From Anxiety to Opportunity: How is GenAI Reshaping Our Assignments and Teaching Practices?

Francisco Lopez-Martin started with the idea that GenAI is a force shaping our world (not merely a tool) and that our students need to learn to understand it so that people are in control of GenAI, not merely fact-checkers in the “AI loop.” One way that he incorporates AI into students’ classwork is by creating a class bot that students could use to practice arguing through the 16th-century Debate of the Indies between Las Casas and Sepúlveda.  He explained that having the ungraded opportunity to work through their understanding of the text increases students confidence and participating in class discussion and debate.

Melissa Huerta discussed her experiments with using a GenAI program to have students do visual storytelling as a way to enhance their vocabulary and grammar learning and language practice. She reflected on both the value of the assignment (connecting language learning to creative experiences) and the challenges she encountered, including realizing how much scaffolding and explanation were required to ensure that the assignment enhanced students’ language learning.

Max Goldman talked about the limitations of GenAI’s usefulness in a discipline (philology) founded in making sense of human texts, where students’ learning often happens more in making mistakes than in being correct. In his classes, he tells students that they don’t need to use GenAI but also has developed an extensive guide for students who choose to use it, which he hopes they will use to think through their choices about their own learning process.

One of the many takeaways from the session: We need to be thinking about how to balance asking students to persist through the friction that is vital to learning without creating so much friction for them that it leads them to shut down. The path to productive learning lies somewhere in between.