Michael Alan Chang says the professorship will enable him to keep building relationships across BU Wheelock, the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, and Boston Public Schools, which can lead to the collaborative design of AI-for-Education tools. Photo courtesy of Wheelock College of Education & Human Development

Education & Social Service

Can AI Make Classrooms More Joyful?

BU Wheelock’s first Margaret McGuire Earl Career Development Professor says yes

Michael Alan Chang’s work focuses on the collaborative design of AI tools for education—not surprising, given his background as a computer scientist who pivoted to education research after completing his PhD. What might be more surprising is how he describes that work: helping researchers “dream alongside students, teachers, and families about hopeful, joyful learning possibilities.”

Chang may have more opportunities to help such dreams become reality in schools with his recent appointment as the inaugural Margaret McGuire Earl Career Development Professor in BU’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. Chang, who’s also a Wheelock assistant professor of language and literacy education, a faculty fellow in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS), and assistant director of Wheelock’s Earl Center for Learning & Innovation, says he’s “humbled” that his work has been recognized as aligning with the Earl family’s vision.

For her part, Sylvia Tailby Earl (Wheelock’54) is delighted to support early-career faculty like Chang with the three-year career development professorship, named for her late mother-in-law. She sees it as a meaningful way of honoring Margaret McGuire Earl’s work as an educator. “I just felt that she deserved a great deal of recognition,” Earl says, for teaching mathematics at a time when few women did. This is Earl’s latest transformative gift to BU Wheelock; she and her late husband, Jim, also established the Earl Center for Learning & Innovation.

Chang says the professorship will enable him to keep building relationships across BU Wheelock, CDS, and Boston Public Schools, which can lead to the collaborative design of AI-for-Education tools. In all of his work, the emphasis on designing collaboratively is key, as is his vision of going beyond current methods and approaches to reimagine what education can be.

“Rather than radically changing how we approach teaching and learning in schools, many of the most common uses of AI-Ed tools primarily seek to make existing instructional practices more efficient, individualized, and personalized,” Chang says. “I am interested in understanding why it is hard to envision learning possibilities outside the status quo.”

That’s why his focus goes beyond efficiency to consider how successful learning feels. “This approach offers a new way to think about the role of technology,” he says, “in building on a large body of educational research that argues that learning necessitates forefronting learners’ joy and well-being alongside more traditional disciplinary learning.”

Chang’s current research builds on his postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, where he led the development of the Learning Futures Workshops, a three-year effort to design novel AI-based learning tools in collaboration with students, teachers, and families. The resulting tool, the Community Builder, has been deployed in public middle and high schools across the country.

Next, Chang plans to explore how practices from the arts and humanities can create opportunities for high school–age youth to participate in designing “AI-for-Education tools that challenge the status quo.” To support that work, he’s seeking PhD students who are interested in ethics and social justice in education, arts, technology—and, of course, learning together.