We are delighted to announce that the Knowledge Equity Lab is a recipient of the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Pedagogies of Inclusive Excellence (PIE) Fund!
The PIE Fund aims to support the advancement of equity-based, holistic, accessible, anti-racist, and decolonial pedagogies and curricular development, by providing faculty with an opportunity to propose initiatives that foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and mentorship across the campus and within the broader community.
Building on the Knowledge for Change Tkaronto Hub’s Innovation Lab Centering Community Participatory Knowledge Co-creation in the Age of AI, our proposed project aims to critically examine artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and governance in higher education and community organizations, prioritizing justice, pluralism, and relational accountability. We wish to build shared capacity to recognize and respond to uncritical, opaque, or extractive AI deployments that normalize surveillance, data capture, vendor lock-in, and epistemic injustice.
This fall, using Theatre of the Oppressed and Photovoice, students and community partners will be invited to generate stories, images, and performances that cultivate “critical seeing” and analyses of power. Grounded in Paulo Freire’s scholarship on critical pedagogy and Augusto Boal’s participatory theatre praxis, “resistance” means reflection with collective action. Through our arts-based programming, we are committed to fostering a space where our participants—whose voices are often omitted from decision-making processes, yet are the most impacted by the lack of critical governance and policy around AI—can share their experiences, craft and raise critical questions, and imagine alternatives together. They will have the opportunity to actively rehearse responses to the inevitability narratives surrounding AI adoption, and choose to engage, adapt, set limits, demand accountability, or decline adoption when AI undermines consent, equity, and plural ways of knowing.
This project will be led by the Knowledge for Change Tkaronto Hub (Knowledge Equity Lab–UTSC, The Centre for Learning and Development in Regent Park, and the Ontario Council for International Cooperation), and will culminate in the co-creation of a multimedia manual on the Pedagogy of Resistance to Uncritical and Extractive AI Adoption.
Stay tuned for more updates!