Facilitating Teens as Ethical Sensemakers of Technology
Rotem Landesman, Jean Salac, Amy J. Ko · 2024
With the growing awareness of emerging technologies' impacts on teens' lives, families, and communities, rethinking the ways in which we educate and talk about these innovations and their moral and ethical complexities are gaining steam. We present a novel pedagogical intervention that blends techniques from Philosophy for Children (P4C), a pedagogical approach that teaches youth reasoning and argumentative skills, with Youth as Philosophers of Technology, a framework for computing education that foregrounds learning how to decode and unmake tech's relationship with power through artistic, moral and humanistic inquiry, without devaluing core computing practices, such as design, making, coding, and tinkering. We studied this intervention in a summer elective class with 12 students ages 14--18 in the US. Our ongoing data analysis revealed two categories of themes: (1) 'launchpads for ethical sensemaking', namely instances when we observed ethical sensemaking around technology, and (2) 'expressions of ethical sensemaking', namely what students' ethical sensemaking looked like when discussing the ethical implications of technology. We hope to catalyze discussions for both researchers on characterizations of and growth around ethical sensemaking of technology, as well as practitioners on implementations of Youth as Philosophers of Technology and P4C ideas in their classrooms.