Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6-12

Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning provides intentional approaches to the integration of artificial intelligence tools into middle and high school classrooms, specifically to foster equity and social-emotional wellbeing. The overlap of AI with today’s schools poses pivotal questions about ethics, morality, inclusion, and human learning at a time when students are already reckoning with public health crises, systemic injustice, and other connected challenges. This book helps teachers examine the pros and cons of artificial intelligence--as used by both educators and students--as well as its implications for meaningful culturally responsive teaching and social-emotional learning efforts. Featuring activities, lesson plans, and discussion and writing prompts for use with adolescent learners, each chapter offers concrete pedagogical approaches and instructional innovations that align technological changes with learning objectives in ways that advance, rather than replace or neutralize, attention to equity and well-being.

Dr. Marlee Bunch is an interdisciplinary educator, author, and scholar. Her research examines the oral histories of Black female educators in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who taught between 1954 and 1971. She is the founder of the un/HUSH teaching framework and author of The Magnitude of Us (Teachers College Press, 2024) and Unlearning the Hush (University of Illinois Press, 2025). Dr. Bunch received her doctorate from the University of Illinois.

Brittany R. Collins is the Director of Education at Write the World, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to closing opportunity gaps in writing education. She also works as an educational consultant and professional development facilitator focused on trauma-informed teaching, social-emotional learning, and literacy education.