Infrastructuring for Politicized Care: Building AI-Supported Collaboration Tools in a Long-term Research-Practice Partnership (Poster 3)

• In Event: Advancing Methods, Theories, and Conceptualizations of Infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Objectives:
We describe our efforts to infrastructure for politicized care in the context of building artificial intelligence (AI) based tools for education. The authors of this proposal represent an interdisciplinary research institute developing AI tools that support youth and teachers in working together to reflect on their collaboration. For these tools to be taken up in a way that effectively re-mediates inequitable relationships in a classroom, they must be built on a foundation of a caring relationship. Thus we ask: What kinds of actions support and inhibit building an infrastructure for politicized care in AI-supported classroom contexts?

Theoretical Framework:
We build on the idea of co-design as infrastructuring for building organizations’ capacity to create more equitable systems (Penuel, 2019). Our conception of care starts with the work of Tronto & Fisher (1990), who conceptualize care as personal and embodied wellness embedded within social relations. McKinney De Royston et al., (2017) describes how racializing forces narrow the needs that are welcomed within formal academic contexts, which suggests the need for a broad, politicized notion of care (see also Valenzuela, 1999) to guide infrastructuring. Our framework emphasizes several elements of infrastructure: curricular routines that engage students, teachers, and parents, AI-based learning technologies, and teacher professional development. Each of these relationships is imagined as part of a long-term partnership that increases trust and the collective capacity of each group to address issues of power.

Data Sources and Methodologies
We draw from an analysis of field notes and video data from two co-design sessions with youth, teachers, district leaders, and parents (a) a multi-year Learning Futures Workshop series where the notion of AI-supported collaborative community agreements were first developed and (b) professional learning sessions as part of a long-term partnerships with teachers where supports (curricular routines, lessons) were developed to help address the political nature of community agreements. We created analytic memos and coded for moments where co-design partners welcomed or resisted elements of politicized caring infrastructure and then how new infrastructures were collectively imagined.

Findings
We show how politicized care as a foundation of co-design work created the context for teachers to cede power to students in deciding how to collaborate (emphasizing everyday forms of collaboration not conventionally welcomed in academic spaces) and reflecting on their collaborative contexts. Our findings indicate that our long-term partnership with teachers, district leaders, and youth – ones that have already forefronted youth agency – laid the groundwork for the adoption of those community agreements. On the other hand, the politicized nature of the community agreements led to resistance from teachers and district leaders who questioned how the democratic and political elements of community agreements would connect with disciplinary learning outcomes.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
The importance of caring relations within partnerships has been well-established, largely focusing on the immediate, interpersonal relationships between partners (Riedy & Penuel, 2024). We build on this literature by demonstrating how partnerships played a key role in helping us create the organizational context for relationships centering politicized care.

Authors

• Michael Alan Chang, Boston University

• Quentin Biddy, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Jeffrey Bush, University of Colorado - Boulder

• William R. Penuel, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Mon-Lin Ko, University of Colorado - Boulder