Pathways to Partnerships

Emerging Themes in How to Teach with AI

Yesterday, I had the distinct privilege to click a Zoom link and be transported to a Webinar space hosted by www.aixeducation.com and co-hosted with Ourmedia called “AI and the Art of Learning: Project-Based Pedagogy for the Future. AI x Education was founded by Johnny Chang from Stanford University (which has a very excellent AI Literacy Framework that you can look at here) and Tara Mandrekar is the Associate Director for Ourmedia. The webinar featured three panelists; Dan Be Kim, an AI Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Jorge Costa, an Associate Professor of Music Production at Arizona State University and Ginger Garcia, Educator and Curriculum Designer and English Teacher at the International School of Boston.

Dan Be Kim offered an amazing overview of a wonderful AI Literacy framework, drawing on three specific tiers of progression through AI Literacy beginning with Functional Literacy (how to use tools; tinkering, exploring, and experimenting) and then moving to Critical Literacy (Why outputs look the way they do, ethical considerations, assessing AI, evaluating AI, giving feedback and iterating) and finally arriving at Rhetorical Literacy; a co-creative and co-constructive literacy stage in which AI serves your mission and your vision for extended creative expression or redesigning curriculum. I will say this AI Literacy framework was very clear, concise and impressive and one that educators everywhere should be paying attention to. Using these ideas of Functional, Critical and Rhetorical can be very effective not only for students but for educators as well to help bring folks into the conversation around AI and how it can help create partnership pathways to new ideas about how this technology can change pedagogy, workflow and educational paradigms no matter where folks are at in their own personal, nuanced and valid place with AI.

Ginger Garcia presented an amazing account of her work with middle school students and how she was creating incredible AI partnerships and collaborative, project based initiatives for students to enhance their metacognitive processes and critical thinking skills with AI tools and platforms. I have done very similar work in my First-Year Writing classroom; Ginger used AI tools to help students understand how messages students were creating with their writing were being understood and interpreted by audiences and if the exigence and authorial intention of the writing was having the impact the writers wanted; offering students chances to see, in real time, how the words they were crafting were being understood by audiences and then offering them space and time to adjust, reflect and metacognitively/critically think about how the ideas they were shaping in their writing were transferring to their audience. This concept of real time feedback and metacognitive, process based writing is a crucially important practice that, when used with human partnerships, and an understanding that AI is simply a tool for ideation and externalized metacognition, can support writers in brand new ways.

Jorge Costa, an accomplished musician and producer, shared an incredible experience working with students in a music class using AI tools to reclaim agency and ownership in the music production process in the age of AI; a process that was strikingly similar to the process of writing and composition. Students working with Jorge embraced play and fun in his class, working with Generative AI tools to create beats and the starting points of musical compositions with various AI tools; which raised important questions about ownership of the AI output; did this song belong to the artist or to the AI? These same questions can and should be applied to all AI output. This comprehensive report from the U.S. Copyright office is worth reading on this point. Throughout the course, Jorge’s students grappled with really important questions about how to use AI, how not to use AI, and how to create partnerships with these tools through project based learning activities that presented new pathways to the outcomes Jorge valued in his course, pathways that offer new value for students working with and critically thinking about the role of AI in music production. Students were able to find agency in using parts of AI generated musical compositions and reworking those elements into new, remixed or sampled music elements that they created themselves as humans, collaborating with AI tools to produce something new and engaging, forging paths to new musical compositions and novel ideas as they collaborated with AI in ways they had not considered before, pushing their imaginative boundaries further. In the end, Jorge and his class created several exciting pieces of human/AI partnered musical compositions which students agreed were their original work and will be released.

All of these amazing presenters shared a common theme: project based learning initiatives that underscored the value of AI collaboration and co-constructive partnerships as process over production. I have said many times that AI is not really a product tool; at best, it simulates the creation of a product, it provides a probable outcome of what that thing you want it to make might look like; it is a pretty good guess at what that thing might be. Is it the real thing? Not really. So what is AI really good at? It is good at being an externalized, metacognitive partner. It is good at being YOU; or more precisely, it is good and helping you see your own thinking. Writers are sort of trained to do this already. In Phaedrus, Socrates says that writing and conversing with others renders self-knowledge possible and writing is offered as a way through which self-knowledge could take place; some argue that it was the development of written language itself that caused humans to become self-aware; now that we had a vehicle to see our internal thoughts reflected outwardly. Perhaps this is the true power of AI; not to create products but to help us see our own consciousness externalized and be able to ‘talk to our selves’ in a way; to metacognitively collaborate in ways we never thought possible before.

The amazing panelists I had the privilege of listening to yesterday presented some incredible stories and experiences that point to the astounding impact of what AI can do for students, educators and pedagogical paradigms if wielded in the right ways; if we can begin to forge partnership pathways that foster new efforts toward process, project based learned, AI Literacy and a rethinking of the value in the work of teaching and learning in the age of AI.