Remarks I shared at the first faculty assembly of the 2023-24 school year at West Virginia Wesleyan College:
This time last year many of us were understandably stressed about the potential of ChatGPT and later Chat GPT4 to destroy higher education as we know it—not to put too fine a point on the heights our anxieties could reach. A year later, we’ve probably all got stories to share and wisdom to offer about how we managed this chilling new thing in our discipline-specific ways. And we are likely still trying to figure out best practices for the coming year and beyond. Certainly, colleges and universities everywhere are scrambling to have the smart, winning position on this, whatever that might be.
What I’d like to do in my brief time here is note a couple of things that the emergence of this new technology reveals about the very old practice of teaching the young. I’m not talking about artificial intelligence in the broad sense—that catch-all term for cognition-like capabilities that will either save us or end us, depending on your point of view. Rather, I mean these text-based conversational AI agents like chatbots and what we are to make of them pedagogically, other than the enemy.
First, I wonder if we’ve paid sufficient attention to the ways these platforms can actually enhance learning, especially for students who come to us with gaps in the knowledge and skills we expect of them. Note to self here and maybe to you, too: we should cherish the students we get, not pine for the students we wish we had.
ChatGPT can be used effectively as a tutoring tool, generating things like individualized practice problems and questions, along with instant feedback. It offers personalized study advice for students who struggle to work smarter, not just harder. ChatGPT can improve accessibility to content for students with disabilities, like audio and visual aids, and provide them support services that aren’t always available in person or easy to get to.
Second, how much of our angst around chatbots is because we secretly, or not so secretly, suspect that our students are just itching to pull one over on us? Another note to self here and maybe to you, too: let’s not communicate to students, overtly or even in subtle ways, that we expect they will cheat. That is a form of cynical defeatism I am prone to myself, but it’s neither fair or wise. I don’t believe that most young people come to college hoping to game the system or dupe their professors or scam their way to their degree. I think most of our students are dealing with responsibilities and heartaches and trauma we have no idea about, and that the pressures they feel to “succeed”—from family, friends, coaches, and our competition-driven culture—send some of them down a spiral of bad decisions that can lead to disastrous consequences. And some of those disastrous consequences are put in place by us because we’re persuaded that cheating is a student’s default mode (or the default mode of certain students) and we feel furious and helpless to do anything about it.
Maybe our anxiety and fury about ChatGPT could be channeled into energy better spent in taking more seriously a collaborative model of education. Paolo Friere, the Brazilian philosopher, educator, and political activist, in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, criticized what he called the “banking” concept of education: the idea that teaching is an act of depositing information into the repositories that are passive, individual students. We know that this is not only an ineffectual way to teach but a dehumanizing one as well since, as Friere observed, all real learning is social and collaborative in nature: “The teacher and the taught together create the teaching,” he famously said. This is a model of teaching and learning that encourages active in-class inquiry, curiosity-led participation, and critical literacy—the skill set one needs in any discipline, and for any future vocation, to think critically about what one is reading, hearing, seeing, and to develop a critical consciousness that has the language and the ability to assess: is this fair? is is just?
This collaborative pedagogy can open our imaginations to ways of assessing student learning that don’t rely so much on the kinds of assignments that ChatGPT excels at. And even if you’re not persuaded by the collaboration model of teaching and learning, it is on us to design assignments that can’t be performed readily and convincingly by a chatbot.
And what are some ways that ChatGPT might help us with tasks we don’t love doing, like some forms of grading, generating quizzes, crafting practice questions for tests, and so on. Who among us doesn’t want more time for the lifegiving aspects of our vocation and more time for having a life?
Let me be clear: I am for embodiment. For presence. For human connection. In teaching and in life. And I have deep concerns about these generative AI platforms. I worry about the very loss of embodiment, presence, and human connection they represent. I worry about bias and inaccuracy. I worry about the over-dependence, the addictions, even, they can induce.
But the question is not: is ChatGPT good or bad? The question—which is the question for any technology, really—is: what sort of person will the use of this technology make of me? And: what habits will the use of this technology instill? And: how will it affect how I relate to other human beings? And: what practices will the use of this technology replace? And: what will the use of this technology encourage me to notice? Cause me to ignore? And: what was required of other human beings, of other creatures, of the earth, so that I might be able to use this technology?[1]
So we should do all we can to discourage students from asking a chatbot to compose their written assignments. Run those AI content detectors if you must. But this moment presents bigger challenges than that to us and to our students. It poses worthy questions that have been around longer than AI and ChatGPT but are newly urgent. I hope we are interested in exploring them with depth and nuance, both personally and collectively. I’d welcome such conversations.
Cheers to a new school year, everyone.
Thank you!
[1] These questions are from Michael Sacasas’ essay “The Questions Concerning Technology” on his Substack “The Convivial Society.” He also talks about the essay on an episode of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show.”