This is about AI, and more specifically, AI in social studies classrooms. I want to preface this with the fact that I genuinely love history. I loved history way before I loved teaching. I love history because I’m a human who is infinitely amazed at the complicated journey humanity has taken to get me here today. I feel myself connected to past decades, centuries, and millennia. This never ceases to amaze me. To some degree, we are all trying to figure out who we are and what makes up our identity as tiny little human individuals who walk the face of an enormous Earth with an enormous history.
It just dawned on me how incredibly privileged I am to have attended school in a time where I could trust almost everything presented to me (I say almost because I can recall moments of bias and distortion in my middle school US history course quite clearly- an unintended consequence of a human instructor). In particular, I think back to my undergrad days at the University of North Florida where I took a Spanish Paleography course. We had access to a database of letters written from Spanish Florida and the whole goal of the course was to take these letters and transcribe them. Just look at the old Spanish handwriting and type it out letter-by-letter and word-for-word so it could enter the next phase which is translation. Many of these letters had never been touched by any historian beyond being digitally scanned into this database! We were doing the work of getting these incredible pieces of history formatted so they could build our ever-evolving understanding of local Florida history. History never felt so real to me. I would print off copies of these letters and sit in the library or outside the fencing club before practice trying to figure out the old calligraphy. Never once did I think, “This is something fake that my professor is using to test our transcription skills.”
I heard something the other day that has bothered me to my core. A student questioning an actual clip of a JFK speech. Not questioning it in a way we want students to- but questioning whether or not it was generated by AI. A student not trusting that a teacher was showing them authentic history. There are so many questions we want students to ask when evaluating presidential speeches, but we don’t want them to have to first figure out if it’s even real. We cannot let students feel like they can’t trust their history teachers to provide real bits of historical sources. The magic behind history is that human connection to our past.
On one hand, I’m happy that students have the sense to question material they encounter. On the other, I’m sad that they are skeptical of even real material. Students are savvy. They always have been. They know teachers are using AI to lessen the ridiculous work load placed upon them. They know it’s everywhere.
I know AI is here and it isn’t going anywhere. I’ve heard the “argument” that we need to embrace AI in schools because it isn’t leaving. However, I don’t think this is a valid argument for presenting students with AI-generated content in a history classroom. Artificial lighting is an amazing invention. It has fundamentally altered the human experience. It’s not going anywhere. It’s here to stay. But, that doesn’t mean we have to love light pollution. If you’ve ever been out to stargaze in a place truly free of light pollution, you know just how incredible it is to see the Milky Way with your own eyes. Our history classrooms should be a space where students can see real history because real history is incredible. Imagine if students walking into your classroom knew they were in a space that was 100% authentic? 100% human-curated?
AI is a tool that has a use and is here to stay. Students do have to learn to live in a world with AI. There’s some incredible applications of AI for teachers, too. Taking a picture of a physical textbook reading and feeding it to AI to create an audio reading for a visually impaired student on the spot? That’s crazy helpful! To be clear, I’m not actually an anti-AI hardliner. I use AI all the time. But, I do not think think it deserves a place in student-facing instructional materials for history. What’s going to happen when students can’t trust that the maps they see, the speeches they read, the artwork they see are from the real human experience?
Be upfront with your students. Have a silly AI caricature of yourself in your classroom? Tell your students it’s AI, but then tell them you won’t give them any AI-generated materials. Tell them real history is important to you and that they can trust you to teach them the most human of all courses because, well, you are a human pouring your human self into the class.
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