#995: Community-Building in K12 Classrooms with a Collaborative AI Agent and Associated Curriculum Routines

This paper examines how curriculum routines can mediate tensions between the convergent tendencies of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and the divergent, equity-oriented affordances of collaborative learning. Drawing on a multi-year partnership with teachers, we analyze the co-design and classroom enactment of a collaborative AI partner, CoBi, and associated “revisiting community agreement” routines. Using video data and thematic analysis, we show how these routines functioned as boundary objects linking design intent with classroom practice. Teachers enacted the routines with high integrity and creatively adapted them to local contexts, leveraging AI errors to foster AI literacy and critical reflection. Students engaged in meta-collaborative discussions that positioned AI as a phenomenon for critique rather than a source of authority. Findings illustrate how curriculum routines can align human and technological agency, sustaining equity-centered and reflective collaboration in AI-embedded classrooms.