Summary
At the Citadel, the graduate school of education decided to take on the challenge of AI proactively, with the help of a $25,000 Opportunity Grant from the Lowcountry Graduate Center. It is being used to demystify AI and integrate it into the curriculum for students who are or will be literacy teachers.
Just as the “worldwide web” was in the early 1990s and social media was in the mid-2000s, so today artificial intelligence is creating shockwaves for the opportunities and pitfalls it presents businesses and education. Every business is wondering what AI is going to do for them – and to them.
At the Citadel, the graduate school of education decided to take on the challenge of AI proactively, with the help of a $25,000 Opportunity Grant from the Lowcountry Graduate Center. It is being used to demystify AI and integrate it into the curriculum for students who are or will be literacy teachers.
Overcoming Teachers’ Fear of AI
“A lot of our students appear leery of AI. It’s part of our job is to understand that it’s not going anywhere,” said Liz Beck, assistant professor of literacy. Most master’s degree students are working teachers who see the AI train barreling down the track at their classrooms.
The Opportunity Grant is being used to incorporate AI into the curriculum for the course Teaching Reading and Writing to ESOL students. The department has developed a pre- and post-instruction assessment tool that will help instructors determine the needs of their master’s degree students and the efficacy of their efforts to integrate AI into the curriculum.
The big issues with AI facing teachers are academic honesty and cognitive reduction in students who rely on the tool to do their thinking for them. No one knows for sure how much of a factor these issues will be or how they can be mitigated in favor of AI’s benefits. Andrew Zutell, a professor in the school of education and AI project manager, says 2020 research with Chinese students learning English used an AI tool to record student speech and analyze it to increase their fluency. It found the benefits to the students far outweighed any theoretical downsides.
How AI Will Be Used in Literacy Instruction
In the area of literacy, teachers might use programs like ChatGPT and Google Bard to assist with quantifying text complexity so they can walk their students iteratively through language of increasing difficulty, says Britnie Kane, program coordinator for literacy, interim dean of the school of education. She notes that teachers might present the Declaration of Independence to their students, but need to simplify the language for new English speakers. “AI allows us to write prompts that say, write Declaration of Independence at an 8th grade reading level,” she said.
It won’t be long before all graduate school programs are incorporating AI into their curricula. AI searches will become the new “Googling,” says Kane, and so schools must determine now how best to manage its use.
90% of Teachers Uncomfortable with AI
The Opportunity Grant is a matching award that the Citadel will supplement to provide supplies, services and professional development opportunities, the last of which will be plentiful and critical. Educators will be sharing best practices and war stories over the next decade or so until everyone is comfortable with the tool. For now, Kane says, 90% of teachers are not comfortable with AI and 75% have never used it. Already The Citadel has used these conferences to learn about using AI for lesson planning, assessment building and personal tutoring.
“Right now,” says Liz Beck, “we don’t need to be advanced in AI and machine learning, but we need some grounding so we can continue to build upon it and refine the skills.