LLMs to Support K-12 Teachers in Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: An AI Literacy Example

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Large Language Models can assist K-12 teachers in integrating Culturally Relevant Pedagogy into their teaching practices, addressing barriers like time and resource constraints, through a pilot study of the CulturAIEd tool.

Contribution

It introduces CulturAIEd, an LLM-based tool that helps teachers adapt AI literacy curricula to students' cultural contexts, demonstrating its potential to improve CRP implementation.

Findings

CulturAIEd increased teachers' confidence in cultural responsiveness.

Teachers found CulturAIEd streamlined curriculum adaptation.

The tool enabled culturally responsive modifications efficiently.

Abstract

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) is vital in K-12 education, yet teachers struggle to implement CRP into practice due to time, training, and resource gaps. This study explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can address these barriers by introducing CulturAIEd, an LLM tool that assists teachers in adapting AI literacy curricula to students' cultural contexts. Through an exploratory pilot with four K-12 teachers, we examined CulturAIEd's impact on CRP integration. Results showed CulturAIEd enhanced teachers' confidence in identifying opportunities for cultural responsiveness in learning activities and making culturally responsive modifications to existing activities. They valued CulturAIEd's streamlined integration of student demographic information, immediate actionable feedback, which could result in high implementation efficiency. This exploration of teacher-AI collaboration highlights how LLM can help teachers include CRP components into their instructional practices efficiently, especially in global priorities for future-ready education, such as AI literacy.