Reading the Black Box

While AI often operates as an opaque “black box,” the capacity to interrogate its sociotechnical logic is a fundamental requirement for critical inquiry and literacy in the digital age. This paper addresses a gap in understanding the fine-grained process of how students deconstruct this opacity. We present a discourse analysis of a student discussion in a high school English language arts (ELA) classroom, guided by the theoretical framework of onto-epistemic heterogeneity (OEH). Using substantive engagement as a coding heuristic, our findings show students collaboratively deconstructed AI’s perceived autonomy, using dialogical inquiry to attribute responsibility to its human-driven origins. A key finding is how students “bridged” academic knowledge with their lived experiences, fostering a nuanced interrogation of normalized technological behaviors. We propose three core instructional approaches for moving beyond a focus on technical skills toward critical inquiry and social action in an AI-mediated world.