At the end of 2023 I was invited to speak at the Parliamentary Inquiry into the use of generative artificial intelligence in the Australian education system alongside Dr Joanne O’Mara and Emma Jenkins on behalf of the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English. As part of the inquiry submissions process, VATE conducted a members’ survey, and the Australian Associate for the Teaching of English (AATE) prepared a response coauthored by myself, Dr Alex Bacalja, and Professor Susanne Gannon.
VATE presented to the public hearings as part of the process, and the full transcript of the hearing is available here. We will also be producing an article for our members’ magazine, Idiom, discussing the initial survey, the hearing, and our position on Generative AI.
In this blog post, I’ve extracted my own comments from the hearing transcript and edited them for clarity to outline my thoughts on Generative AI in education. Some of these thoughts have since been reflected in our recent articles for The Conversation and the AARE blog, plus this post on the new Australian Framework for Generative AI in Education.
My comments for the hearing
I contributed to the Australian Association for the Teaching of English submission to the inquiry and I’m also a PhD student studying generative artificial intelligence and education.
I reviewed some of the submissions from our members and prepared a discussion paper for circulation with our members. It’s definitely an issue which the English teachers both in Victoria and across Australia are very concerned with. Shortly after those submissions to the inquiry we had our national conference in Canberra. There were several sessions and panels on generative AI and discussions which reflected a number of their concerns and the potential opportunities for the technologies.
My PhD study is focused on the implications of these technologies for the professional identity of teachers of writing. One concern we have which I think is reflected in the submissions from the members is the potential of generative AI for deskilling teachers. We [VATE] are cautious as an organisation and our members are certainly concerned about the idea of generative AI being used to run off lesson plans resources and so on.
We know as well that a lot of the narrative is being led by technology companies and people who are deploying generative AI. We would much rather the the teachers associations – not just VATE – were more involved. Teachers associations in other disciplines are also concerned about this. We really would like to see some input from the teachers associations on how these technologies are used to support teachers rather than just the interests of the technology companies.
If we apply these technologies properly there are some real ways they can reduce teacher workload and can take some of the load off the work we do in the classroom and outside of the classroom. I’m interested in generative AI in a multimodal creative capacity. To give a clear example, if we look at products like Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Photoshop – which are industry-standard creator tools that might be used in the English, Media and Arts classrooms – the generative AI tools being built into platforms like that lower the barrier to entry for both teaching and using those tools.
One thing that teachers are concerned with — English teachers in particular— was that the burden of teaching AI ethics and teaching the use of generative AI would fall to them.
I’m very conscious of moving the narrative away from generative AI as cheating because I think that if we just get hung up on this idea … we will have teachers spending a lot of time managing fairly low-stakes behavioural issues and wasting a lot of time on things like GPT detection software, which doesn’t work. It’s a conversation we need to move away from. I’m optimistic about the creative potential of generative AI tools.
I’ve got a couple of perspectives. Firstly, I’m optimistic about generative AI and the power and sophistication of the technologies. But I’m also critical of chatbots as a particular application of the technology. When I say chatbots I’m talking about things that you’ve probably come across in the course of this inquiry like Khanmigo – Khan Academy’s tutor chatbot – and similar things such as SARAH from the previous example. They draw on a large but fairly homogenous and limited dataset and the limited worldview of the dataset my second concern really is a personal one. I’m a parent; I’ve got three kids under eight years old. I’m autistic and one of my board roles is for Reframing Autism – a national autism charity. Our kids have got various diagnoses. I can see that personalised learning is a very attractive proposition for these technologies. Personalised learning where everybody has a little tutor on the side is very attractive particularly in light of teacher shortages and difficulties that we have getting teachers into classrooms. But I wouldn’t like necessarily to see one of my own children coming through school reliant those kinds of limited interactions with that kind of personalised coach, particularly from my perspective knowing it’s not drawing on the same kind of worldview that might be advantageous to my children. It might work for 80 percent of the population but there would be children on either end of the curve who would be potentially disserviced by that kind of approach.
So, I think an approach where we look at ways through which we can support teachers’ skills and abilities to form those relationships and create time for that to happen—AI can maybe take some of the administrative workload away and create a bit more time and space for the critical and creative thinking and the connections that we build in the classroom—is where these technologies should go. I’m not going to argue against the fact that a chatbot could probably deliver more content than I could even in an area of my speciality like critical theory and literature or something like that. A chatbot probably knows infinitely more than I do about Marxism. But it’s the quality of the interactions as well as the quantity that counts.
One thing I like to do when I work in schools is to run through a teacher’s daily work and identify things that could be either offloaded or reduced by artificial intelligence. A lot of the time what we come up with is: if it’s something that can be automated very easily with AI does it need to be something that we actually do in the first place? There are a lot of things like this that happen in schools and schools deal with them in different ways but we know that some schools have very onerous report writing processes but instead of offloading report writing onto AI we could just rethink the way that we do the report writing. Some schools don’t have end-of-term reports anymore; they’re just aggregate comments from assessment tasks. But it’s also not just about thinking of ways that AI can replace administrative tasks but about whether if AI can replace an administrative task that task needs to exist in the first place. That would certainly be where I would start.
Hopefully this post gives some insight into my thoughts, hopes, and concerns regarding Generative AI in schools. If you’ve enjoyed these articles, please join the mailing list to stay up to date. If you want to get in touch to discuss professional learning or consulting, use the form below:
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