Keynote Preview: Dr. Tiera Tanksley
Civics of Tech Announcements
3rd Annual Conference Announcement: We are excited to announce that our third annual Civics of Technology conference will be held online on August 1st, from 11-4 pm EST and on August 2nd, 2024 from 11-3pm! Our featured keynotes will be Dr. Tiera Tanksley and Mr. Brian Merchant. You can register and learn more on our 2024 conference page. Conference submissions are now closed, and submission decisions will be sent out soon.
Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 07/11/24. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. To avoid July 4th holiday conflicts, our next Tech Talk will be on Tuesday, July 9th, 2024 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
by Jacob Pleasants and Dan Krutka
In anticipation of the conference, we’d like to direct the Civics of Technology community toward the work of one of our keynotes, Dr. Tiera Tanksley.
Dr. Tiera Tanksley is an Op Ed Public Voices Fellow for Technology in the Public Interest with the MacArthur Foundation and Post-doctoral Fellow for Youth, Technology, and Public Policy at UCLA. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist and rewrite racially biased technologies.
For a closer look at Dr. Tanksley’s scholarship, we highlight her recent (2024) paper that appeared in English Teaching: Practice and Critique: “‘We’re changing the system with this one’: Black students using critical race algorithmic literacies to subvert and survive AI-mediated racism in school.” In her study, she examined how students develop Critical Race Algorithmic Literacy, a construct she has developed and advanced as a vital capacity given the current developments around AI in schools and society. She says:
The permanence and pervasiveness of anti-black racism in schools, further entrenched and substantiated by anti-black digital technologies, brings race-evasive and ahistoric constructions of “ethical,”“critical” and “effective” use of AI in schools into question. We must challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions that undergird these terms, and instead ask, “Ethical for whom? Critical of what? And efficient to what ends? (p. 3)
Her students were part of a summer program targeting Black-identifying students called “Race Abolition and Artificial Intelligence.” During the program, Dr. Tanksley helped her students develop both technical and critical understandings of algorithmic systems, including AI technologies. Her students explored the social implications of those systems, with a focus on how anti-Blackness becomes embedded in those systems. In her qualitative study of students’ reflections and responses from the experience, she found the following:
First, CRAL [Critical Race Algorithmic Literacy] was associated with an increased critical awareness of AI in general, and in relation to anti-black racism in particular. Second, this critical awareness of anti-blackness and AI was linked to more robust interrogations of the rhetorical underpinnings and material consequences of “unethical” approaches to AI in their current schools. Third, CRAL was associated with efforts to reimagine and redesign AI systems – and the sociopolitical systems and educational structures that surrounded them – in ways that protect, uplift and support Black educational success. (p. 8)
Through her work, Dr. Tanksley shows the importance both of critiquing current systems and imagining more just technological futures. You can find more of Dr. Tanksley’s work by visiting her site. We look forward to learning more about her Tech Imaginary during her keynote at our conference on August 2nd!
If you haven’t already registered to attend, you can find the registration link on our conference page.
Reference
Tanksley, T. C. (2024). “We’re changing the system with this one”: Black students using critical race algorithmic literacies to subvert and survive AI-mediated racism in school. English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 23(1), 36–56. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-08-2023-0102