Political Science Educator: volume 29, issue 2
Reviews
The advice faculty typically get on how to address Generative AI in their teaching varies between technocratic optimism, doomsday pessimism, pragmatic suggestions, and ambivalence. The ANALOG Inspiration[1] card deck grounds itself pragmatically in the trying context that we find ourselves in the modern neoliberal university (with diminishing resources, exhausting surplus labor, and growing market mentality of students and administrators alike) to think through the role of AI for your class and fostering discussions about its direct role in pedagogy. The 50 cards, available in an electronic or physical format, cover a range of topics and quotes from different authors. Instructors can use the cards to help me change some of my assessments and even provide specific activities in my class. For example, the “AI Auditors” card instructs:
“Ask students to read about AI’s encoded biases. Invite them to experiment with tools to expose errors, find inconsistencies, and uncover assumptions, especially as they relate to their discipline. What kinds of vernacular are used in specific contexts? What perspectives ae missing from outputs? What do image generators assume with their depictions? Invite students to share their audits and findings with their peers.”
On a broader level, several exercises allow instructor to use AI to flesh out: the hidden curriculum in their courses, alternative assessments for Universal Design; the student choice in a final project; the creative friction, complexity, or humor in an assignment; the aggregation of individuals ideas in a group project; the value added a student might find in an assignments; and the beautiful ideas hidden in the syllabus.
Additionally, the deck lays out quotes from scholars and educators, directly engaged in Gen AI and pedagogy to those addressing the classroom through black feminism, abolitionism, indigenous knowledge production, and story-telling. The quotes promote ideas, situate our teaching practices, and push us to engage the text from which they came.
For example, the deck draws upon Jason Edward Lewis (University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary at Concordia University; with Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Samoan heritage): “Indigenous epistemologies [underpin] ways of knowing and speaking that acknowledge kinship networks that extend to animal and plant, wind and rock, mountain and ocean… While [AI] developers might assume they are building a product or tool, they are actually building a relationship to which they should attend.” The quote pushes us to look to the relational being hidden by so much of the atomistic and the convenient in modern life, but also in the disposability of the stressful and result-driven world of our education. Lewis, like the deck, brings us to the collaborative and intersubjective. Beyond being an analog machine for the thinking of individual teachers alone in their offices, the deck might facilitate conversations in faculty development spaces and even co-teaching efforts between faculty and students. It might be a relationship to which we have attended, and a context to which we have worked through its truth-claims, social dynamics, and other specificities, as any good pragmatist might seek out.
— Matt Evans, Editor of the Political Science Educator
[1] https://www.analoginspiration.ai/
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. As part of APSA’s mission to support political science education across the discipline, APSA Educate has republished The Political Science Educator since 2021. Please visit APSA Educate’s Political Science Educator digital collection.
Editor: Matt Evans (Northwest Arkansas Community College)
Assistant Editor: Colin Brown (Northeastern University)
Submissions: editor.PSE.newsletter@gmail.com
