Higher ed was abuzz last week after UCLA professor Zrinka Stahuljak announced her intention to teach with an A.I. generated textbook in the next iteration of her medieval literature class. While much of the response to this announcement focused on the ethical complexities of using generative A.I., Stahuljak\u2019s comments raised another issue that has received less attention. The textbook, she argued, would mean students would receive \u201ca more standard, a more coherent, and a more even training\u201d in her classes, while she would be \u201cmore of a teacher than I\u2019ve ever been.\u201d<\/p>\n
It’s not clear if in choosing standardization\u2014sameness\u2014Stahuljak is trying to improve the experience of her students, herself, or both. But I would argue that sameness is not the path to improvement on any of those fronts.<\/p>\n
In Stahuljak\u2019s class, students will enter the classroom and receive the same education from the same textbook with the same prompts and assignments generated by A.I. Variability in instruction will be replaced with the opportunity to make everything \u201creplicable\u201d across sections (in this instance) and across years (in future applications). To many this may sound enticing\u2014the opportunity to ensure every student in every section is experiencing the same thing without reference to their own, their instructor\u2019s, or their classmates\u2019 foibles, personalities, intellectual tangents, or even responses to having a bad day. It articulates the hope of objectivity: that there is a dispassionate place from which we might all might \u201cdo\u201d education better, if only we could iron out the wrinkles of being, well, human.<\/p>\n
But we are human. Both we and our students are an infinitely and wonderfully variable bunch. That variability has to do with the lives we have lived until the moment we meet in classrooms, and the degree to which we have been prepared for\u2014and welcomed at\u2014college as teachers and learners both.<\/p>\n
Our students come from wildly different socio-economic backgrounds, and attended every imaginable type of high school, from those struggling to meet the needs of their students to those with multi-million-dollar endowments. Our students have, and don\u2019t have, kin; they have, and don\u2019t have, caretaking and financial responsibilities toward those kin. Some of our students travel by bus and subway and light rail to make it to class, while others can walk across campus in five minutes from their dorm. Some of our students see themselves reflected in their faculty, and others do not, and some of our students see themselves reflected in our staff, and others do not, and all of them are receiving subtle (and not-so-subtle) messages about the people for whom higher ed was created.\u00a0 Some of our students need accommodations as a matter of justice, while even more don\u2019t have the time, money, or access to get the documentation that universities demand before accommodations are made.<\/p>\n
This barely scratches the surface of the vast, meaningful differences between any sized group of students gathered in any classroom, online or off. And what we teachers do is respond to and affirm that difference. We don\u2019t ignore it, and pretend the playing field is level, but seek it out and celebrate it. We learn the names of our students; we grow to understand their facility with writing and mathematics and ceramics and dance. We adjust, day by day, to the pace of their learning, and we\u2019re constantly in the business of dreaming up new classroom activities that will recognize the variability of their needs. We tailor our feedback; we throw out a lesson and try something new; we decide a book isn\u2019t working and find a new article and flip our classrooms and open up a new discussion board. We are changemakers in every possible sense, because the realities our students face demand that we be such.<\/p>\n
This is demanding work. It is hard. Most of us are exhausted most of the time. I find no fault with anyone hoping that our teaching loads become lighter and our paths to success easier. But it isn\u2019t an A.I. textbook that\u2019s going to solve the problem\u2014it\u2019s investment in human beings, at every kind of institution, at every level at which we educate and mentor and teach and learn. It\u2019s better pay, and permanent positions, and childcare, and eldercare, and good healthcare, and professional development, and time.<\/em><\/p>\n So, I am not persuaded that an A.I. generated textbook is going to revolutionize education in any way that is meaningful, and certainly not that it will make improve our teaching.<\/p>\n We are humans, and it\u2019s investment in human difference that is the key to realizing the higher ed for which we hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Higher ed was abuzz last week after UCLA professor Zrinka Stahuljak announced her intention to teach with an A.I. generated textbook in the next iteration of her medieval literature class. While much of the response to this announcement focused on the ethical complexities of using generative A.I., Stahuljak\u2019s comments raised another issue that has received less attention. The textbook, she argued, would mean students would receive \u201ca more standard, a more coherent, and a more even training\u201d in her classes,…<\/p>\n