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Partnering with a diverse group of students and teachers to develop the next generation of collaborative learning, iSAT is dedicated to transforming classrooms into more effective, engaging, and equitable learning environments. Our research community believes partnerships and shared knowledge are crucial to advancing our goals, and our partnership with —a research hub led by with , , and the —is proving to be a perfect match!

CIRCLS: A Hub for Research on Emerging Learning Technologies

CIRCLS is a community-based hub for National Science Foundation (NSF) funded researchers who explore and investigate technologies that will be available to learners in the future. CIRCLS connects research projects—especially those emphasizing research and emerging technology for teaching and learning (such as what iSAT is working on). The key activities CIRCLS focuses on are: building community, mapping the work (sharing expertise and brokering relationships), advancing the work (creating and leading activities that rise above what any individual project can accomplish on its own), and amplifying and disseminating (publishing a community report that discusses the work of the community as a whole and more). 

The CIRCLS community knows that emerging technologies can raise or lower barriers to learning and that barriers to learning have emerged along lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other aspects of identity. Most researchers within the community view addressing these barriers as a moral imperative and seek to adopt practices in their exploratory research projects that can contribute to liberating learners from these barriers.

CIRCLS Partnership with iSAT

The iSAT and CIRCLS partnership is both mutually beneficial and a natural fit. iSAT aims to advance AI in support of student collaborative teamwork and both AI and collaborative learning are big topics in the CIRCLS community. A very important part of iSAT’s research is the Learning Futures Workshops hosted every spring. These workshops are planned and hosted by, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of California Berkeley, who splits his time between both iSAT and CIRCLS. These workshops help iSAT to better understand youths’ dreams for the best-case scenario use of AI in classroom settings and the feedback from the youth also helps to inform traits of the AI Partner. This very much resonates with the CIRCLS community, who also feel that the insights arising from engaging with youth during these workshops are very important. In an interview, iSAT was able to dive a little deeper with CIRCLS Principal Investigatorand our shared postdoc Michael Chang to get their perspective on what is gained from this partnership.

iSAT: What opportunities do you feel the CIRCLS-iSAT partnership brings to the CIRCLS community?

Jeremy: The insights arising from youth engagement are important; we don’t have enough of these insights in the CIRCLS community (especially regarding what youth dream in regard to emerging technology). Also, the insights about how to engage with youth; it’s not easy work, and iSAT has become sophisticated about how to do it. In another activity also led by Michael Chang, we partnered with iSAT to develop a research tool called that can be used by the many projects in our community to help their computer scientists and learning scientists work better together. The conjecture mapping has a lot of value. And we’re hoping iSAT will contribute reports about their work that we can amplify to a larger audience.

iSAT: Where do you see AI benefiting education (teachers and learners) the most? How can AI in education be an asset instead of something viewed negatively?

Jeremy: Our CIRCLS team prefers an “” perspective on AI, rather than the more common perspective which views AI and people as separate and parallel. AI can be positive when it aligns closely with human goals and enables people to better achieve their aims. In the Learning Futures Workshops, we’re seeking to better understand how youth envision AI helping them. Generally speaking, AI can be an asset when it is designed to support people and keep people in the loop.

iSAT: Can you elaborate on what has been the findings from the Learning Futures Workshops and how this helps progress the work that CIRCLS / Digital Promise is doing?

Michael: The Learning Futures Workshop seeks to surface the hopes, dreams, and concerns of youth and teachers around the use of AI to support collaboration in classrooms. First, the workshop makes a contribution to co-design by supporting participants from dreaming within inequitable institutions. Second, our participants have pushed us to think about how AI might be able to support relationships between classroom actors; this is largely a new metaphor for AI/Ed. These findings dovetail nicely with the work of CIRCLS, which seeks to support the research community in developing and sustaining equitable futures. Please read here to learn more:

iSAT: What has your experience working with iSAT and CIRCLS been like? What most excites you about your role, and what challenges you the most?

Michael: In my capacity designing and running Learning Futures Workshops for iSAT, participants dream of a wide range of expansive possibilities. While iSAT can realize (or at least move us closer) to some of those possibilities, if we are to truly enact youth’s hopes and dreams, the work cannot happen solely within iSAT. Through CIRCLS, I am excited to share the methodologies and findings developed in the workshops in order to support others in realizing expansive futures for school. Generalizing the work to the CIRCLS community is a major challenge, as it raises key questions for the field about how we translate important concepts across disciplines (and sub-disciplines) with varying commitments, ideologies, and epistemologies.

To learn more about CIRCLS, and .