(via Lily Murray, Northern Kentucky University)
Registration is open for the ACRL Instruction Section Inclusive Pedagogy webinar “Potentials of Critical AI Literacies: Challenging AI Inevitability, Valuing Communities and Human Thought, and Supporting Student and Teacher Agency”. It will take place on Wednesday, January 21, from 1:00 to 2:00 PM CDT.
As GenAI technologies have increasingly been integrated into search and writing tools since the public debut of ChatGPT in late 2022, library workers and educators have been faced with difficult questions about these tools and whether or how to teach with GenAI. Many have expressed tremendous enthusiasm about GenAI technologies, while a growing number of library workers and educators are concerned about the existing harms of AI technologies (e.g., environmental footprint, exploitative labor, privacy, biased and inaccurate information, deskilling and cognitive offloading), as well as the long-term consequences of reliance on GenAI (e.g., climate impact at the local and global scale, labor and jobs, human agency, information integrity, interpersonal relationships and community).
Surrounded by contradicting messages about GenAI, it can be hard to know what to think about these technologies, or to distinguish between AI hype and the actual abilities and costs of various AI technologies. For instruction librarians, calls to teach a kind of AI literacy that requires adoption and active use of GenAI has made it difficult to make agentic choices about how to teach about GenAI and whether to actively use or even promote these tools.
In this webinar, Dr. Andrea Baer, Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Information at the University of Texas-Austin, invites fellow librarians and information literacy educators to consider how narratives of AI inevitability, alongside AI hype and minimization of GenAI’s existing harms, instruct people on the socially acceptable ways to feeling about GenAI (feeling rules). Such discourse, she argues, limits student and teacher agency in relation to GenAI technologies. She will then look to work in critical AI literacies that 1) examines the actual abilities and limitations of GenAI technologies and their existing harms and 2) affirms students’ and teachers’ rights to choose ways to (dis)engage with GenAI. She invites participants to investigate their own evolving thoughts and feelings in relation to GenAI and to consider ways of teaching about GenAI and simultaneously advocating for student, teacher, and librarian agency in relation to these technologies.
Register in advance for this webinar here.