AERA 2026 Annual Meeting Success
This year, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting became a milestone for Indonesian educational research. The AFIRMASI team successfully presented three groundbreaking papers, bridging local wisdom with global technological ethics.
1. Challenging Symbolic Violence: Figured Worlds and AI
Representing AFIRMASI and Texas State University, Chelsia Shanen Panekenan presented "Figured Worlds, Class Hegemony, School Rituals, and AI: Ethnographic and Ethical Perspectives on Identity, Harm, and Humanizing Pedagogy in Education."
Chelsia's work, co-authored with the team, explores how school rituals can inflict "formative wounds." She drew a direct parallel between biased human judgment in classrooms and the potential for AI systems to "algorithmize" historical inequities. Her presentation received international acclaim for its use of layered autoethnography to humanize the often abstract debate on AI ethics.
2. AI as Guest: Rebuilding Power Relations
Muhammad Hilal Sudarbi took the stage in the session "Exploring the Intersections of Artificial Intelligence and Educational Research" (Division G - Social Context of Education).
His paper, "AI as Guest, Wisdom as Teacher: Rebuilding Power Relations in Educational Technology through the Culturally Sustaining AI Framework," challenges uncritical techno-solutionism. Hilal proposes a radical shift: casting AI as a respectful guest and local wisdom (kearifan lokal) as the primary teacher. This framework empowers marginalized communities to validate their own knowledge systems while engaging with advanced technology.
• Unit: Division G - Section 5: Inquiry, Transformation, and Communities
• Type: Roundtable Session (Table 6)
• Descriptors: Decoloniality, Artificial Intelligence, Culturally Responsive Schooling
3. Agrarian Resilience: The Roots of Tomorrow
Ayu Fitriani, in collaboration with Muhammad Hilal Sudarbi, presented a transformative model for curriculum design in the session "Past and future of (material not just symbolic) decoloniality in curriculum" (Division B - Curriculum Studies).
Their work, "The Roots of Tomorrow: A Framework for an Agrarian Resilience Curriculum," addresses the crisis of "education for exodus" in climate-vulnerable regions like NTT. The proposed curriculum focuses on three pillars—Ecological Attunement, Systems Thinking, and Socio-Economic Agency—to empower youth to build sustainable futures within their own communities.
• Unit: Division B - Section 6: De/Colonization and Transformative Curriculum Studies
• Type: Roundtable Session (Table 5)
• Descriptors: Curriculum Theory, Decolonial Theory, Rural Education
A Unified Vision for Humanizing Pedagogy
For AFIRMASI, the success at AERA 2026 is a validation of our core mission. Whether through Chelsia's ethnographic insights, Hilal's culturally sustaining frameworks, or Ayu's resilience-based curriculum, our goal remains the same: ensuring that technology serves to heal and empower, rather than displace or dehumanize.
As the team concludes in their joint reflections: "Empathy and local wisdom are not obstacles to progress; they are the essential filters that ensure technology truly serves humanity."