ReDDDoT Phase 1: Planning Grant: Supporting Culturally Centered Artificial Intelligence Literacy through Community-Engaged Partnerships

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is shaping human activity in profound and untested ways. A cycle of exclusion often takes root when new technologies, such as AI, emerge such that certain values are privileged over others in the design, development, and deployment of AI. Who designs AI, who has access to AI products, and whose imagination AI is fulfilling must inform how we ensure AI represents the needs, interests, and values of all. This planning grant seeks to enable co-learning and co-development of an AI literacy roadmap recentering diverse cultural knowledges and ways of knowing and being. This sets the stage for ensuring continued reduction and mitigation of potential harm as AI becomes increasingly embedded in future STEM workforce development. This work will allow a diverse group of stakeholders - learning scientists, educators, technologists, and Indigenous thought leaders - to rethink the ways in which we can avoid reinforcing dominant values that shape AI and its development. Through partnership building, framework construction, and proposal development, the project will develop sustainable partnerships that cultivates a broad community of interests across the education, industry, and Indigenous communities to prepare a future STEM+AI workforce; collaboratively construct a culturally-centered AI literacy framework that focuses on cultural and community-based perspectives on AI; and amplify voices from indigenous and other marginalized communities to navigate the responsible design, development and deployment of AI. Collectively, this work seeks to reimagine AI literacy to rethink norms embedded in literacy frameworks thus far. This work is innovative in its integration of research-practice partnership and community-based participatory approach for developing an AI literacy framework, which expands on current AI frameworks through intentional inclusion of multiple communities. This work will provide deeper insight into how different communities can co-develop shared understanding and work collectively to pursue justice-oriented technology development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.