Teach the Teacher Professional Development
From Learners to Leaders: Advancing Indigenous AI Instruction
Teach the Teacher Professional Development (T3PD) offers AI Education to Indigenous communities, who have historically been underserved, by recruiting, training, and supporting future instructors to implement an AI Code Camp in their home community.
Bringing Advanced Technology Education to Indigenous Communities
During the PD, future instructors of IndigiGenius AI Code Camps will engage in activities over the course of approximately nine weeks in order to gain the technical and pedagogical skills necessary to be instructors of future regional and tribally based code camps. This preparation will require the participants of this professional development program to develop adequate skills in GitHub, Docker, Jupyter notebooks, Python, PyTorch, and Unity mobile application development. Participants' learning will take place in asynchronous and synchronous contexts. Participants will engage in asynchronous activities to initially learn about Python, Deep Learning, and Unity mobile application development. We will leverage online platforms to support future instructors in acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to utilize and teach about these technical areas, which we intend to leverage to minimize the amount of time participants need to spend with the primary IndigiGenius curriculum development and instructional team.
Once participants have shown proficiency in these technical areas, they will be brought together to learn about the pedagogical design and practices of IndigiGenius AI Code Camps. We anticipate the synchronous element of this professional development to take two weeks, in which participants will learn about culturally relevant and sustaining learning environment design, coherence, and common challenges in teaching the IndigiGenius AI Code Camp curriculum. As a final step, participants will join a scheduled code camp to learn about leading a camp and gain hands-on field experience teaching the curriculum by shadowing and co-teaching with an experienced instructor.