The National Science Foundation’s Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings awarded $2,249,999 to Oakland, California-based nonprofit YR Media — a “media, technology and music training center and platform for emerging BIPOC content creators who are using their voices to change the world” — to teach “underrepresented” and “underserved” youth how to integrate critical theory with artificial intelligence technologies.

{snip}

The program, consisting of participants who “are 90% youth of color and 80% low income,” involved partnerships with the MIT Media Lab and Google staff and was “grounded in sociocultural learning theory” predicated on a “theoretical framework” of “Computational Thinking plus Critical Pedagogy.”

{snip}

Emphasizing the sociocultural component of the program, the grant poses a series of questions like: “What do underrepresented youth understand about AI and its role in society?” and “What are the features of an engaging ethics-centered pedagogy with AI?”

It further affirms the program’s divisive attempt at stirring racial consciousness by indicating that “[t]he research design will use ethnographic techniques and design research to study and analyze youth learning.” Emphasizing the different experiences of various racial demographics, “ethnographic techniques” like those employed here are often just veiled attempts to make students think they’re oppressed via the manipulation of statistics.

Young participants were encouraged to view “AI through an ethics-and-equity lens,” which the program suggests is “desperately needed by the digital media and tech sectors as well as the general public.”

{snip}

The program further explored “the educational conditions that promote STEM engagement among BIPOC youth and others who have the most to offer and the most at stake in building ethical, equitable, and expressive AI.”

{snip}