Learning to Design, Designing to Care: High School Students Co-Designing AI for Disability Inclusion

Abstract

The rapid integration of AI into education raises important questions about equity, accessibility, and the inclusion of learners with disabilities. While international policy frameworks emphasize fairness and human agency, the voices of young people themselves remain largely absent from these debates. This paper presents the design of a participatory workshop with Italian upper secondary school students, situated within the national Percorsi per le Competenze Trasversali e l’Orientamento (PCTO) framework, which links education to professional training. Students aged sixteen to eighteen, will engage in an eleven-hour program combining interactive lectures, role-based activities, and collaborative prototyping. Working in small groups, participants will design speculative AI tools intended to support peers with diverse educational needs, including visual, auditory, cognitive, and linguistic differences. The workshop explicitly incorporates materials authored by people with disabilities and creates opportunities for students with disability, if present, to contribute directly. The project is expected to foster empathy, perspective-taking, and critical AI literacy – measured pre- and post-intervention – while producing speculative design artifacts that highlight ethical and pedagogical considerations. By treating AI as a socio-technical system rather than a neutral tool, the study aims to demonstrate how participatory design can be used to cultivate inclusive values and democratize conversations about educational technologies.