For over 40 years, the Mayor’s Summer season Youth Employment Program (MSYEP, or the Mayor’s Program) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been offering youngsters with their first work expertise, however 2022 introduced a brand new providing. Collaborating with MIT’s Private Robots analysis group (PRG) and Accountable AI for Social Empowerment and Schooling (RAISE) this summer time, MSYEP created a STEAM-focused studying website on the Institute. Eleven college students joined this system to be taught coding and programming abilities via the lens of “Knowledge Activism.”
MSYEP’s partnership with MIT supplies a chance for Cambridge excessive schoolers to achieve publicity to extra pathways for his or her future careers and training. The Mayor’s Program goals to respect college students’ time and present the worth of their work, so individuals are compensated with an hourly wage as they be taught workforce abilities at MSYEP worksites. Along with two ongoing analysis research at MIT, PRG and RAISE developed the six-week Knowledge Activism curriculum to equip college students with critical-thinking abilities so that they really feel ready to make the most of information science to problem social injustice and empower their group.
Rohan Kundargi, Okay-12 Neighborhood Outreach Administrator for MIT Workplace of Authorities and Neighborhood Relations (OGCR), says, “I see this as a mannequin for a brand new sort of partnership between MIT and Cambridge MSYEP. Particularly, an MIT analysis mission that entails college students from Cambridge getting paid to be taught, analysis, and develop their very own abilities!”
Cross-Cambridge collaboration
Cambridge’s Workplace of Workforce Improvement initially contacted MIT OGCR about internet hosting a possible MSYEP worksite that taught Cambridge teenagers the way to code. When Kundargi reached out to MIT pK-12 collaborators, MIT PRG’s graduate analysis assistant Raechel Walker proposed the Knowledge Activism curriculum. Walker defines “information activism” as using information, computing, and artwork to investigate how energy operates on this planet, problem energy, and empathize with people who find themselves oppressed.
Walker says, “I wished college students to really feel empowered to include their very own experience, skills, and pursuits into each exercise. To ensure that college students to totally embrace their educational skills, they need to stay snug with bringing their full selves into information activism.”
As Kundargi and Walker recruited college students for the Knowledge Activism studying website, they wished to verify the cohort of scholars — the vast majority of whom are people of coloration — felt represented at MIT and felt they’d the company for his or her voice to be heard. “The pioneers on this subject are individuals who seem like them,” Walker says, talking of well-known information activists Timnit Gebru, Rediet Abebe, and Pleasure Buolamwini.
When this system started this summer time, among the college students weren’t conscious of the methods information science and synthetic intelligence exacerbate systemic oppression in society, or among the instruments presently getting used to mitigate these societal harms. Because of this, Walker says, the scholars wished to be taught extra about discriminatory design in each side of life. They have been additionally enthusiastic about creating accountable machine studying algorithms and AI equity metrics.
A special facet of STEAM
The event and execution of the Knowledge Activism curriculum contributed to Walker’s and postdoc Xiaoxue Du’s respective analysis at PRG. Walker is finding out AI training, particularly creating and educating information activism curricula for minoritized communities. Du’s analysis explores processes, assessments, and curriculum design that prepares educators to make use of, adapt, and combine AI literacy curricula. Moreover, her analysis targets the way to leverage extra alternatives for college students with numerous studying wants.
The Knowledge Activism curriculum makes use of a “libertatory computing” framework, a time period Walker coined in her place paper with Professor Cynthia Breazeal, director of MIT RAISE, dean for digital studying, and head of PRG, and Eman Sherif, a then-undergraduate researcher from College of California at San Diego, titled “Liberty Computing for African American College students.” This framework ensures that college students, particularly minoritized college students, purchase a sound racial identification, important consciousness, collective obligation, liberation centered educational/achievement identification, in addition to the activism abilities to make use of computing to remodel a multi-layered system of obstacles through which racism persists. Walker says, “We inspired college students to show competency in each pillar as a result of all the pillars are interconnected and construct upon one another.”
Walker developed a sequence of interactive coding and project-based actions that targeted on understanding systemic racism, using information science to investigate systemic oppression, information drawing, accountable machine studying, how racism might be embedded into AI, and totally different AI equity metrics.
This was the scholars’ first time studying the way to create information visualizations utilizing the programming language Python and the info evaluation device Pandas. In a single mission meant to look at how totally different techniques of oppression can have an effect on totally different facets of scholars’ personal identities, college students created datasets with information from their respective intersectional identities. One other exercise highlighted African American achievements, the place college students analyzed two datasets about African American scientists, activists, artists, students, and athletes. Utilizing the info visualizations, college students then created zines in regards to the African Individuals who impressed them.
RAISE employed Olivia Dias, Sophia Brady, Lina Henriquez, and Zeynep Yalcin via the MIT Undergraduate Analysis Alternative Program (UROP) and PRG employed freelancer Matt Taylor to work with Walker on growing the curriculum and designing interdisciplinary expertise initiatives. Walker and the 4 undergraduate researchers constructed an intersectional information evaluation exercise about totally different examples of systemic oppression. PRG additionally employed three highschool college students to check actions and provide insights about making the curriculum participating for program individuals. All through this system, the Knowledge Activism staff taught college students in small teams, frequently requested college students the way to enhance every exercise, and structured every lesson primarily based on the scholars’ pursuits. Walker says Dias, Brady, Henriquez, and Yalcin have been invaluable to cultivating a supportive classroom surroundings and serving to college students full their initiatives.
Pupil Nina says, “It’s opened my eyes to a unique facet of STEM. I didn’t know what ‘information’ meant earlier than this program, or how intersectionality can have an effect on AI and information.” Earlier than MSYEP, Nina took Intro to Pc Science and AP Pc Science, however she has been coding since Women Who Code first sparked her curiosity in center faculty. “The group was very nice. I might speak with different women. I noticed there must be extra girls in STEM, particularly in coding.” Now she’s enthusiastic about making use of to schools with sturdy laptop science applications so she will be able to pursue a coding-related profession.
From MSYEP to the mayor’s workplace
Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui visited the Knowledge Activism studying website on Aug. 9, accompanied by Breazeal. A graduate of MSYEP herself, Siddiqui says, “Via hands-on studying via laptop programming, Cambridge highschool college students have the distinctive alternative to see themselves as information scientists. College students have been in a position be taught methods to fight discrimination that happens via synthetic intelligence.” In an Instagram put up, Siddiqui additionally stated, “I had a blast visiting the scholars and studying about their initiatives.”
College students labored on an exercise that requested them to examine how information science could be used to help marginalized communities. They remodeled their solutions into block-printed T-shirt designs, carving photos of their hopes into rubber block stamps. Some college students targeted on the significance of knowledge privateness, like Jacob T., who drew a birdcage to characterize information saved and locked away by third social gathering apps. He says, “I wish to open that cage and restore my information to myself and see what might be accomplished with it.”
Many college students wished to see extra illustration in each the media they devour and throughout varied skilled fields. Nina talked in regards to the significance of illustration in media and the way that would contribute to larger illustration within the tech business, whereas Kiki talked about encouraging extra girls to pursue STEM fields. Jesmin stated, “I wished to indicate that information science is accessible to everybody, irrespective of their origin or language you communicate. I wrote ‘good day’ in Bangla, Arabic, and English, as a result of I communicate all three languages and so they all resonate with me.”
“Total, I hope the scholars proceed to make use of their information activism abilities to re-envision a society that helps marginalized teams,” says Walker. “Furthermore, I hope they’re empowered to change into information scientists and perceive how their race generally is a optimistic a part of their identification.”
