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 “la, 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.
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’s missing or omitted? Asking this question helped us reframe the conversation and put the learners– not the tech– 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?
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– a large language computational model), it shouldn’t nudge out what we already know about how human beings learn, what bolsters our students’ 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.
We had one of our many “ah-ha” 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:
“The acceleration of everything is troublesome to me. I think we’re accelerating ourselves beyond what our hearts and our minds can actually absorb, and we’re all living checklist lives. We’re all just getting everything done…And if you speed things up, what you’re really doing is diminishing or impoverishing or in some way even abolishing experience. Because experience takes place in time.” This latter statement– that experience takes place in time– was especially prescient given how artificial intelligence reduces processes to instantaneous outputs, essentially eliminating experience. Consider this advertisement from Genspark.ai (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Video Recording of a Commercial for Genspark Seen on the NYC Subway
Theresa shot this clip while riding the subway on a visit to New York City in April 2026. We don’t get a lot of illuminated, moving advertisements in our part of rural Appalachia, so seeing variations of this “One Tap” campaign lit up on train after train in NYC reveals not only the pervasive nature of advertising, but also the hidden ideologies that influence and shape culture. What we love (but actually loathe) about this ad is the (not-so-hidden) ideology that our experiences don’t matter. The company is literally showing us that what’s omitted is our experience– in this case, of the meeting (Figure 2).
Notice how the ad cuts out two indispensable action verbs; listen and capture. Observe how the tech eliminates the moments where we humans would engage– noting key points, making decisions, and sharing action items. All these components (and more) are an invaluable dimension of the experience of meeting. We agree that there are some meetings that could be an email. But we also believe there are myriad human purposes contained within the experience of a gathering (Parker, 2020) and those purposes matter.
Figure 2. Still Frame from a Commercial for Genspark Seen on the NYC Subway
Unlike the suggestion of this campaign– that society is one tap away from ditching the messy, human venture of working stuff out slowly for instant, synthetic products– we believe students desire the journey. Or, as the late Ken Robinson noted, they seek an experience of being fully alive (Robinson, 2010). We all do! And if we are to be in service to students and learning, then teaching media literacy must comprise designing an experience of living that embraces the messy middle (which is, again, the part AI obliterates). Learning can be designed to brim with ample social, temporal, and somatic elements. As often as possible, let’s bolster opportunities for students to engage in conversation, connection, and creative expression in order to foster an experience in time that might just be indelible, building lasting friendships, memories, and an experience of being alive. And maybe, just maybe, we can do this while also attending to the reality of AI.
For instance, in Dr. Henson’s assignment “Anticipating AI,” university students in a digital photography class shoot anticipatory images using mirrorless cameras. By anticipatory, we mean that they collaborate in brainstorming playful poses and positioning each other as though they were interacting with a thing or seeing something amazing or intimidating. Students compose their images in ways that will, eventually, enable the use of Adobe Photoshop’s new generative fill feature to complete the composition. In other words, like a magician about to initiate a trick, students scheme and plan together first, creating images with the physical cameras that carve out a space for something that isn’t there… yet. In doing so, they inevitably end up talking, moving, and laughing! Then, after importing their anticipatory pics into Pshop, they learn how to make targeted selections and utilize the generative fill feature to craft the missing pieces (Figures 3 and 4). Like other AI, Pshop’s generative fill works by typing a prompt for the image you wish to generate into a text-entry box.
Figure 3. Before and After for “Hmmmm, Wouldn’t It Be Funny to Find a Koi Pond in the Water Fountain”
Figure 4. Before and After for “Let’s Make it a Bluebird Sky and Add a UFO”
The process of co-constructing images with peers in space and time builds a relationship between students with each other, students with the physical world, and students with their imaginations, while also preparing them to use industry tools in creative ways that centers them as the creator.
Another core dimension of this activity is a discussion about creativity and copyright. John is attentive to creating space for students to learn about how Adobe’s generative fill feature was trained as part of the experience. “Setting it apart from other image generation AI tools, Generative Fill in Photoshop is trained on only Adobe Stock images, openly licensed work, and public domain content…a method [that] prioritizes ethical considerations by avoiding the use of copyrighted material without permission” (Nguyen, 2023). This learning opportunity is anchored in human conscientiousness, connection, and reciprocity– along with the technology. And, most importantly, it positions the students to ponder possibilities, rather than prompts.
We recognize that AI is part of our work as educators, which is why John incorporates it into his curriculum. But we aren’t ready to cede creativity to the machines yet. We are especially skeptical as we approach 2030 with the polycrisis at the front of our minds.
Ruha Benjamin (2024) explains that “schools are places where the next generation either comes alive with possibility or is crushed by the weight of odds stacked against them” (p. 36). In finding those possibilities, climate storyteller, Tatty Hennessy, explains “… the problems we’re facing feel less and less ‘people-sized,’ and that weakens the connections between problems and solutions… Storytelling is a way to close that gap…It can make us care, and caring is the root of action” (2019). So, yes, let’s study AI and develop AI literacy frameworks that extend and augment foundational media literacy frameworks– but let’s also listen to and uplift artists and storytellers. Let’s cultivate human caring and creativity in our classrooms by playing with problems and solutions in all shapes and sizes so that our students become storytellers.
Studying algorithmic personalization and influence in your media literacy class? Replace the five-paragraph essay by hosting a mock global forum where students role play attendees from all over the world tasked to develop demands for industry, governments, and schools. Analyzing AI outputs for misrepresentation? Forget the slide show and convert your classroom into a theatre company where students write scripts personifying a continuum of representations to address and redress hegemonic social codes. And do these things in time– because the experience matters. Media literacy is not just a subject of study– it is also a way of teaching, or pedagogy, that involves deep listening, critical and creative conversations, and multimodal sense-making between students with each other, with the curriculum, with educators, with the physical environment, and with the future we are (re)shaping together.
In discussing his fifth solo studio album, Twilight Override, Jeff Tweedy writes “When you choose to do creative things, you align yourself… with creation, you inherently take a side against destruction…Creativity eats darkness” (Drew, 2025). And we think media literacy as pedagogy can too.
Figure 5. Linocut print created by Artist Andi Gelsthorpe
References
Benjamin, R. (2024). Imagination: A manifesto. WW Norton & Company.
Drew, C. (2025, November 6). Jeff Tweedy Conquers Darkness on Twilight Override. The Austin Chronicle. Retrieved from https://www.austinchronicle.com/music/jeff-tweedy-conquers-darkness-on-twilight-override/
Harvard Law School. A conversation between Drew Faust and Leon Wieseltier (2015, April 16) Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4TXg69kfo8
Hennessy, T. (2019, January 27). Why Should We Care About Stories? Open Democracy. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/why-should-we-care-about-stories/
Nguyen, A. (2023, June 28). How Adobe is Using AI with Generative Fill in Photoshop. DiscoverTec Blog. Retrieved from https://www.discovertec.com/blog/how-adobe-is-using-ai-with-generative-fill-in-photoshop
Parker, P. (2020). The art of gathering: How we meet and why it matters. Penguin.
RSA Animate & Robinson, K. (2010, October 14). Changing education paradigms. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Artist Bio
Andi Gelsthorpe is a mother, modern-day hunter-gatherer, social worker, photographer, community activist, and printmaker. As an artist, her work focuses on nurturing human connection and developing a sense of belonging. Andi believes that creativity is the first language of humanity. She is interested in the relationship between meaningful art-making and resiliency. She seeks to establish safe spaces for people to reflect and explore the healing power of their imagination while engaged in the creative process. Andi lives in the beautiful mountains of Boone, NC, with her husband, their son, and their two blue heelers, Rip and Frank.
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