To start the new academic year in our international teacher training course, I asked three questions to gain a better understanding of the participants’ views on artificial intelligence’s (AI) application in the classroom:
Our pre-service teachers were thoughtful on AI’s implications as they discussed the value of big data for choosing a partner and the potential for less bias compared to their parents, while arguing for the emotional depth and understanding that goes beyond what can be quantified. Similarly, the “AI marking app” could be a faster, and debatably more objective and consistent assessor, but concerns were raised over its ability to identify nuance and creativity. Of course, binaries are good for debate and drawing out philosophical perspectives, but ideally, we can answer for both applications of AI and human creativity, the best positivism and scientific rationality has to offer, alongside the best of humanism and phenomenology.
Which brings us to that third question. A resounding no is the answer for anyone paying attention, with the caveat being that AI is not going to replace teachers, but teachers who understand it and use it while seeing its limitations, they will replace teachers who don’t.
What am I talking about when I talk about AI? AI can be viewed as a technical field of engineered systems for outputs such as recommendations, forecasts, content, or decision making based on objectives, but it can also refer to the technologies or tools we use that can perform human tasks that require “intelligence,” such as perception, reasoning, judgement, and problem solving. In this article I refer to both meanings depending on the context.
Offering a definition of it raises one of the first things AI can teach us: we rarely discuss intelligence in our own discourse as educators anymore, and that is a good thing. As international educators, we speak less and less about “intelligence” being something measurable, and statistically measurable in the case of AI, as we talk more about capacities: how our brains allow us to move, think and act in different and unique ways; how are context and environments influence and shape use; and how we can encourage individuals to flourish by recognizing the potential in each of us over the deficits. Even just by defining what AI is, we can learn a lot about our own commitments as teachers to inclusivity and the neurodiversity movement.
AI tools have many applications in international classrooms: translation and language learning tools, intelligent tutoring systems, real time feedback and adaptation to individual needs through personalized learning, large language models (LLM) for curating and creating curriculum resources, to name only a few. It is revolutionizing the ways people learn, and most usefully, it responds to learning styles and offers immediate feedback. This speaks to one facet of the job of a teacher, and if you think teaching is only about the transmission of knowledge and personalization, then AI may very well make you irrelevant. But if you think the role of the teacher is to inspire, to encourage emancipation- individually and collectively, to create, and to design, then we offer something very different.
Education is not static because our students are never the same as the ones the day before. We are all in flux, but young people in particular are in a state of becoming. We guide them in a process by which they explore the world, discover it, and play an active role in changing it. In all our subjects, we challenge them in this creative act of designing and creating new knowledge, breaking with patterns and remaking themselves and the wider world.
This speaks towards what AI teaches us about education, art, and our understanding of ourselves. I’ve taught throughout the Middle East and Europe, and within that diversity, there are not many things that I think of as universals, but one thing that all students in classrooms want is to be seen.
As a literature teacher, I have worked with 11-year-olds who write fiction that feels so original, so innovative that it feels like a break with what has come before in the canon, different to everything I have ever read. And I have seen the joy when that work is read as a class, discussed together, and celebrated together. I have had students who open themselves up in their writing and reveal things that maybe they have never told anyone before. Often fiction is the lie that reveals the deeper truths. And for us to miss that young person expressing themselves, to miss a young person striving to question who they are, for that to be looked at by AI – that would be a travesty. From teaching creative writing to working with students to solve global problems, AI teaches us that education is really about change and renewal, more so than knowledge transmission and personalization.
AI tools are mirrors, and they reflect the views, values, and perspectives of the wealthy, global north societies that built them. These are the same values that have brought us to the incredible positions in scientific ingenuities, but they have also put us on the edge of planetary devastation.
Hannah Arendt in The Crisis in Education writes that “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.” If we allow AI to teach and tell the stories of our histories, create our art, give advice to our young people about how to plan for the future, we are letting the past tell us who we are, what we can do, and most worryingly who we will become.
When I work with the next generation of international educators, I tell them that developments in AI ask something of us about the need for us to move beyond the knowledge that has come before so that across the globe we can rediscover our history, celebrate our differences, and create the story of a future for our shared humanity that will have less to do with our current knowledge and more to do with remaking oneself and one’s world.
Is that not what education is really about?
Reference:
Arendt, H. (1954). The Crisis in Education. Available at: https://thi.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Arendt-Crisis_In_Education-1954.pdf. [accessed 1 October 2024]
Dr. Callum Philbin is a researcher and teacher trainer with NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands, where he works with colleagues to support teaching and learning in international schools. Callum has been a teacher and school leader in international schools in the United Arab Emirates, Czech Republic, and The Netherlands, and completed his doctoral research in international education with the University of Bath. He now trains international teachers and leaders across undergraduate and master’s courses, while leading a research group focused on practice-oriented research for the international classroom.
