Emergent Technology, Emergent Critique: Students and Teachers Developing Critical AI Literacy through Participatory Design around Generative AI

2026-04-23

AI Summary

This study addresses the risk of generative AI unilaterally shaping educational practice by engaging eleventh-grade Latinx students and high school teachers in a five-week participatory design process to collaboratively explore AI applications and pedagogical strategies. Centering youth voices, the project cultivated three critical AI literacy practices: collectively interrogating AI assumptions, co-learning through complementary expertise, and critically engaging AI through culturally grounded knowledge and creativity. Qualitative analysis of video recordings and design artifacts demonstrates that teacher–student collaboration not only enabled the co-construction of ethical and practical norms for AI use but also yielded a transferable framework of reflective practices. These findings offer an innovative pathway for integrating emerging technologies into education in ways that are equitable, contextually responsive, and critically informed.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Bias, Fairness & Equity
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

Who gets to decide how generative AI tools enter students' classrooms? We report on a five-week participatory design program in which three 11th-grade Latinx students and three high school teachers in California negotiated how generative AI tools would be used and taught about in learning environments. Drawing on video recordings and designed artifacts, we ask: what critical AI literacy practices emerged as students and teachers jointly designed how generative AI tools would be used and taught about? Our analysis reveals three practices: collectively unsettling assumptions about AI, mutual learning through complementary expertise, and grounding AI critique in cultural knowledge and creative practice. Students and teachers developed these practices through the design work itself. This case contributes strategies for designing with youth around an emergent technology like generative AI toward critical AI literacy. It extends work on youth as protagonists by showing how this approach enables students to shape both the adoption and the interrogation of these tools in their learning environments.

Problem

• generative AI
• critical AI literacy
• participatory design
• youth agency
• classroom integration

Innovation

• participatory design
• critical AI literacy
• generative AI
• youth protagonism
• co-design