AI in Higher Ed: Advancing Equity and Critical Consciousness in and Beyond the Classroom
Date: June 5, 2025
Institute Description
The CECW 2025 Institute will delve into the paradox of AI in higher education: how can we harness its benefits while addressing its equity challenges? Often, the advantages of AI are celebrated without fully acknowledging its limitations, such as unexpected errors, gaps in knowledge, and inherent biases. As AI proficiency increasingly becomes a job requirement, developing critical consciousness—an awareness of how to reflect on and address issues of exclusion, oppression, and disenfranchisement—becomes essential.
Participants will explore how AI can integrate equity and community cultural wealth in and beyond the classroom. We will consider strategies for integrating AI across disciplines, ensuring that its implementation promotes rather than undermines equity, belonging, and justice.
CECW Institute Outcomes
Learning Outcomes
- Inquire: Critically examine and analyze the ethical considerations, risks, and gaps in AI use, such as how inbuilt biases (race, gender, disabilities, etc.) in AI systems impact learning outcomes.
- Gain insight into the dual nature of AI as both a tool for advancing equity and community cultural wealth as well as a potential driver of systemic inequities.
- Understand the Impact of inequities embedded in AI within higher education contexts, and how to address them.
- Communicate: Enhance our critical consciousness on the potential benefits and drawbacks of AI as an assistive tool in higher education and evaluate the impact of AI on specific outcomes.
- Institutional Collaboration: Engage in cross-disciplinary discussions on how AI can be used to advance equity across all levels of the institution.
- Participate in conversations to critically examine and co-create equitable and effective practices of AI use across a higher education institution.
- Develop a critical consciousness of when and why the use of AI is not conducive to specific outcomes/s.
- Act and Grow: Develop AI-driven strategies to foster discipline-specific, culturally responsive experiences that enhance community cultural wealth across higher education.
- Equity and AI in Practice: Utilize strategies for fostering AI literacy among faculty, staff, and students to navigate the technology’s strengths and limitations, including its biases and gaps.
- AI Integration centered on Cultural Humility: Explore approaches to leveraging AI in developing and implementing culturally responsive practices that foster community cultural wealth.
COMING SOON: Call for Proposals
We invite proposals that explore one or more of the Institute learning outcomes above with a focus on the practical applications of AI integration in higher education.