UC Davis

Background: K-12 AI education has emphasized technical skills over critical inquiry, with fewer opportunities to examine how algorithmic systems encode and reproduce power. This study explores how ELA classrooms can foster students’ critical AI awareness—their capacity to analyze how AI, social hierarchies, and people’s ways of being co-constitute one another. Drawing on onto-epistemic heterogeneity, we centered students’ diverse experiences and knowledges as they investigated algorithmic bias and manipulation. Methods: A three-month unit organized around reading, talking, and writing as exploration was implemented in two secondary English classes (n=69). In this social design-based experiment, we analyzed students’ pre- and post-unit surveys, discussions, and essays to trace the expansion of their thinking about AI. Findings: Students developed “nested” critical orientations, increasingly situating personal (“inward”) concerns within broader systemic critiques. This “outward” expansion was mediated by the interplay of reading, talking, and writing. Students addressed AI’s racialized dimensions and began to envision collective action; surveys indicated expanded awareness of algorithmic influence. Contribution: Grounded in onto-epistemic heterogeneity, this research positions ELA as a disciplinary home for critical AI inquiry, showing how humanities-based literacy practices can foster broadening orientations central to critical AI awareness and to informed, agentic participation in an algorithmic age.