Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 11 seconds
I’ve written a lot, on and off, about the importance of developing critical AI literacy, but I realize now that it is not enough, and I’ve recently started thinking about all of this with even more dimensions than I had previously included in my critical AI literacy model described here. If you’ll notice, there are parts in my critical AI literacy model that talk about equity concerns and bias concerns, as well as ethical issues more broadly. I kind of feel like when I’m talking about those, I’ve focused mainly on the biases within AI itself, and inequalities related to access to AI and so on, and ethical issues in the process of designing AI and using it. Which is important, of course. But as a teacher deciding what to do in our classes with regards to AI, I think we need to be literate in other things and be aware of these things:
- What is my teaching philosophy? What do I believe about how people learn, how do I want to be as a teacher, how do I want my classroom environment to be? And I don’t just mean revising our learning outcomes and our assessments in a kneejerk way to figure out how to circumvent student AI use. I was already thinking about this, and I also came across this article which digs deep into ways of looking at AI from different lenses: Against Artificial Education (my slides focus more on pedagogy directly).
- How aware am I of social justice and inclusion issues, how much equity literacy do I have? There are many layers of inequity that AI use may exacerbate, reproduce or reduce. Equity literacy is a term by Paul Gorski, but you will see in the slide deck below that I’ve used the 4 I’s of Oppression Video to simplify the “awareness” of oppression piece. Of course equity literacy goes beyond that and should also be about how to redress injustice in our own context and how to advocate for systemic change.
- What is my approach to caring for my students? How important is community in my classroom? There are many different ways to care. I believe it should be socially just care (not just a small number of people carrying affective labor) and we should approach it with compassion and centering learner agency and participation in their own learning as much as possible (you’ll see in the slides my work with Mia Zamora, Daniela Gachago and Nicola Pallitt applied to AI)
- EdTech literacy: we should never ever be just integrating technology into our teaching because it is the shiny new thing. The tech needs to be adding something GOOD, either helping us as teachers do something new that is valuable or something old in a better way, or doing this for students in a way that is worth it. Also: be aware of the risks of adding it.
- How well do I understand AI anyway? (critical AI literacy)
In brief, when deciding whether or not to use a new technology a particular way:
- How well does it align with my teaching philosophy? Does it help me do my teaching philosophy better? Might it actually be against my values to use it (for me: Turnitin.com as fostering mistrust, for example)
- How well do I myself understanding it? (critical AI literacy)
- How might my use or refusal of it affect learning? Teaching? (SAMR, PICRAT) Does it help teachers or learners do something valuable or that would have been difficult or unimaginable without it?
- How might my use of refusal of it affect equity and inclusion: Which groups may be unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged by this?
- How does it affect trust and community in the classroom?
- To what extent is this new thing going to promote learner agency versus the opposite?
I don’t have time to talk about this in detail, but I’ve got several slide decks I’ve used around this topic, within my institution and in keynotes, so I’ve removed all institution-specific data from it, merged them all together, and I’m sharing this combo huge slide deck which I will embed below, and is also open for anyone in the world to comment on:
I welcome comments and suggestions on the slide deck directly or here in the comments. Let me know if this is useful for you, what you might add to it, what you might question in it. Do keep in mind that I usually have a lot of interaction around this, and all my “answers” are about how I would think about it in my own context, not necessarily applicable across contexts. The questions are more important than the answers, here, imho.
Header Image by Angel Hernandez from Pixabay. I chose this image of a blindfolder person with an open book, because doing one of the literacies alone without the others is like trying to read a book while blindfolded! I love that I found this image after I wrote the entire post – it works really well for what I’m saying here.