Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) has gradually been integrated into major aspects of schooling and academic learning following breakthroughs in algorithmic machine learning over the past decade. Interestingly, history shows us that as new technologies become perceived as ‘normal’ they fade into uncritical aspects of institutions. Considering that schools produce and reproduce social practices and normative behavior through both explicit and implicit codes, the introduction of AI to classrooms can reveal much about schooling. Nevertheless, artificial intelligence technology (specifically new machine learning applications) has yet to be properly framed as a lens with which to critically analyze and interpret school-based inequities. Recent education discourse focuses more on practical applications of technology than on the institutional inequalities that are revealed when analyzing artificial intelligence technology in the classroom. Accordingly, this paper advances the case for a critical artificial intelligence theory as a valuable lens through which to examine institutions, particularly schools. On the cusp of machine learning artificial intelligence becoming widespread in schools’ academic and hidden curricula, establishing a practical epistemology of artificial intelligence may be particularly useful for researchers and scholars who are interested in what artificial intelligence says about school institutions and beyond.
Highlights
Introduction3. The AI effect, hidden AI, and web 3.0
Why do some technologies fit into curricula, but others do not? In what ways do teachers and students use technology? How are decisions made about which technologies to integrate into which schools? Who benefits from certain technologies? Who does not? These questions and many more have gone unanswered
Critical artificial intelligence theory developed in part from a study I conducted on AI-grammar checkers (Toncic, 2020)
Summary
Some of the most pressing questions are about digital technology in the classroom. These, in turn, prompt additional questions about how surveillance, security, and control function in schools To address these questions and better understand how human beings and systems interact with intelligent machines, I suggest a theory that uses new technology (i.e., artificial intelligence) as a lens to interpret institutional systems. By ‘schooling’ I intentionally refer to an understanding of schools as political and economic institutions that articulate education in specific ways (Hall, 1981; Hamilton, 2013). The purpose of a critical artificial intelligence theory for schooling is to regard anew this elusive institution, to peer upon its characteristics not through direct scrutiny but by examining the new technologies that fit, like puzzle pieces, into the existing frameworks of schools. Once we understand ‘why’ and ‘how’ this technology has been adopted by or into schools, perhaps we may obtain better insight into the school institutions serving particular people and places, as well as the inequities that operate unabatedly behind the veneer of schooling
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