a call for like-minded teachers
Should I… initiate a affinity group of professors who are both against AI in the classroom and also, crucially, willing to create and defend the formative guardrails and pedagogical moves to design around its use? We need more than strongheaded exhortations in syllabi, and we need more than handwringing complaints that students won’t read. It’s still unclear whether GenAI will be world-changing across many industries. But even if it’s underwhelming in total, it can eat the entire educational enterprise in the near term, at generational expense. I want collective mutual reinforcement around 1) a developmental view of the classroom and student-teacher relationship that employs constraints in pursuit of hardwon liberties, 2) a substantive mental model of intelligence — human reason and virtue — outside computation and pattern-finding, 3) ideas for preservationist pedagogies, and 4) practical problem-solving, like getting paper-based course materials systems back. Let me hear from you if you want this. My firstnamelastname at hey.com
