Abstract
This paper explores I Am Matriarch, a digital storytelling platform that uses human-centered AI to support feminist, decolonial, and ethical pedagogies in museum education. Designed as both a learning environment and a curatorial tool, the platform enables students, educators, and cultural institutions to co-create narratives around historically excluded women artists, particularly those from the Global South. The project’s objectives are to embed inclusive metadata, multilingual tools, and AI-driven recommendations into an interactive platform that emphasizes agency, equity, and voice. Rather than relying on automation, the platform employs human-in-the-loop AI to amplify student-led research and storytelling, ensuring that learners remain central to content creation and ethical decision-making. This practice-based intervention contributes to new models of e-learning by embedding collaborative authorship and intersectional pedagogy into digital curation. The project has been piloted in university classrooms where students used the tool to activate underused institutional collections, explore metadata ethics, and create public-facing digital exhibitions. Using qualitative data from design feedback, peer review, and classroom evaluation, the research demonstrates that I Am Matriarch not only enhances engagement, but also fosters digital literacy, cultural analysis, and narrative thinking. It exemplifies how human-centered AI can support transformative learning environments—particularly when designed with equity and inclusion at the core. This study resflects the 2026 theme Human-Centered AI Transformations, offering a replicable framework for future-facing digital pedagogy.
Presenters
Andrea FernandezVisiting Assistant Professor / Project Director, I Am Matriarch, History of Art and Design, The Pratt Institute, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Considering Digital Pedagogies
KEYWORDS
AI, Pedagogy, Inclusion, Storytelling, Digital Humanities
