Center Spotlight: Beck Tench, Project Zero

Beck Tench has carried the same deep questions throughout her career.

“Questions about attention, about how we live well with technology, about how to slow and notice the world,” she says. “This new role” — as principal investigator (PI) at Project Zero (PZ) — “gives me permission and responsibility to hold those bigger questions at the center of a research agenda. That’s liberating and thrilling to me!”

A senior researcher and designer for PZ’s Center for Digital Thriving (CDT) since 2022, Tench has abiding curiosities about how to live well in a radically connected world. With CDT co-founder Emily Weinstein, Ed.M.’14, Ed.D.’17, she has been leading IMAGINE AI, a framework and free suite of resources co-designed with educators and young people to help support digital agency when using AI technologies and creating AI policies. 

As a PI, Tench will co-lead the next phase of this work via AI Agency in Schools, embedded fieldwork that aims to understand how AI is changing classrooms in the United States and United Kingdom. Alongside that team, she’ll be collaborating with school communities (educators, administrators, students, and parents) to co-design additional resources. 

Finding A Home at HGSE’s Oldest Research Group

Tench says she came to Project Zero because of the people and stayed for the same reason. “As I got to know more about PZ, I realized that I'd been a PZ person long before I knew it existed,” she says.

The school’s oldest research group, PZ is an educational research center that has pioneered progressive, creative-based thinking and learning for nearly 60 years — with frameworks, tools, thinking routines, and a robust library of resources accessed by countless educators, learners, and leaders around the world. 

PZ co-directors Lecturer Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Ed.D.’12, and Carrie James agree that Tench is a natural fit for the family, one who lifts and leads others in thought, curiosity, and innovation.

“Beck brings deep expertise in the design of restorative, learning-rich environments; participatory design methodologies; contemplative practice; and positive technology use,” says Dawes Duraisingh. Adds James: “Beck’s thinking on AI is cutting-edge and fundamentally human at its core. The IMAGINE AI resource collection gives teachers and students a crucial compass for navigating a rapidly changing, tech-filled world.”

Avoiding AI “Enshittification”

In this winter’s J-term course, Social Media, Generative AI, and Youth Well-Being: Learning and Teaching for Digital Thriving, Tench and co-instructor Dan Be Kim, Ed.M.’25, an AI fellow at the center, helped students see that when it comes to AI, they’re not alone in seeking how best to integrate the technology into their lives. 

Drawing students from across Harvard, the course studied market forces, such as “the attention economy,” which treats human attention as a commodity to be harvested and monetized by digital apps; behavior design (think subtle nudges from apps like TikTok and Instagram that steer users in specific directions); and “enshittification,” journalist Cory Doctorow’s term for how platforms start strong, then slowly erode the user experience to serve their own interests. 

Tench and Kim aimed to help learners “see tech clearly” by understanding the business models that drive technological development. “But then, we layered in ways of finding the agency we have as individuals and as a collective to shape our use of these tools in ways that support our values,” Tench says.

Despite the brief term of the class, only five days, Tench says she feels it awakened a sense of hope, and of solidarity, in their learning community. “When I feel daunted by the tech news cycle, I find hope in how the resources we’re developing are actually helping educators and learners cultivate a sense of agency in how AI fits into their lives and learning,” she says. “I'd love to be a resource for the broader Harvard community as we all navigate AI together.”