A little less than a year ago, my friends and colleagues, Marie Heath and Stephanie Smith Budhai reached out to me asking me if I would be willing to write a foreword to their book Critical AI in K-12 Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Cultivating Justice and Joy.

I think it was the combination of “justice” and “joy” that really struck me and I knew I HAD to write this. That said, I did have some trepidation in taking this on becuase I wasn’t entirely sure, as I wrote in my email to them: whether “I was the right person for this.” I said, “Though the topics and themes in this book, inform what I do and how I think about the world, they are not necessarily the focus of my scholarly work.” Well let me just say they managed to convince me and I ended up writing a foreword that I am actually quite proud of.

The book is now published and available for purchase. In my foreword I discuss how we might thoughtfully engage with AI technologies by developing what literacy scholar Myers calls “the ability to consciously subvert signs.” Beyond merely using AI tools, I argue that true AI literacy requires us to recognize the historical and cultural contexts these technologies emerge from, and to cultivate the agency to bend them toward more just and joyful purposes. Drawing inspiration from diverse examples of creative resistance, Diego Rivera’s murals, skateboarding culture, and Paulo Freire’s literacy work, I propose that meaningful engagement with AI demands both technical understanding and a commitment to transformative education that centers human creativity, agency, and liberation.

(Note: I have written elsewhere in this blog about how I have adapted this definition of literacy, as put forth by Myers. In this foreword, written before that change, still has the older definition. More on that shift here.)

I am thrilled to share the foreword (courtesy of Harvard Educational Press). If you can’t access the embed below, you can download a pre-publication version of the foreword.

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Addendum

I was invited, a few months ago, to moderate a virtual book talk organized by the Gutman Library at Harvard with Stephanie and Marie. You can see the entire conversation below.