We cherish creativity in teaching and learning and have been thinking about it a lot since ChatGPT rolled out nearly four years ago. As media educators teaching at the intersection of communications, technology, and society, we necessarily paid attention to the buzz surrounding artificial intelligence. Yet, as imaginative makers who believe passionately in the magic of human collaboration, expression, and invention, we really wanted to stick our fingers in our ears and sing \u201cla, la, la, la, la.” While we allowed ourselves a long, generous runway before we entered our first prompts, we did eventually taste the koolaid, but are looking to fill our cup with something else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the fervor surrounding AI in education consists of asking questions like: How do we integrate AI into teaching and learning? How do we use AI ethically? How do we use AI in a way that aligns with our values? What training or professional development is needed for teachers to incorporate AI? What new frameworks or literacies should be created or studied? How are students using AI? How do we prevent students from using AI? Amidst these inquiries, we found ourselves pondering a key media literacy question: What\u2019s missing or omitted? Asking this question helped us reframe the conversation and put the learners\u2013 not the tech\u2013 back at the center of our dialogue. It also invited a slew of other questions, such as: When do our students feel most fulfilled? What motivates them to learn? How do we help them to know themselves better? What relationships do they find meaningful and how can we facilitate them fostering these connections? Who are they when they come into our classrooms and how are they changed when they walk out the door again? What do they take with them from our classes that will last the rest of their lives? How are we supporting them in cultivating their creativity and imagination as instruments of resistance, resilience, reflection, and revelation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While AI is a technology that we need to address critically in our classrooms (starting with ditching the marketing jargon and calling it what it is\u2013 a large language computational model), it shouldn\u2019t nudge out what we already know about how human beings learn, what bolsters our students\u2019 sense of self, value, imagination, and fulfillment as developing human beings, how education may support them in reaching their fullest potential, and why it matters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We had one of our many \u201cah-ha\u201d moments watching this decade-old conversation between Drew Faust (Harvard University President and Lincoln Professor of History) and Leon Wieseltier (Caroline Zelaznik Gruss and Joseph S. Gruss Visiting Professor in Talmudic Civil Law) that was hosted at the Brookings Institution in 2015 (Harvard Law School, 2015). In this discussion, Professor Wieseltier laments: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe acceleration of everything is troublesome to me. I think we\u2019re accelerating ourselves beyond what our hearts and our minds can actually absorb, and we\u2019re all living checklist lives. We\u2019re all just getting everything done\u2026And if you speed things up, what you\u2019re really doing is diminishing or impoverishing or in some way even abolishing experience. Because experience takes place in time.\u201d This latter statement\u2013 that experience takes place in time<\/em>\u2013 was especially prescient given how artificial intelligence reduces processes to instantaneous outputs, essentially eliminating experience. Consider this advertisement from Genspark.ai (Figure 1).<\/p>\n\n\n\n