For over 40 years, the Mayor’s Summer time 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 Training (RAISE) this summer season, MSYEP created a STEAM-focused studying website on the Institute. Eleven college students joined this system to be taught coding and programming expertise by the lens of “Knowledge Activism.”
MSYEP’s partnership with MIT offers a chance for Cambridge excessive schoolers to achieve publicity to extra pathways for his or her future careers and schooling. The Mayor’s Program goals to respect college students’ time and present the worth of their work, so members are compensated with an hourly wage as they be taught workforce expertise 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 expertise 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 Group Outreach Administrator for MIT Workplace of Authorities and Group Relations (OGCR), says, “I see this as a mannequin for a brand new kind of partnership between MIT and Cambridge MSYEP. Particularly, an MIT analysis challenge that includes college students from Cambridge getting paid to be taught, analysis, and develop their very own expertise!”
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 right 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 research how energy operates on this planet, problem energy, and empathize with people who find themselves oppressed.
Walker says, “I needed college students to really feel empowered to include their very own experience, abilities, and pursuits into each exercise. To ensure that college students to completely embrace their educational talents, they need to stay comfy with bringing their full selves into information activism.”
As Kundargi and Walker recruited college students for the Knowledge Activism studying website, they needed to verify the cohort of scholars — the vast majority of whom are people of shade — felt represented at MIT and felt they’d the company for his or her voice to be heard. “The pioneers on this area are individuals who appear to be them,” Walker says, talking of well-known information activists Timnit Gebru, Rediet Abebe, and Pleasure Buolamwini.
When this system started this summer season, a number of the college students weren’t conscious of the methods information science and synthetic intelligence exacerbate systemic oppression in society, or a number of the instruments presently getting used to mitigate these societal harms. In consequence, Walker says, the scholars needed to be taught extra about discriminatory design in each side of life. They had been additionally thinking about creating accountable machine studying algorithms and AI equity metrics.
A distinct aspect 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 schooling, particularly creating and instructing 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 right way to leverage extra alternatives for college students with various 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 id, essential consciousness, collective obligation, liberation centered educational/achievement id, in addition to the activism expertise to make use of computing to remodel a multi-layered system of limitations during which racism persists. Walker says, “We inspired college students to exhibit competency in each pillar as a result of all the pillars are interconnected and construct upon one another.”
Walker developed a collection of interactive coding and project-based actions that targeted on understanding systemic racism, using information science to research systemic oppression, information drawing, accountable machine studying, how racism could be embedded into AI, and completely different AI equity metrics.
This was the scholars’ first time studying the right way to create information visualizations utilizing the programming language Python and the info evaluation device Pandas. In a single challenge meant to look at how completely different programs of oppression can have an effect on completely different features 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 concerning the African People who impressed them.
RAISE employed Olivia Dias, Sophia Brady, Lina Henriquez, and Zeynep Yalcin by the MIT Undergraduate Analysis Alternative Program (UROP) and PRG employed freelancer Matt Taylor to work with Walker on creating the curriculum and designing interdisciplinary expertise tasks. Walker and the 4 undergraduate researchers constructed an intersectional information evaluation exercise about completely different examples of systemic oppression. PRG additionally employed three highschool college students to check actions and provide insights about making the curriculum partaking for program members. All through this system, the Knowledge Activism group taught college students in small teams, frequently requested college students the right way to enhance every exercise, and structured every lesson primarily based on the scholars’ pursuits. Walker says Dias, Brady, Henriquez, and Yalcin had been invaluable to cultivating a supportive classroom atmosphere and serving to college students full their tasks.
Scholar Nina says, “It’s opened my eyes to a special aspect 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 thinking about making use of to high schools with robust laptop science packages so she will 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, “By means of hands-on studying by laptop programming, Cambridge highschool college students have the distinctive alternative to see themselves as information scientists. College students had been ready be taught methods to fight discrimination that happens by synthetic intelligence.” In an Instagram submit, Siddiqui additionally stated, “I had a blast visiting the scholars and studying about their tasks.”
College students labored on an exercise that requested them to examine how information science is perhaps used to assist marginalized communities. They remodeled their solutions into block-printed T-shirt designs, carving footage 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 symbolize information saved and locked away by third occasion apps. He says, “I wish to open that cage and restore my information to myself and see what could be performed with it.”
Many college students needed to see extra illustration in each the media they eat and throughout numerous skilled fields. Nina talked concerning the significance of illustration in media and the way that might contribute to higher illustration within the tech business, whereas Kiki talked about encouraging extra girls to pursue STEM fields. Jesmin stated, “I needed to indicate that information science is accessible to everybody, regardless of their origin or language you communicate. I wrote ‘hi there’ in Bangla, Arabic, and English, as a result of I communicate all three languages they usually all resonate with me.”
“Total, I hope the scholars proceed to make use of their information activism expertise to re-envision a society that helps marginalized teams,” says Walker. “Furthermore, I hope they’re empowered to turn out to be information scientists and perceive how their race could be a optimistic a part of their id.”
