As the AI boom impacts education in monumental ways, educators must place increased emphasis on teaching ethics and digital literacy.
Assistant Professor Vashti Wai Yu Lee (TESOL, Applied Linguistics) remembers learning about digital literacy as a young girl. Her teacher spoke intently on the importance of double-checking information found online instead of taking it at face value. The advent of AI has drastically altered the way we access and gather information, but the need for digital literacy remains the same—and educators have an important role to play in teaching students to use the tool not just effectively but responsibly.
Exploring Digital Literacy
Digital literacy played a role in inspiring Lee’s work as a PhD student at Michigan State University. Her supervisor invited her and two other students to write an article on AI technology for a special edition of Pedagogies: An International Journal, a publication catered toward educators. Lee and her cowriters decided to investigate AI literacy through the lens of pedagogy, or the theory of teaching—particularly relevant as they were soon to begin their teaching careers. The project required them to invest extensive time into reviewing previous journal editors’ work and learning more about AI’s impact on language education. The team worked on the article for over a year before it was published, by which time Lee had joined the BYU Linguistics Department.
The Argument
The article, “Problematizing and Addressing Equity Issues in Multiliteracies and the Use of Generative AI: Why Critical Ethical Literacy Matters,” stresses the need for educators to teach their students skills in critical and ethical literacy relative to AI content. Lee explains, “People are aware that these tools have limitations, but the tools are helpful, so we use them frequently.” She argues that there needs to be more conversations within classrooms on how to use AI responsibly. Further, it is important for both students and educators to recognize the merits and limitations of AI tools, especially in terms of recognizing biases and preserving writer voice and identity. “We need to teach students to compare and contrast human and AI-generated content,” she says. These discussions will foster critical thinking and can also lead students to use AI more ethically.
The Application
In the article, Lee and her colleagues outlined a process for educators to follow to facilitate critical thinking and ethical literacy development in the classroom. They argued recognizing the limitations of AI tools is the first step, followed by understanding the need for evaluation of AI content, designing activities to teach students to evaluate this content, and then leading discussions about ethical dilemmas students might face as they come across artificial material. With these steps, Lee and her colleagues argue, educators will better prepare students to use, create, and analyze AI content in critical and ethical ways.
Teaching critical ethical literacy in the age of AI is important to Lee, who prepares future educators in her TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) classes. Lee says what she learned in writing this article influences the way she leads her classroom. Instead of trying to prevent the use of AI, Lee believes “as educators, our job is to help students know how to use these tools effectively and teach them the limits of these tools so that they can leverage them thoughtfully.”
Read Lee’s full article here.