Key Points:

  • Our students will graduate into a world where AI use will be increasingly normalized and expected of them, which makes it important for them to learn how to use these tools well and responsibly.
  • Beyond simply teaching students to use this technology, AI-based assignments can promote critical reading and thinking, develop metacognitive skills, and sharpen students’ abilities to revise and give feedback.
  • Furthermore, the rise of AI raises significant questions about equity, inclusion, authorship, learning, creativity, and humanity itself. These are questions our students need to consider as they prepare to live, work, and lead in a post-AI world. They’re also exactly the kind of big, complex questions that the liberal arts excel at addressing.
  • Teaching “AI Literacy” is therefore less a matter of transforming the way we teach and more about reframing our existing goals and methods in ways that will help our students to engage the world they live in today.

In his keynote talk for the 2023 LTC conference, Lew Ludwig, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Denison College, stressed the need for students to learn–and thus for colleges to teach–AI literacy skills. Inside academia, many faculty are quite reasonably concerned that AI tools can provide students with shortcuts that limit their engagement and learning. Outside academia, though, these concerns are much less prevalent, and the use and availability of AI writing tools is expanding extremely rapidly. In short, our students will graduate into a world where AI use will be increasingly normalized, expected, and potentially unavoidable in nearly all forms of writing, which makes it important for them to learn how to use these tools effectively and responsibly.

Understandably, for many of us, the prospect of embracing yet another technological and cultural revolution that might require us to fundamentally change the way we teach can be (fill in your preferred adjective here) …daunting?  …exhausting?  …terrifying? If you find yourself in this position, you might take some comfort in this knowledge: the skills that students’ need to understand and use AI tools responsibly are, for the most part, the same skills that Carleton already emphasizes throughout our curriculum. This means that teaching AI Literacy is less a matter of transforming the way we teach and more about reframing our goals and methods in ways that will help our students to engage the world they live in today.  It also means that, if anything, the rise of AI makes liberal arts education and the methods that define it more relevant than ever.

On this page, we discussed ways to make writing assignments resistant to AI writing, all of which are also high-impact practices for developing effective writing assignments. However, assignments and in-class activities that actively incorporate AI can allow students to explore and understand this technology while simultaneously developing their scholarly reading, writing, and thinking skills. This page covers some of the basic skills that students need to use generative AI effectively and discusses how these intersect with the academic skills we already prioritize in Carleton classes.

Furthermore, given that this is a new technology with many unknowns and enormous potential for both good and ill, it’s prudent for all of us–faculty, staff, and students–to develop our AI literacy by exploring what these tools can do and to consider how they might impact our work.  When you engage AI in the classroom, you invite students to do that exploratory work alongside you. This creates the potential for pedagogically-rich assignments that build student trust and draw on their experiences and perspectives for everyone’s benefit.

Beyond simply learning to use AI tools, students need to understand and engage the major issues that AI raises. As a society, we tend to take a purely reactive approach to major technical innovations–that is, we tend to adopt the new technology first and question its effects on our lives second. If we want our students to be critical and engaged citizens of the world, though, we must teach them to recognize and pursue complex questions as they arise, rather than accepting the “new normal” on its face. This, of course, has been the goal of liberal arts education all along, and it’s something that Carleton instructors excel at doing. So, on this page we’ve collected a (non-comprehensive) list of ethical and political questions that AI raises, and we strongly encourage instructors to consider how the material in their courses might allow for discussions on these topics.