| dc.description.abstract | Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an everyday presence in our lives, including in our literacy practices, but is still not the subject of instruction for many students. In this dissertation, I explore using a critical posthumanist literacy framework to guide the design and teaching of curriculum around AI and ethics for middle school students, focusing on AI ontology, entangled agency, ethics and sociotechnical justice, and speculative pedagogy. I report here on my design and teaching of a quarter-long unit on AI and ethics in a 7th and 8th grade class, finding that students developed complex understandings of AI, but tended to overgeneralize about where and what it is; students saw tensions between data privacy and safety, but most had few concerns about their personal, daily uses of AI, much less how AI might “use” them; students applied ethical lenses and identified major ethical issues with AI, and generally maintained hope for our future with AI; and that speculative fiction consumption and production allowed for students to think about their everyday reality, to conduct ethical thought experiments, and to practice or prepare for the future. While critical literacy practices and posthumanist theory were generative in this iteration of design, future designs should explore more what “just enough” technical expertise is necessary to do critical work, should continue finding hope and joy in the face of attenuated human agency, and should develop strategies for teaching with an uncertain (rapidly changing, opaque) topic. In conclusion, I offer an initial set of critical posthumanist literacy practices, where students identify, critique, question, and create with everyday AIs. | |
