Category: 4/ Fellow”s Projects

Aula Fellow Project

  • Investigating Transition Phases: An Autoethnographic Study of International Women of Color Engineering Educators in the US

    Investigating Transition Phases: An Autoethnographic Study of International Women of Color Engineering Educators in the US

    The study aims to explore the transitions experienced by international Women of Color (IWoC) engineers in the US as they navigate their academic and professional lives. Motivated by the lack of research on IWoC’s experiences, specifically around transition points of their lives, four international Women of Color participated in this qualitative auto-ethnographic deep-dive. All four researchers have attended college in the United States for their high educational degrees focused on education/engineering education and are currently involved in engineering education scholarship work.

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  • Making Space for Critical Action: Re-visioning Computational Thinking

    Making Space for Critical Action: Re-visioning Computational Thinking

    While school makerspaces promise to inspire and excite, the challenge of meaningfully integrating them into schools remains. Guided by a philosophy of praxis that stresses the need for education to interweave theory, action, and reflection to advance positive social change in our communities (Freire, 1970), this paper reports on the co-design of a school space called the Critical Action Learning Lab (CALL) for inclusive making to support computational thinking and critical action through curriculum-informed learning

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  • Outsiders: Pathways and Perspectives from Engineering Education PhDs Outside Academia

    Outsiders: Pathways and Perspectives from Engineering Education PhDs Outside Academia

    This article presents a critical exploration and recommendation based on the lived experiences of PhD graduates in Engineering Education who have ventured into non-academic career paths. The work is rooted in an auto-ethnographic research approach, and the report aims to mimic a live virtual panel. It seeks to elucidate the experiences and challenges faced by PhD graduates who diverged from traditional academic roles to pursue careers in industry, entrepreneurship, consulting, and pre-college leadership. These narratives reveal a complex landscape of motivations, perceived hierarchical barriers, and under-recognition within academic and non-academic sectors, highlighting a divide between industry and academia. The paper delves into the unique challenges faced by non-academic engineering educators, such as confronting a culture that often questions their value outside traditional faculty roles and the overarching perception that non-research roles are less significant. Despite these challenges, the authors argue for the vital role these professionals play in bridging the gap between research, instruction, and practical application in engineering education. They emphasize the importance of ASEE or similar professional societies in recognizing and leveraging the diverse contributions of non-academic engineering educators to foster a more inclusive and supportive community. Key takeaways and recommendations include the necessity for ASEE and similar bodies to shift normative expectations, create inclusive and equitable environments, and actively value diverse career trajectories. The paper calls for actionable strategies to build more inclusive professional communities, create safe spaces for discussing career diversity, and establish stronger connections between current students and diverse alums. The overarching goal is to cultivate an environment where all forms of contribution to engineering education are valued, encouraging a broader spectrum of career considerations among graduates and professionals. The authors seek not only to share insights but also to galvanize a nascent community of like-minded engineering educators aspiring or working outside the traditional academic sphere.

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  • Reimagining AI Conference Mission Statements to Promote Inclusion in the Emerging Institutional Field of AI

    Reimagining AI Conference Mission Statements to Promote Inclusion in the Emerging Institutional Field of AI

    AI conferences play a crucial role in education by providing a platform for knowledge sharing, networking, and collaboration, shaping the future of AI research and applications, and informing curricula and teaching practices. This work-in-progress, innovative practice paper presents preliminary findings from textual analysis of mission statements from select artificial intelligence (AI) conferences to uncover information gaps and opportunities that hinder inclusivity and accessibility in the emerging institutional field of AI. By examining language and focus, we identify potential barriers to entry for individuals interested in the AI domain, including educators, researchers, practitioners, and students from underrepresented groups. Our paper employs the use of the Language as Symbolic Action (LSA) framework [1] to reveal information gaps in areas such as no explicit emphasis on DEI, undefined promises of business and personal empowerment and power, and occasional elitism. These preliminary findings uncover opportunities for improvement, including the need for more inclusive language, an explicit commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, clearer communications about conference goals and expectations, and emphasis on strategies to address power imbalances and promote equal opportunities for participation. The impact of our work is bi-fold: 1) we demonstrate preliminary results from using the Language as Symbolic Action framework to text-analysis of mission statements, and 2) our preliminary findings will be valuable to the education community in understanding gaps in current AI conferences and consequently, outreach. Our work is thus of practical use for conference organizers, engineering and CS educators and other AI-related domains, researchers, and the broader AI community. Our paper highlights the need for more intentional and inclusive conference design to foster a diverse and vibrant community and community of AI professionals.

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  • Teaching Future-Makers: Outcomes of an International Design Workshop for Critical Action Educators

    Teaching Future-Makers: Outcomes of an International Design Workshop for Critical Action Educators

    This paper reports on recent developments of the Critical Action Learning Exchange (Carvalho et al., 2021), an international community of educators who seek to respond to social and environmental issues that affect their students. We report on an international design workshop that engaged a cohort of teachers in designing Critical Action Learning activities for their students in the Summer of 2023. Participants (n=39) completed 16 curriculum designs for grade levels from kindergarten to university, addressing a broad range of socio-environmental issues and adopting diverse approaches, such as Arts-Based Critical Action, Community Engagement, Critical Making, Games for Critical Action, and Storytelling. This paper examines our Professional Development model, together with an analysis of teacher participants’ ideas and their design products. We investigate what forms of scaffolding can facilitate the changes of practice needed for teachers to become critical action educators and support their Critical Action Learning designs.

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  • World AI: Women in AI

    World AI: Women in AI

    A collaborative event with Women in AI. We asked conference participants to tell us about their hard questions in AI, and had many fruitful conversations for future collaborations.

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  • World AI: Women in AI

    World AI: Women in AI

    We organized with Women in AI for this 2024 World AI group photo on the main stage. Thank you to everyone who participated!

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  • AI Governance for the Global Majority: Understanding Opportunities and Challenges

    AI Governance for the Global Majority: Understanding Opportunities and Challenges

    Artificial intelligence (AI) will impact individuals, communities, and institutions worldwide in both unique and universal ways. While public and private sector actors have begun to build the foundations for achieving more secure and trustworthy AI, the voices shaping the AI governance agenda are primarily from the Global North. To govern AI in a way that reflects a global range of contexts, it is imperative to adopt a more inclusive lens in defining its harms and opportunities. Broadly accepted AI governance principles may struggle to translate into practice without a more explicit focus on how priorities and challenges prevalent in the Global Majority intersect with AI.

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  • Autonomous weapons: Palantir, Airbus engineers seek to calm ‘killer robot’ fears

    Autonomous weapons: Palantir, Airbus engineers seek to calm ‘killer robot’ fears

    Our Fellow Tammy Mackenzie was recently interviewed by FRANCE 24’s Tech24 segment to share her thoughts on AI in Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS).

    The segment looks into the ethical implications of deploying AI in military operations and discusses the critical need for regulatory frameworks that ensure these technologies are used responsibly. As the conversation around AI evolves, we must engage with these topics. Properly balancing military pragmatism and AI ethics is among the most significant global challenges today.

    How do you think we can achieve a balance between innovation and responsibility?

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  • Leveraging AI in education

    Leveraging AI in education

    To stay ahead, it is essential to adapt to the rise of AI by intelligently incorporating it into all levels of the education process

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  • A Global South Perspective on Explainable AI

    A Global South Perspective on Explainable AI

    A context-driven approach is necessary to translate principles like explainability into practice globally. These vignettes illustrate how AI can be made more trustworthy for users in the Global South through more creative, context-rooted approaches to legibility.

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  • De la gestión de crisis a la crisis de gestión: Responsabilidad y democracias liberales en el estallido de la pandemia de la COVID-19

    De la gestión de crisis a la crisis de gestión: Responsabilidad y democracias liberales en el estallido de la pandemia de la COVID-19

    El estallido de la pandemia de la COVID-19 conmocionó a las sociedades de todo el mundo. En su esfuerzo por adaptar sus respuestas a la crisis a sus propias condiciones de supervivencia, los gobiernos tendieron desde el principio a recurrir a argumentos que limitaban la rendición de cuentas frente a la población. Las democracias liberales no fueron ajenas a esta forma de abordar el problema. En ese contexto, sus dirigentes esgrimieron la metáfora de la guerra para describir su posición como garantes de la supervivencia de la población frente a la nueva amenaza. Atenazados entre la incertidumbre y la necesidad de predecir la naturaleza y la evolución del enemigo invisible, sus respuestas pusieron en entredicho la responsabilidad política, profesional y personal de los dirigentes. En este artículo se ofrece una reflexión sobre el nivel de responsabilidad de los gobiernos de las democracias liberales en la gestión de la pandemia. Durante la crisis, los decisores tendieron a dejarse llevar por las narrativas que les resultaban más beneficiosas para escabullirse de sus responsabilidades, apuntalando así sus necesidades políticas a corto plazo a través del uso de metáforas belicistas, el juego de culpas, la competición con otros países y la dispersión de las fuentes en el proceso de toma de decisiones. Esta realidad supone hoy un llamado a la reflexión a los actores sociales, incluidos los expertos, intelectuales y medios de comunicación, para trascender la retórica predominante en la gestión de la pandemia y la “nueva normalidad” que le siguió, de manera que la dinámica de alteraciones constantes de las reglas del juego y las responsabilidades pueda dar paso, en el futuro, a un escenario con menos arbitrariedad y más rendición de cuentas.

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