible AI metaphors for learning and the organizational conditions that support the eventual uptake of these metaphors?

Theoretical Framework
Our framework begins with the question of how historically minoritized youth have been positioned within their schools today and then within the co-design context itself. Participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) highlights how deficit oriented ideologies shape learning tools imagined for historically minoritized youth, and attunes us to considering subject-subject relations as the object of co-design contexts. Hence our goal, rather than explicitly imagining technologies as the key outcome of our co-design space, is the development of transformative agency (Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2019) where youth develop agency to engage with and transform their local contexts towards their desired civic outcomes. Finally, as new, more equitable relationships and technologies are imagined for schools, we draw on infrastructural speculation (Wong et al., 2020) to support youth in imagining the organizational contexts that will help to make their social envisionings a reality.

Data Sources/Methodology
We describe three co-design workshops conducted between 2021-2024 that engaged minoritized youth in imagining new possibilities for in-school collaboration and AI learning tools. These workshops engaged many of the same high-school aged youth over a multi-year engagement. We transcribed video recordings and field notes conducted during the workshops, and annotated the transcriptions for indices of becoming historical actors (Gutierrez et al., 2019). Finally, we created analytic memos across our workshops that drew connections between the indices of becoming historical actors and described how they shaped the imagining of new infrastructures.

Results/Findings
We found that our multi-year approach supported youth in developing transformative agency, thereby opening up equitable possibilities for learning technologies that forefront their own agency within typically hierarchical classroom spaces. While youth started off by imagining learning technologies that were deficit-oriented, opportunities to re-imagine classroom relationships opened the door to a new metaphor for AI-based collaborative learning such as the Community Builder (CoBi) AI Partner that supports youth and teachers in building and reflecting on collaborative norms they themselves find to be meaningful. We found that while youth at first resisted the idea of using CoBi inside classrooms, infrastructural speculative methods (e.g., a modified Theater of the Oppressed Activity from Boal & McBride, 2013) supported them in imagining how they might build organizational contexts that would support CoBi in being taken up in the ways that they hoped for.

Authors

• Michael Alan Chang, Boston University

• Thomas Breideband, University of Colorado - Boulder