“What we don’t know how to do is help build connections more equitably between mentors and kids. [How to] help young people reflect on what’s important to them for themselves, and know how to connect that to a plan for their next steps. How to make visible the assets and the skills they already have… that aren’t reflected in traditional metrics like grades or test scores. These are the harder problems. I think these are the more interesting problems to solve.”
– Dr. June Ahn, Professor and Senior Associate Dean of Academic Personnel in the UCI School of Education, and member of the Connected Learning Lab
Earlier this year, the Connected Learning Lab (CLL) hosted its spring symposium, AI for Learner Agency and Self-discovery: Insights and Inspiration from Research and Impact Partnerships. The invited speakers and panel, comprised of CLL researchers, practitioners from Anaheim Unified School District, and industry partners from Roadtrip Nation, joined in dynamic presentations on their interconnected work, and a panel discussion highlighting the CLL’s core commitments to being learner-driven, asset-based, and fostering research-practice partnerships. The focus was on exploring how generative AI can provide support for educational approaches driven by young people’s unique strengths, and supporting self-discovery and self-understanding.
Errol Arkilic, Chief Innovation Officer for UC Irvine, kicked off the symposium, describing the broader context of UC Irvine’s place in research and innovation. “UC Irvine is a Research One campus. We provide an enormous amount of innovation in the area of therapeutics, medical devices, AI, material science, and sustainability,” Arkilic shared. “And what we’re really here to do today is to talk about an innovative approach to AI. One that focuses on how AI can support self-reflection in learner agency.”
UC Irvine Chief Innovation Officer Errol Arkilic speaking at the Connected Learning Lab Spring Symposium, “AI for Learner Agency and Self-discovery.”
Arkilic introduced the presenters, which included June Ahn, Professor and Senior Associate Dean of Academic Personnel in the UCI School of Education; Mike Marriner and Nathan Gebhard, co-founders of Roadtrip Nation, creators of the long running series on PBS, and authors of the NY Times best selling book Roadmap; Amy Kwon, Director of Innovative Programs and Instructional Systems in Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD); and Ray Solorzano, AUHSD Social Studies teacher of 16 years.
Collaboration among the presenters is multifaceted: Professor Ahn and his team are research thought partners with Roadtrip Nation in designing and evaluating their programs, including an AI-driven program called Virtual Roadtrip. Ahn also connected Marriner and Gebhard with his AUHSD partners so the program prototype could be piloted in the district, where Ahn’s team is also acting as evaluators.
Community, University, and Industry Partnerships Bolster Innovation
The presentations kicked off with Professor Ahn. In addition to his appointments in UCI’s School of Education and the Connected Learning Lab, Ahn directs the Design and Partnership Lab (daplab) at UC Irvine, and is the founding director of the Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN), a research-practice partnerships network that connects UCI’s School of Education, local schools, and nonprofits. Ahn’s work with AUHSD and Roadtrip Nation brings industry and local partners together with the support of Ahn’s research team to innovate in ways that echo the daplab’s collaborative values. “The daplab, we do work in a particular way,” Ahn explained. “We like to partner with community partners and organizations and really model the role of the university, right in that community partnership.” Ahn’s team is supported by students at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels, all working together to design and build technology prototypes and then testing them with youth in AUHSD – meaning that research and training experiences for undergraduate through doctoral level students are part of real world high school programs and experiences.
Professor June Ahn presenting at the CLL 2025 Spring Symposium.
Ahn framed the threads tying together his partners’ work – Roadtrip Nation’s Virtual Roadtrip project, which uses AI to create dynamic, varied career exploration experiences for youth; and AUHSD’s work in rethinking how student progress is measured and assessed – within the context of a larger question: what should we be designing AI for? “To me,” Ahn said, “these [projects] are examples of thinking about designing AI for the whole range of learning experiences. We’re not just designing AI to give us answers. We’re not just designing AI to make our work faster, [to] produce writing faster, [or] to tell kids what they’re good at and sort them into opportunities.”
Ahn highlighted how the work of Roadtrip Nation and AUHSD serves to challenge standard approaches to designing new educational and career-supporting technology using AI:
“We know how to guide kids to understand some content. That’s not an interesting problem for me, to have AI do that. What we don’t know how to do is help build connections more equitably between mentors and kids. [How to] help young people reflect on what’s important to them for themselves, and know how to connect that to a plan for their next steps. How to make visible the assets and the skills they already have… that aren’t reflected in traditional metrics like grades or test scores. These are the harder problems. I think these are the more interesting problems to solve, and [also] what ties these partners together.”
AI Creates Opportunities to Scale and Personalize
Ahn introduced Mike Marriner of Roadtrip Nation. With co-founder Nathan Gebhard (and a third co-founder, Brian McAllister, not present at the symposium), Marriner started Roadtrip Nation in 2001, aiming to create an exploratory experience for young people – a road trip with interviews along the way with people in careers they might hope to pursue, to help guide them to ownership, understanding, and decision making in their own futures – something Marriner and Gebhard experienced as two young people in their own formative years. For nearly twenty-five years, Roadtrip Nation has been building and implementing these programs in partnership with districts and schools across the country. In each annual program, a curriculum guides students through creating a project based on their experiences.
Mike Marriner and Nathan Gebhard, co-founders of Roadtrip Nation, presenting at the CLL 2025 Spring Symposium: AI for Learner Agency and Self-discovery
In recent years, Marriner explained, increasingly their question was, “How do we scale this impact? We have a fleet of eight motor homes, which is great. But again, you can’t scale that experience. Not everyone can take three months and go across America and interview all these people. But over the last 24 years, we’ve developed a database of videos of all of these interviews of people talking about their careers…this ocean of content and metadata around all these stories. We not only have the video assets, but all the metadata and the skills they’ve gained and the failures they’ve had… these rich data and portraits.”
A conversation with CLL Director and onetime research collaborator Mimi Ito planted the seeds for RTN’s Virtual Roadtrip project. “I’ll never forget the day that Mimi and I chatted about this,” Marriner said. “It was two years ago, and she’s like, “What are you doing with AI? This is the moment where you might be able to finally take all of this data, all of these stories, and create an experience around it for students that could be scaled. And she introduced us to June [Ahn], who was doing some work around this.”
The partnership with Ahn’s lab and AUHSD is still new, and the work is still in development – but the Roadtrip Nation founders were able to share a demo of the prototype they’ve developed, which they’re now starting to test with students in middle schools as well as community and four-year colleges.
Marriner introduced co-founder Nathan Gebhard to walk the audience through the prototype and share what excites them most about the project. “For so long Mike has been telling me there’s gotta be a way that we can do a virtual road trip,” Gebhard shared. “That anybody, anywhere, at any time, could have one of these experiences. For so long, I couldn’t find the path to make that meaningful and to make it personal. But when we came into this space with generative AI, it was the first time we realized… there’s actually an opportunity here.”
The goal for the Virtual Roadtrip program is to use AI to create a personalized experience – not just random connections to interviews, but something that can be deeply personal to each student, so, as Gebhard put it, “every road trip is different.” The prototype they’re working with, intended as a test case for whether they can meaningfully incorporate AI with the 13,000 interview videos they’ve amassed over the years, takes the form of a 30-minute classroom activity with three interviews – a “three-stop road trip.” It’s all driven by the student’s interests, shared with the program at the outset.
The reasoning behind this approach is to start from an asset-based place. Connected learning affirms the power of “asset-based approaches that tap… youth culture and identity.” Roadtrip Nation’s Virtual Roadtrip pilot leans on the same principles “The AI really affirms that any interest is fine, no interest is too small or too big, and that interests aren’t in silos,” Marriner explained – meaning there is an emphasis on combining interests, teaching students they don’t need to be interested in just one thing, and careers aren’t made up of single interests or areas. The three interviews are designed to speak to specific elements of a student’s experience: in addition to students’ varied interests, the interviews are targeted to address specific societal pressures individual students face, as well as perceived hurdles or roadblocks that may discourage them from pursuing a potential career path.
Roadtrip Nation co-founder Nathan Gebhard presenting at the CLL 2025 Spring Symposium: AI for Learner Agency and Self-discovery
The pilot’s results were more than encouraging. With over 450 students participating from middle and high school levels as well as one four-year college and one community college, the Virtual Roadtrip team saw a positive trend in every metric they had hoped to measure – with eight of nine metrics statistically significant. These measured outcomes include an increase in students reporting confidence in being able to reach their goals, belief in there being a variety of career options available to them, and feeling they could identify with people like them working in a career they would like to pursue.
“For us,” Gebhard shared as he wrapped the Roadtrip presentation, “this was just really exciting – the idea that we could stitch together AI and our video content and make something really personal and meaningful.”
Using AI to Center Student Voice
The final presentations were given by Amy Kwon, Director of Innovative Programs and Instructional Systems for AUHSD, and Ray Solorzano, AUHSD Social Studies teacher of sixteen years. Kwon described AUHSD’s journey to using AI, and what they’ve picked up along the way. “What we’ve learned is, AI helps you amplify whatever it is that you’re already doing. In K-12 education, it is about college, career, and life readiness.”
Kwon shared the origins of the district’s approach to assessment, and how that led them to this recent partnership with Ahn and Roadtrip Nation. In 2017, AUHSD convened over 200 teachers, community members, and students to iterate on what they ended up designating as “The Five C’s” – what they deemed essential, 21st-century skills. Those skills were: Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Creativity, and Character/compassion. They defined statuses like emerging, progressing, and excelling for each of these skills, created rubrics for teachers, and collaborated with universities to confirm that these were skills universities wanted to see, so students were assured that they were still being well prepared for secondary education.
Amy Kwon, Director of Innovative Programs & Instructional Systems for AUHSD, presenting at the CLL 2025 Spring Symposium: AI for Learner Agency and Self-discovery
As part of the Five Cs approach, students in AUHSD do a lot more project-based learning, including reflections on their learning process, perspectives on career possibilities, and more. It was these student reflections that served as the basis for the collaboration with Dr. Ahn and the daplab. Kwon explained, “[We thought] what if we centered it around student voice? We can use AI and pull out the way students talk about their own Five Cs rather than centering it around a system in which the adults in the room, the teachers, the educators, devise a system to say what you need to learn, how you need to learn it, and how you need to show that you learned it.”
AUHSD realized they could use AI to reveal the 5Cs that students were already communicating in their own understanding of their work. This is a strong example of connected learning principles in action – centering youth interests, perspectives, and experiences in the design of programs created for them.
The tool AUHSD created with Ahn’s lab allows the district to strengthen its commitment to not only data-driven decision making, but to the types of data that are valued. Solorzano elaborated on the tool, drawing attention to the fact that using AI-supported student reflections to gather data is only part of the point. “It’s not really about the data,” he said. “It’s one thing to have all of this information, but so what, what are we gonna do with this data? And so [Ahn] has been working with us to develop some protocols around how teachers can actually make some changes in their planning, in their teaching, in their assessing of students as well… It’s not about what the AI is saying. It’s about what the teacher does with that information.”
AUHSD Social Studies teacher Ray Solorzano presenting at the 2025 CLL Spring Symposium: AI for Learner Agency and Self-discovery
The aim of the district’s approach, as Kwon described, is to disrupt the traditional teaching and learning system in two key ways (“traditional” as Kwon defines it meaning a system in which the teacher creates the assessment and asks the question, and the possible outcomes are the student getting it right or wrong): The level of personalization and individualization students can offer to their students, and the idea of what is considered “college, career, and life ready.”
Connected learning research on occupational identity development in adolescence has explored the benefits of “personally relevant learning connected to academic, civic, and career opportunities,” and how this kind of learning can best support young people in finding their place in communities and careers.
For AUHSD, “What we’re really looking for now is the idea of best fit,” Kwon explained. “Best fit for college admissions, best fit for employment, best fit for jobs, best fit for student. We believe that having a tool like this and a system that works… that’s the shift of the future, in having a booming economy and making sure that everyone is in just the right fit.”
Panel Discussion
The presentations were followed by a panel, moderated by Arkilic. The panelists discussed what goes into the foundations for the projects the AUHSD and RTN are doing, and what kinds of approaches they’ve taken to push back and challenges.
Ahn emphasized the enormous amount of work that had to happen behind the scenes in order to produce the kind of programs AUHSD and RTN and working on implementing. “The part that you don’t hear in the presentation,” Ahn said, “is the deep thinking – how [Roadtrip Nation’s Marriner and Gebhard] think about career identity, or the deep thinking [AUHSD does] about, how do we [approach] 1300 teachers changing how they teach in the classroom? So that’s the secret sauce that gets glossed over in a presentation.”
Speaking about resistance from teachers and how the district has handled it, Solorzano shared, “[It’s really about] giving the teachers the power to see, hey, it’s not that you’re losing your agency, it’s just maybe we’re using your critical thinking in a different way.”
In the last remarks, Ahn spoke to the students and researchers in the audience. “The role that we can play is in how we help folks think about the theories and things that we design from, and for the design students, [it] is designing for the non-obvious, not just what we know.”
A recording of the full symposium is available for viewing on the Connected Learning Alliance YouTube.
Check out more about the panelists’ work:
- Design and Partnership Lab (daplab)
- Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN)
- Roadtrip Nation
- Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD) (district site)
- Roadtrip Nation & AUHSD’s career pathways program
— Jenna Abrams
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