These days, rare is the gathering of educators where the discussion doesn’t quickly turn to the specter of Generative AI looming over the future of our practice. Some of us have embraced AI and found ingenious ways to weave it into our classrooms, teaching students how to think critically about AI and use it ethically. Others have refrained from inviting AI into our curriculum, worried that students who rely on AI cheat themselves out of the opportunity to hone their thinking in college.
For the last few semesters, I’ve found myself on the sidelines of these discussions, unsure which team is the one for me. As a teacher of writing, I view myself as a teacher of thinking, but I also know that AI is already shaping the future of education whether or not I embrace it.
I have worried that, by not choosing a path forward with AI, I was being left behind by my own inaction–that is, until a few weeks ago when I caught an interview with one of my pedagogical heroes, James Lang, author of hits such as Small Teaching and Cheating Lessons, on the Teaching in Higher Education podcast.
I listened while Lang drew a comparison between educators trying to predict and prepare for a future with AI and the characters Pangloss, Martin, and Candide at the end of Voltaire’s 1758 novel, Candide. (Can you guess what discipline Lang teaches when he isn’t writing about teaching and learning?)
In Candide, the character Pangloss holds fast to the belief that humans are inherently good and all will be well despite the atrocities they’ve witnessed throughout the novel. Martin believes that humans are inherently evil and nothing but more misery lies ahead for them all. At the end of the novel, however, Candide declines to choose a side–it doesn’t matter who is right, he decides. What matters is the work at hand in the here and now. Lang shared the final sentence of the novel: “‘That’s true enough, but we must go and work in the garden.’ In other words,” Lang explained, “worry less about praising the perfection of the blue skies or taking a grim satisfaction at them falling around you and worry about attending to the work that sustains you…Regardless of how you are responding in your classrooms to the arrival of AI in our lives, the fundamental truths about how humans learn have not changed.”
In his analogy, I see that, whether we view our future with AI like Pangloss, as brimming with possibility, or if we view it like Martin, as the end of original thought, the fundamental truths about how humans learn have not changed. It is a reasonable response to generative AI to focus our energies on nurturing the fundamentals of teaching and learning in our own classrooms–we can and should continue to “work on the gardens of our classrooms.”
Lang’s idea sparked something inside me. I understood that, instead of choosing a side in the AI debate, I can do what I’ve always done when the landscape of education has shifted under my feet–work on being the most effective and engaging teacher I can be, here and now.
I’ll leave you with a few last words from Lang’s conversation with Bonni Stachowiak:
“You feel storm clouds gathering above you, and you’re worried about the future of education. In the meantime, you’re connecting with students and creating learning in the gardens of your classrooms. The rain may or may not fall. In the meantime, the gardens need tending. If you continue to believe in the value of the plants that have always flourished in your garden, keep growing them.”
This is a comfort to me, and I suspect, to many of you as well. This semester, let’s dig into the work of teaching and learning and see what blooms.