UC Irvine

Generative AI is entering American schools on terms set by vendors, platforms, and policy actors, while the educators and students who live with these systems have little say in how it arrives. The stakes fall hardest on communities already exposed to the material costs of automation. This dissertation asks what becomes possible when Latino youth hold sustained authority over how artificial intelligence enters their learning. Across three studies it advances one claim: young people come to understand AI as sociotechnical, made together with the social world it enters and bound up with human labor, community life, and relations of power (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987; Winner, 1980), by becoming sociotechnical designers, people who define problems involving AI, decide whose knowledge counts in addressing them, build artifacts that act in the world, and imagine the futures those artifacts make possible.The studies unfold at a Latino-serving public high school in southern California, and they trace three relationships between youth and the act of designing: with, from, and toward their communities. The first follows a five-week program in which three teacher-student dyads co-designed how generative AI would be taught across computer science, design, and social studies, and it documents how terms that appear settled were reopened at the scale of the curricular unit. The second follows one co-designed unit into the classroom and traces the community-based AI learning it set in motion, showing how the unit’s sequencing made community knowledge foundational and held community practitioners as the final authority on what the technology was for. The third examines a science fiction unit in the Latino futurist tradition, where the study focused on twelve youth who reasoned about AI through speculative media-making. Working from within their own cultural aesthetic, they made visible what AI would cost their communities in memory, labor, and personhood.Across the three studies, the learning lives in the practice of designing, and that practice is grounded in the funds of knowledge Latino communities already hold. The dissertation prepares youth to shape how AI operates in and for their communities, and it offers educators and researchers an account of how that preparation is done.