The Future of Work and AI Begins in the Classroom: Navigating Personal Uncertainty through Collective Action and Reimagination

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Empowering youth for a digital future: civic dialogue, news literacy, and collective action in global classrooms

Proposal

1 Problem and purpose

The rapid development of AI presents students with an ever-shifting workplace. According to the New York Federal Reserve, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has exceeded the national average by the most in more than three decades (Rugaber 2025). A 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center finds that more workers are worried about the future of AI in the workplace than they are hopeful (Lin 2025). For youth, this means an uncertain future where the career pathways of previous generations no longer seem applicable.

Despite the urgency of this problem for young people, this topic remains underaddressed in K-12 education. Specifically, AI and the Future of Work is often described in a reductionist manner and not informed by a nuanced understanding of different interplays of social elements. As a result, youth are faced with a narrative of technological determinism that centers around the inevitable dominance of AI in our future. Yet, when presented with a world characterized by increasing inequality, particularly as a result of those technologies, each critical step we take as a society will have significant implications on the emergence of the future. The role of education in creating peace and community needs to be reimagined. Our divided world does not need more education that promotes individualism amidst future uncertainty. Instead, this time is demanding a reimagination for collective action.

To tackle these problems, we apply research from a variety of disciplines–Education, HCI, History, and Activism–into a 5-lesson curriculum that guides students in understanding AI’s implications in the future of work. Strongly guided by traditions in political organizing and constructivist pedagogy, this curriculum guides youth to form their own value principles regarding the meaning of work, thereby understanding that their individual future is inextricably tied to a societal vision that requires collective action from all of us.

This mini-curriculum is guided by the framework of a series of international social studies curriculum subject areas, including: Character and Citizenship Education in Singapore; Japan’s Dōtoku, or Moral Education; and Hong Kong’s Citizenship, Economics, and Society. Rather than focusing on a passive learning of history and geography as traditional social studies does, these subject areas promote a positive reflection of students’ own lives in relation to their own interactions with AI.

Each lesson is around 45-minutes long, guided by a line of inquiry, and follows a learning trajectory from individual meanings of work to collective action.

Lesson 1: The philosophical meaning of work; the history of interplay between technology and work
Lesson 2: Understanding AI’s different impacts on shifting the workplace
Lesson 3: Applying skills to future scenarios
Lesson 4: Imagining the best and worst versions of individual future work with AI
Lesson 5: Building a collective future

2 Design principles

The design of the mini-curriculum is informed by a number of theoretical frameworks.

Firstly, the curriculum is guided by a constructivist pedagogy, providing frameworks that allow students to actively construct their own knowledge through personal experiences. This design is critical as any instruction on an emerging future of work would be irresponsible; instead, such a future can only be envisioned through students’ own values and priorities, while supported by research-backed frameworks. For instance, students interrogate the skills they need based on their ideal future career.

Given these frameworks, students construct their vision of the future based on their own values. In Lesson 1, students will participate in a series of philosophical debates on the meaning of work, ending in an individual writing exercise that summarizes what work means to them personally. This writing will be referenced throughout the unit as an anchoring point for how students situate themselves and form their own opinions regarding this emerging future. This will be especially helpful as students consider AI in the workplace through a framework of Automation-Augmentation-Creation-Revaluation in Lesson 2 and interrogate AI-based, human-centered, or general skills as the most useful for the future in Lesson 3.

Apart from a constructivist pedagogy, this curriculum is informed by the Alinsky Organizing Model, a community organizing methodology that empowers community action by identifying individual problems (Post 2018). This organizing tradition is relevant as a pedagogy, as it provides a platform to articulate individual concerns while tying them together to a collective agenda.

Lessons 4 and 5 embody this model. In Lesson 4, students are asked to imagine two possible futures of their ideal job given AI–a best-case scenario where the incorporation of AI makes the job even more desirable, and a worst-case scenario where AI makes the job less attractive. Students are asked to use generative AI tools to turn their imaginations into reality through pictures and text –these will become their tools of advocacy as students share the contrast between the two futures. In Lesson 5, students are then asked: Who determines how AI is incorporated into your job? In other words, who has the decision-making power between the two futures? Guided by case studies of governance and policy, labor union pushbacks, organizational power distribution, and influences of new AI technologies, students will turn into participating citizens, grasping collective action for all as the precondition to shaping a desirable future for one. At the end of the unit, students walk out of the classroom with a list of actions that they will take as individuals and as a community.

3 Design highlights

Applied from a wide array of disciplines, this curriculum uniquely guides students to grapple the uncertain future. More importantly, it is designed to be timeless. Seeking to guide students on “how to think” rather than “what to think”, the curriculum isa useful framework for teaching about an emerging future through a civically-engaged, action-oriented approach, regardless of how far AI has advanced into the workplace. Through reimagining a collective possibility from an individually oriented topic, this curriculum serves the purpose of peace education in this divided world.

Authors

• Cunyan Ma, MIT Media Lab

• Daniella DiPaola

• Cynthia Breazeal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology