The Balancing Act
Our students need critical literacies in complex digital technologies like GenAI, and therefore, so do faculty and graduate students who teach. In an era where innovations and marketing continue to advance, the best approach is a balanced one: instructors will need to engage with GenAI while also helping students develop critical thinking about these tools.
| Engage with GenAI | Critique It |
|---|---|
| The exigency for understanding and engaging with GenAI | The exigency for developing critical literacies for GenAI |
| We are all teaching in the age of GenAI, so we will all need to adapt and adjust how we teach as students meet this technology in their daily lives. | GenAI software is created by human beings and deployed and marketed for financial gain. We need critical literacy; we need to question not only GenAI-created content, but also the software itself. |
| GenAI is here to stay. It is already being integrated into the computer systems we use daily. | As a human creation, GenAI is not “inevitable.” Our students will influence what forms it takes in the future. |
| Employers expect students to know how and when to deploy GenAI, so students may feel they need these skills to survive on the job market (Mowreader, 2024). | Discourse about GenAI innovation—including ideas about survival—is often troublingly similar to discourse supporting eugenics (Gebru & Torres, 2024). |
| New GenAI products appear almost daily, with increasing capabilities. | The core GenAI innovation, large language models (LLM), were created in ethically dubious ways (Metz, 2024). |
| You should assume that GenAI software can do anything you might assign your students to do. That means we all need to update how we teach (Cardona et al., 2023; Byrd et al., 2023) | Widespread GenAI use, even at the level of ideas and dialogue, may result in more homogenous products (Doshi & Hauser, 2024). |
| GenAI software may provide useful support for learning (Hutson et al., 2024). | GenAI software may supplant both learning processes (Darvishi et al., 2024) and human contact (Crawford et al., 2024). |
Resources & Events
This resource provides practical strategies, examples, and UT-specific tools to help you teach in the age of GenAI. View our Teaching with GenAI SharePoint Resources.
For resources on GenAI created by other UT offices, visit the Teach with GenAI at UTK hub page.