9 Defending Human Teaching Expertise in the Age of AI: A Call to Action

Aims and Objectives

• Critically appraise AI in Education to generate awareness and understanding around the human and social impact of AI
• Bring a transdisciplinary perspective to AI in Education
• Recognise and value the irreplaceable expertise of the human teacher
• A Framework of 5 Guidelines for AI in Education: A call to action to provoke human educators to consider how they might work with AI in ways that are educationally desirable

Initiative Overview

This theoretical framework draws on my published research to take a critical approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education. It comprises four defining features that are designed to raise awareness and provoke discussion amongst teachers, students, institutional policy makers and educational technologists around the nature and purpose of teaching in the age of AI. The framework seeks to embrace a more values-based concept of what good teaching should look like. Each of the features is accompanied by a question that functions as a Call to Action. The questions are designed to provoke human educators to consider how they might work with AI in education in ways that are educationally desirable.

Political Values: To what extent and on what terms is your teaching directed and controlled by AI? (Gibson, 2024)

AI driven educational technologies have the power to control human behaviour through their ownership and analysis of the huge volumes of user-generated data. This datafication of education is of a cyclical nature. New data-driven theories of learning emerge, which are in turn coded into the educational technologies, academic institutions purchase these technologies, pedagogic practices are influenced by the use of these technologies, data-driven insights produce the evidence to create policy, which, in turn, feeds back into and validates the learning theories. Furthermore, this over-reliance on factual information to create evidence-based educational policies and practices erodes human judgements around what is educationally desirable.

Ethical Values: How might you generate student awareness around the algorithmic agency of AI? (Gibson, 2023)

AI is an active agent in shaping our knowledge systems.  However, AI  hallucinates and is prone to bias and prejudice. We must push back against the encroaching political forces of AI monopolising our educational practices. Freedom in the future is contingent to our understanding of the technologies we use, how they work, why they work as they do, who controls them and what value systems they embody. This is an ethical response in its aim to generate understanding around the political forces within our relational encounters with AI.

Pedagogical Values: How might your educational activities be developed to be more collaborative, rather than individualistic? (Gibson, 2025)

In education, we tend to conceptualise AI as a personalised one-to-one private tutor whose primary function is to facilitate the transmission of knowledge in an efficient and scalable manner with little consideration for the messiness and unpredictability of the lived experience of teaching with AI. This individualistic approach positions AI as a neutral tool and the human teacher and students as passive objects. To embrace a more collaborative approach is to position all entities as active subjects. In this capacity, knowledge is generated in and through the relational encounters.

Social Values: How might you and your students become involved in the design and development of your AI technologies? (Gibson, 2023)

Teachers should become more involved in shaping their educational technologies to become more pedagogically driven, reflective of our value systems, and respectful of the democratic boundaries between humans and technology. Human teachers  might work with computer programmers, philosophers, political theorists, designers, and sociologists at an institutional level.

References

Gibson, P. (2025) [In Press)]. Pedagogy of AIED. In: W. Holmes and C. Pelletier, eds., The Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence and Education. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar Handbooks series.

Gibson, P. (2024). Orchestrating Good Educational Relationships With(in) Automated Teaching: A Posthuman Perspective. Networked Learning Conference, 14(1).

Gibson, P. (2023). Enacting Empowerment Through an Automated Teaching Event: A Posthuman and Political Perspective. Postdigital Science & Education

Future Directions and Sustainability

Future work will continue to engage local and global educator communities focused on critical approaches to educational technology. This includes ongoing involvement with the Networked Learning Consortium and the Critical Approaches to Artificial Intelligence in Education (CAI&ED) community.

Recent activity includes participation in the forthcoming Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence and Education and an invitation to UNESCO Paris Headquarters in September 2025 to present research and contribute to discussions on educational futures.

Alignment and Policy Context

• Ten Considerations for Generative Artificial Intelligence Adoption in Irish Higher Education (HEA, 2024)
• Generative AI in Higher Education Teaching and Learning: Sectoral Perspectives (O’Sullivan et al., HEA, 2025)
• Guidance for Generative AI in Education and Research (UNESCO, 2023)
• AI and the Future of Education: Disruptions, Dilemmas and Directions (UNESCO, 2025)
• UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education

Resources and Supporting Information

• CSET Collective (2025). Critical studies of education and technology … reasons to be hopeful? https://doi.org/10.26180/29265038.v1
• Gibson, P. (2024). Orchestrating Good Educational Relationships With(in) Automated Teaching. Networked Learning Conference Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.54337/nlc.v14i1.8086
• Gibson, P. (2023). Enacting Empowerment Through an Automated Teaching Event. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00346-9

Images

Funding and Acknowledgements

Funding: Strategic Alignment of Teaching and Learning Enhancement (SATLE) funding, administered by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in partnership with the Higher Education Authority.

Image acknowledgement: Zoya Yasmine / https://betterimagesofai.org/ / CC BY 4.0