Think about your pedagogy in context
Reflect on your module’s audience
Why is this important?
Your module will be most effective if you understand the positionality, values, and knowledge of your audience.
Reminder: Keep your audience in mind as you decide how to navigate your conversation.
There are many considerations to keep in mind while teaching ethics. Consider how centering marginalized people can lead to stereotypes or tokenizations of marginalized students and communities. On the other hand, centering non marginalized people can further invisiblize the ways marginalized people are harmed by technologies.
- Who is involved in your group, and what are their priorities?
- Is your group predominantly marginalized or non marginalized?
- What is your group’s familiarity with tech ethics? With ethics in general?
- Who in your group might be most interested versus least interested in tech ethics? How might you cater your ethical artifacts to both ends of the spectrum?
Reflect on your own position in the learning process of tech ethics
Why is this important?
You do not need to be an ethics expert to facilitate ethical discussions; we are all learners. Take a moment to reflect on your position and knowledge in the learning process.
- What position do you occupy in the classroom? In society? Related to technology?
- What do you know about ethics? What do you know about the ethics of technology? Most importantly, what do you not know?
- How might you acknowledge your areas of ignorance about ethical tech (which is to be expected) in the classroom?
- In what ways might you share your experiences and values with the class to open up space for students to share their perspectives?
Ground your technology in ethical critical thinking
Narrow in on a relevant technology for your lesson
Explore the technology's history and context
Why is this important?
To evaluate the technology’s effect on social systems and institutions, it is important to understand its underlying motivations.
- What are the historical and cultural circumstances in which the technology emerged?
- When was it developed? For what purpose? Who funded it?
- Who interacts with the algorithm? What do they do with it?
- How has its usage and function changed from then to today (Lin, 2021)?
Explore ethical values, interests, hazards, and conflicts
Why is this important?
In technical lessons, ethics is often positioned as an addendum instead of a foundational consideration. By embedding ethics into the engineering mindset, future creators of technology will be encouraged to understand and act upon the broader social and political ecosystem within which technologies are situated.
- Which ethical concepts are most relevant to your technology?
- How might these ethical concepts be operating on different scales, such as the scale of the individual, the community, the institutions, or broader society?
- What are the implications of choosing a particular scope?
- e.g. How might centering the needs of the community miss the needs of some individuals?
Get situated to analyze the technology's stakeholders
Why is this important?
Technology classifies our identity to position us with more or less power.
Pedagogy Reminder: How to not stereotype or tokenize marginalized students/communities?
Be careful with broad generalizations. Having students imagine situations can easily cross the line into stereotyping.
Check out this resource.
Check out this resource.
Assess the individual and community impact
Why is this important?
Different communities are differentially harmed or helped by technology, and they also hold the power to resist it.
- Whose interest are best served by this technology, and who has the greatest risk of being harmed?
- In the cases where “harm” is not the right lens, how might you consider how technologies differentially enable/constrain certain actions and behaviors, or enable/limit possibilities?
- At the expense of whose labor?
- Are the concerns of some individuals or groups more important?
Assess the systemic impact
Why is this important?
Harms to communities are indicative of broader power structures at play, which technology can either perpetuate or confront.
- In the process of enabling some behaviors while constraining others, how might the technology be encouraging or discouraging certain social discourse and norms (Birhane, 2021)?
- In what ways does the technology reinforce or challenge ideologies or the status quo?
- What systemic advantages and disadvantages might this technology amplify?
Acknowledge assumptions in your stakeholder analysis
Why is this important?
When considering other perspectives, it’s important to understand that you’re still operating from your own subjective and biased experience.
- By consulting these perspectives, whose ethics are you valuing?
- What assumptions might you have made about your stakeholders?
- Are you understanding the extent of this harm by engaging with, listening to, and learning from the affected communities (Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Free Radicals)?
Apply your thinking to your values and actions
Examine your own positionality and values
Why is this important?
Rehumanize yourself: put the focus on yourself, not the machine.
- What position do you occupy as a creator? As an employee of a larger organization? As a hypothetical user?
- What are your values? How might they differ from the people around you?
- To what extent do our initial beliefs originate in stereotypically held intuitions about groups or cultures (Birhane, 2021)?
Align your actions with your values
Why is this important?
Build agency to advocate for your values through your actions.
- Does building/interacting with this technology in its current status align with your values?
- If so, what further questions or perspectives should creators consult to implement the technology with the greatest care and attention to the concerns of all stakeholders?
- What changes could you make to minimize the immediate harms brought on by this technology?
- Given that immediate harms are indicative of broader systems of power, how can you support harmed communities as they combat systemic harms?
- What’s the dominant person’s role to support justice in marginalized communities? How can you validate and support the agency of marginalized communities as opposed to acting with a savior complex?