The field of AI in education is growing rapidly, supported by new capabilities and buttressed by promises of the technology’s promise to transform education. Research has long played a role in developing knowledge of AI’s capabilities, particularly with respect to personalized learning. Given the rise in interest in AI’s potential, now is a critical time for investigating and developing new approaches for design that not only explore how AI can support learning but that also center the purposes for AI and that give youth, educators, and communities a say in the purposes and means for using AI in schools. In contrast responsible and equitable design and development requires more collaborative negotiation of the purposes for AI tools, as well as the collaborative design and testing of these tools. Based on work from a large AI research institute, I propose a broader discussion on AI’s purpose in education and illustrate how to support broad participation in design for use in a more equitable world. Considering for whom AI is designed, involving diverse stakeholders in its creation, and aligning AI with ethical principles and educational goals that support democratic and collaborative learning, so that AI might support a more expansive range of purposes for learning than have been pursued in the past.

I design and study curriculum materials, assessments, and professional learning experiences for teachers in STEM education, primarily in science and more recently in AI education. I also study how contemplative practices and critical inquiry can support educators in cultivating more compassionate learning environments and schools. A third line of my research focuses on how long-term research-practice partnerships can be organized to address systemic inequities in education systems linked to race, gender and sexual diversity, and language.

In each of my projects, I work in partnership with educators and education leaders to explore how to attenuate inequities in school systems by: (1) creating equitable classroom cultures that attend to student experience; (2) testing strategies for address epistemic injustices in whose knowledge is elicited and valued; and (3) connecting teaching to the interests, experiences, and identities of learners, particularly those to whom our society owes an education debt. I use a wide range of research methods, including one my colleagues and I developed called design-based implementation research, to test what we design.