Why think historically when AI can do it? Understanding the relationship between generative artificial intelligence and history teacher identity

GenAI and history education

Much of the literature related to history education and GenAI focuses on AI as a tool to enhance learning, improve engagement and assist with the work of lesson planning and assessment. Research has attempted to measure the effects of integrating GenAI in history teaching (Yetişensoy and Karaduman, 2024) and the value of using AI to assess students’ ‘historical competencies’ in ways that ensure ‘objectivity, validity, and replicability of ratings’ (Bertram et al., 2021, p. 1). Some describe AI as a panacea capable of transforming history education by summarising difficult historical texts, mimicking the writing styles of notable historical figures and creating visualisations that allow students to ‘explore and understand complex historical phenomena in a more engaging and interactive way’ (Berson and Berson, 2023, p. 118). Others have interacted with GenAI to evaluate its usefulness as a tool for students to converse with in history class and as a tool for teachers to use to create more engaging lessons or to develop thought-provoking questions (Yell, 2023).

Literature focused on history teachers and GenAI has typically studied teachers’ AI literacy (for example, Yetişensoy and Rapoport, 2023) or the use of AI to enhance history teacher education (for example, Al-Shammari and Al-Enezi, 2024). In much of this related literature, history teachers are described as obligated to keep up with AI’s inevitable development, with some scholars unequivocally asserting that history educators ‘will need to adapt’ (Clark and Van Kessel, 2024, p. 152). Indeed, many history teachers would likely benefit from expanding their understandings of the technological capabilities and practical implications of GenAI (Moylan and Gibson, 2025). However, extant literature has not yet adequately considered the perspectives of history teachers in relation to the significance of GenAI for their understandings of themselves and their profession. Along these lines, the introduction and development of GenAI can be understood as creating ‘conditions of significant change’ (Sachs, 2001, p. 149) that have compelled teachers to confront existential questions concerning their professional purpose and value, as well as their understandings of themselves as history teachers (Moylan et al., 2025).

Historical thinking in British Columbia

In British Columbia, historical thinking is most commonly understood according to the framework offered by the Historical Thinking Project (https://www.historicalthinking.ca/). Six historical thinking concepts make up this framework. They are: (1) historical significance, (2) primary source evidence, (3) continuity and change, (4) cause and consequence, (5) historical perspective-taking and (6) ethical dimensions (Seixas and Morton, 2013). According to Seixas (2017), these concepts are ‘procedural’ and ‘function as problems, tensions, or difficulties that demand comprehension, negotiation and, ultimately, an accommodation that is never a complete solution’ (p. 597). In history education, students can be assessed according to their ‘competence in negotiating productive solutions’ to these problems (p. 597). Although the Canadian historical thinking framework has been faulted for lacking a strong theoretical basis, for glossing over the importance of interpretation, for not making explicit connections between the six concepts and for ‘paying insufficient attention to the dynamic interrelationships of past, present, and future’ (p. 603), the framework can be applied in history classrooms in ways that allow for teachers’ professional judgement as to how exactly address those shortcomings. In British Columbia, historical thinking has been integrated into the provincial curriculum in ways that offer guidelines but allow for significant teacher autonomy.

History education in British Columbia falls under the larger umbrella of social studies, which includes required courses in grades K-10 and an extensive menu of elective courses in grades 11 and 12. For each course, learning standards are organised into two categories: curricular competencies and content. The curricular competencies are aligned with the six historical thinking concepts already described, while the content items are intentionally broad and open-ended. For example, in the 20th Century World History Grade 12 curriculum, one curricular competency reads, ‘Assess how underlying conditions and the actions of individuals or groups affect events, decisions, and developments, and analyse multiple consequences (cause and consequence)’. Content, however, includes items such as ‘authoritarian regimes’ and ‘social and cultural developments’ (Province of British Columbia, 2025).

The current British Columbia curriculum, of which social studies is one part, is the result of a redesign process that took place between 2010 and 2018. According to the province, the redesign was necessitated by the need to prepare students for our ‘technology-rich world, where communication is instant and information is immediately accessible’ by fostering ‘transferable’ skills for ‘21st century learning’ (Province of British Columbia, 2023).

Historical thinking and writing

As the disruption caused by the release of ChatGPT was largely related to its ability to create written text, it is also important to address the connection between historical thinking and writing. While forms of thinking can certainly happen without writing, constructing a written work can be understood as a rigorous method of thinking. As Schneider and Zakai (2016) posit, ‘historical thinking skills are developed through the process of doing history – by asking historical questions, digging through sources, and then crafting written arguments’ (p. 2). In history education, the value of students’ written products does not typically lie in the products themselves, but in the thinking that goes into creating the product, including ‘the critical reading of source materials, the synthesis of evidence and ideas, the formulation of a thesis and an argument, and the expression of thought in a coherent piece of writing’ (Carr, 2025, para. 9). Writing has also been shown to be closely connected to the development of critical thinking and reasoning abilities (Dowd et al., 2018), and to change how the brain functions (Ostrosky-Solís et al., 2004).

Until the advent of GenAI, the idea that learning to write well was an essential part of education was largely taken for granted. Yet some have argued recently that learning to train AI to write well has taken precedence over learning to write well oneself, and that we are facing a future in which very few people will learn to write well and in which the ‘world will be divided into writes and write-nots’ and consequently ‘thinks and think-nots’ (Graham, 2024, para. 11). For history teachers, the potential devaluation of the craft of writing may lead to questions about the potential devaluation of historical thinking, along with questions about the essential purpose of their work and their understandings of themselves.

John: leveraging the inevitable

When I first learned about ChatGPT, I was excited. Right from the get-go. I’m more of an optimist about this. I don’t have any major concerns, and if I do, I then fall on more of a fatalistic argument, which is, there is no way to stop this, so we have to take advantage of it. – John

At the time of this study, John had been a history teacher for 19 years. He described having ‘always really like history’ and always doing well in his history courses in school. When explaining his decision to become a history teacher, he recalled reviewing his old report cards and realising his ‘good marks’ indicated history was something he was good at. This led him to pursue an undergraduate degree in history, followed by a Bachelor of Education degree. He was then ‘lucky enough’ to land his ‘dream teaching job’ at his current school ‘right out of the B.Ed. program’.

Before moving onto John’s thoughts regarding GenAI, it is helpful to consider his perspective on British Columbia’s curriculum redesign process in relation to history education. As John explained:

Overall, within this province, for the first 15 years of my career, history was mostly content driven with the only skills being writing and research. And then, now we’re historical thinking focused, which is a whole interesting challenge of, how exactly do you teach competencies and skills? How exactly do you assess them? And so, it’s been a relearning for social studies teachers to change because, of course, we love content, right? And we’ve – and I’ve been trained to deliver content in an efficient, and I like to think engaging way. So, I’ve stayed a teacher this long, and what’s valued is different now, right? And so, I have to rationalize that with my own professionalism, and then what the province wants me to do, and then what’s relevant for the kids coming out of high school.

From John’s perspective, the shift to a curriculum focused on historical thinking required a dramatic shift from ‘delivering content’ to helping students develop thinking and reasoning capacities in relation to history. While it seems unlikely that history education in British Columbia had been devoid of historical thinking, or that teaching students to write and conduct research was as simplistic as it may have seemed, the curricular redesign made historical thinking the explicit focus of history education in the province.

Concerning GenAI, John repeatedly expressed his belief that it didn’t matter what his thoughts were because ‘it’s not going anywhere’. He justified his position by recalling the many technological changes he had witnessed over the course of his career, from the presence of computers in his classrooms to the introduction of Wikipedia, to the more recent ubiquity of mobile phones. As he explained, ‘I think about when the Internet first came in, or laptops, or all that kind of stuff. It’s just a weird inevitability that this will seep into me personally.’

John seemed resigned to what he views as the inescapability of AI ‘seeping’ into him. Although he appears to be conveying the sense that he is completely without agency in relation to GenAI, and that when it comes to the role of technology in education, time simply marches on, there is more to John’s perspective than this. Examining John’s thoughts about historical content helps in understanding his perspective:

So, in terms of historical content, what I think is of greater value now is the evaluation of the facts and information, right? Now, we just seem to get into what’s real and what’s not, and teaching people to scrutinise sources of information and things like that. So, in something like twentieth-century history, when you get rid of the textbook and you move to a historical thinking skills-based thing, you actually just enlarge the content that you can cover and then decrease the amount of time you have to actually cover it, because you need time to work on skills. So, recalling information has become way easier, because smartphones are synonymous with people holding the Internet in their hands, right? So, you can easily just look stuff up. Thinking about AI, we need to teach students to leverage those historical thinking skills to evaluate the content AI creates. The degree that I can be the teacher and have the course that integrates AI is an advantage on the ground level. Also, I think students and everyone else will see the relevance and the transferable skills that will come across from this.

Perhaps John’s resignation to the seemingly inevitable comes not from a belief that he lacks agency, but from a focus on demonstrating his own continued relevance and the relevance of history education in the age of AI. To John, the ‘content’ of history has lost its significance as technological developments increasingly allow for immediate retrieval of ‘facts and information’, of which AI-generated content is the latest variety. The development of GenAI, on top of the provincial curricular redesign, seem to have contributed to John’s belief that to avoid becoming obsolete he needs to ‘leverage’ historical thinking in a way that seems relevant to students entering an AI-infused workforce. Along these lines, history education could seem valuable only insofar as it teaches students ‘transferable’ skills that can be applied outside of the discipline of history. This is not to say John fully believes this or wants it to be the way things are. In his refusal to admit that his feelings about AI might matter, he may be prioritising self-preservation at a time of significant uncertainty. In many ways, John’s arguments for himself and his profession are materialisations of societal values he has identified in the redesigned curriculum and the context within which he works.

Willem: holding on to humanity

Trying ChatGPT for the first time – it felt weird. Like, it was … It just felt weird, and I was trying to understand why it felt weird, and I guess the only thing I can really say is it just feels like we’re outsourcing something human to this thing. We’re giving it away from ourselves. – Willem

Willem grew up in a family that moved back and forth between Canada and Europe. He described his childhood split between different cultures as shaping his decision to become a history teacher. He explained, ‘I always had, from a young age, an understanding of the impact that culture has on you as an individual, which then led me to be interested in different cultures, which then led to an interest in history.’ He said he has always been fascinated with the ways ‘people engage with one another, and how they engage with institutions, and then how institutions form nations, and how those people interact with each other’. After spending time as an adult living ‘off the grid’ in remote areas, he decided to earn a Bachelor of Education degree and ‘put down roots’. He was in his third year as a teacher when he participated in this study.

Willem’s most pressing concern regarding GenAI was not about the technology itself, but about the ease with which others ‘outsourced’ their human capacities to the technology. Upon encountering ChatGPT for the first time, he immediately felt a sense of uncanniness and connected the technology’s capabilities to a diminishment in human reasoning and thought. He elaborated this position further through the following example:

I’ve got a kid in my class, and they had to do a written response question. It wasn’t even an essay. The question, it started off with, ‘what do you believe’. And I forget what the exact question was, but it was something about the Royal Proclamation, and he wrote this response, and I … immediately, I knew he didn’t write this. I knew AI wrote this. And I got mad at him. The thing is, this assignment didn’t count for marks, but what actually angers me is that he just outsourced his thinking on a question about what he believed. Not, ‘what year did this happen’, but his opinion just got outsourced to AI. And that’s what I think is the real risk with this technology. This over-reliance, over-dependence on using this thing, not for recalling dates or facts but, actually, for how you feel about something, and how you reflect what your opinion is. I would consider that to be a risk. I would say we’re very much at the bottom of this mountain staring up at it, trying to figure out what the hell it even is.

Willem’s emphasis on the student’s decision to outsource his beliefs (as opposed to ‘dates or facts’) to AI is exemplary of his view that historical thinking happens through the process of synthesising evidence and making reasoned judgements about historical events. While Willem seems to see the use of technology to recall information as acceptable, using GenAI to do the work of making historical judgements crosses an important line.

Willem became a history teacher because of his intense interest in human culture and relationships and his desire to build connections with students through the collaborative study of humanity. As he put it, ‘your interaction with young community members is what makes the job meaningful’. For Willem, being a history teacher is not only about teaching students how to think historically, but about building relationships with other human beings. For a student to introduce GenAI as an unwelcome mediator in that relationship seems to have been a great disappointment to Willem and one that may have struck at the core of his professional self-understanding. Willem was angry not because his student cheated on an assignment, but because he relinquished a central human capacity to the technology and allowed that technology to disrupt a student–teacher relationship he valued.

Christina: rediscovering purpose

Initially, I guess there was worry. And then being in my classes and still being so useful even with the advent of this tool brought my worry down quite a bit. Because they still gravitate to me to unravel their thinking, and they still look to me to make sense of an idea. At the end of the day, they realize there’s a gap in their understanding. So, that’s where my worry kind of washed away. The thing will produce an essay, but they can’t tell if it’s good. So, I went from worried to finding some uses for myself again. – Christina

Christina had been a teacher for 20 years at the time of this study. After completing her undergraduate degree and briefly working for the federal government, she spent time travelling and teaching in Asia and earned a ‘Cracker Jack box’ teaching certificate before deciding to pursue a Bachelor of Education degree. (Christina’s description of her teaching certification as ‘Cracker Jack box’ alludes to a once popular snack food in North America that came with a cheap toy in every box.) She described history class as the place students should learn how to argue well and that students should ‘be able to battle back’ with her. As she explained, ‘They should come out strong in their understanding. They should be able to put me in my place, or at least teach me something, a perspective, because they’re the younger generation; they’re woke.’

Christina’s experiences concerning GenAI in the first few months after the launch of ChatGPT at first left her feeling worried; however, that worry was soon replaced by a renewed sense of purpose after noticing that her students still relied on her to help them think. As she explained:

So, if we think about the six historical thinking concepts, like evidence and interpretation, right? Sure, they can use AI to find the evidence. They can find the evidence, but they cannot interpret. They could throw a question into ChatGPT, they can generate an outline, they can get a response. But do they actually understand anything?

To better illustrate her point, Christina described a conversation with a student who was having trouble writing an essay related to Japanese internment during the Second World War. As she explained, ‘One of the historical thinking concepts is ethical dimensions. So, they had photos, they had primary sources, and the task was, reconstruct the Japanese Canadian experience before and during the war, and focus on the ethical dimension. And the student was lost.’ Christina described her conversation with the student during which she asked a string of questions to painstakingly help him think through primary source evidence. After meticulously working through documents demonstrating the segregation and discrimination Japanese Canadians had faced, the student’s conclusion was that Japanese Canadians were mistreated because all immigrants to Canada are mistreated and that this mistreatment is simply a rite of passage. Christina described feeling shocked and disappointed and noted that the student ‘walked away so frustrated’ with her. As she explained:

He was irate, and he said, ‘When I go home, I’m just going to put it in ChatGPT, and I’m going to see what I get.’ And I said, ‘Okay. But you see the problem is that you cannot show empathy. You cannot put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and you cannot see the moral dilemma, or the ethical dilemma, and the marginalization or the consequences of marginalization.’ And I’m sure the boy was not heartless, but he was just lost as to how to do this. So, sure, they can use ChatGPT to get a response. But how much would they learn from that response? What we’re trying to do is change students’ minds. Not to make them agree with us, but to actually change their minds. We’re trying to impress upon them some ways of thinking and some values. But he would have gotten a good mark, likely, because I’ve seen what those things can produce. If the student knows to pick certain pieces of evidence to insert into the response, he could have gotten a good mark. But what would be his big takeaway? That it’s normal to marginalize newcomers in Canada.

As a history teacher, Christina sees herself as tasked with developing students’ capacities for perspective-taking, empathy and ethical thought. Historical thinking, in her view, helps students articulate arguments and support those arguments with evidence. She doesn’t seem to see GenAI as a threat because, to Christina, GenAI has nothing to do with thinking. While she did mention her worries about written assessment at other points in our conversation, she seems to see writing for assessment as distinct from writing as a form of thinking. Her statement that students still need her to ‘help them think along the way’ seems to indicate her belief in her continued value as a history teacher as long as thinking remains valued in history education.

Liz: defending against injustice

What’s worrisome about these reality-creating tools, like ChatGPT, is that they are imagination reducing. They reduce our powers. They cut, they shut down imagination. They benefit from kids not knowing what they don’t know, from everyone not knowing what they don’t know. – Liz

At the time of our conversation, Liz had been a teacher for eight years and had worked in public schools as well as a variety of independent settings that ranged from ‘schools that followed a for-profit model when times were tough and [she] needed the work’ to ‘deeply hippie independent schools in the middle of the woods’. Liz had earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations and a master’s degree in Canadian feminist literature before getting a Bachelor of Education degree and becoming a teacher. She described herself as an activist and connected her identity as a history teacher to her commitment to social justice. As she explained, ‘I realized that the intellectual project of my life is historical in nature, and that I’ve always searched for reasons in history to answer my questions about injustice in the present.’

Liz described her main concerns about GenAI as related to the motivations of the technology corporations leading their development. As a history teacher, she felt it was her job to help students build their defences against the capitalist value judgements that were embedded within technologies like ChatGPT, which, despite the generally neutral-sounding language they generate, were designed according to a certain set of assumptions and beliefs. As she put it:

I feel very clearly that my classroom is an ethical place, and it’s where we learn about ethics and principles, and where we ask honest questions. And relationally, inside a solid community space, we can navigate the things that Silicon Valley throws at us. As we know, the people who make this AI stuff, they know what they’re doing with it, but they don’t know what the implications will be. That’s an amoral place, and they assume an apolitical perspective. We know that what they’re doing has moral implications, and we know it has political implications. So, the best armour we have is community, and thinking, and building kids’ own sense of self and principles.

Thinking, for Liz, is a way to fight back. She characterised GenAI technologies as oppressive tools designed to take advantage of people, especially young people, who may not fully understand the law, their rights or how AI works. Throughout our conversation, she emphasised her scepticism regarding any potential benefits of AI and noted her ‘clear suspicion of the drawbacks of this thing’. Liz saw her role as teaching students how to think about the past so they are prepared to fight against the injustices of the present and the challenges of the future. GenAI, from Liz’s point of view, is part of these injustices and challenges, and needs to be defended against.

Liz described her students’ use of the technology as ‘pacifying’ and voiced her belief that students are utterly lacking in ownership and agency in relation to GenAI. However, she was also quick to express her displeasure at saying such things. As she exclaimed:

I hate talking like that. My currency is hope, man! I’m a social studies teacher. The currency here is activism, and that means personal inspiration. Investment in your society and putting yourself on the line to change it for others for the better. Excellence in activism, right? It’s not about you. It’s about the other people you can affect, and maybe the people who aren’t here yet.

Rather than viewing it as a threat, Liz seemed to see the advent of ChatGPT as an opportunity to reaffirm her values in the face of what she saw as another oppressive capitalist development. She seemed to be proclaiming her commitment to remaining steadfast in her understanding of her professional purpose – to teach students historical thinking capacities as a method of building their defences against oppression.

Thomas: resisting thoughtlessness

In every way, on every end, I’m completely opposed to AI. Maybe it’s an alarmist attitude, but I only see one place where this is going, and it’s not going to make anyone think more deeply. – Thomas

Thomas described himself as always having an interest in history but that he ‘wasn’t quite sure what to do with that interest’ after finishing his bachelor’s degree. He decided to earn his teaching qualifications and, in the process, discovered he enjoyed teaching young people. Thomas expressed his belief in the value of teaching students to think historically so as to encourage civic participation in an era when ‘those in power are constantly reinterpreting history to serve their own ends, to make sure they maintain control’. When we spoke, Thomas was in his fifteenth year of teaching.

Throughout our conversation, Thomas drew on a rich array of historical examples to justify his reaction to the arrival of GenAI. At times, he expressed exasperation that we, as a society, did not seem to have learned anything from the lessons of the past. For Thomas, it was clear that the new technology would only serve to debase human labour and intellect to the benefit of those in power. In one example, he described the connection between GenAI and the Luddite movement of the nineteenth century:

I just did a unit about the Industrial Revolution, and I always like to talk about the Luddites. The term has become kind of loaded. It just has a negative connotation, but really, they were on the side of the future. You know, they said, if your labour can be done by a machine, then your labour is worth nothing, thus you are worth nothing. That’s essentially what it comes down to, and you don’t have to be a little Marxist to understand that. I’m opposed to AI because it is doing the same thing. It is devaluing humanity.

Thomas also described his pessimistic outlook towards GenAI as connected to a ‘larger mood about the state of the world and its descent into whatever the hell is going on’. He was quick to point out that this attitude was not the one he projected when working with students. As he explained:

In my classroom, I don’t say this. I also don’t say ‘Everything is going to be great!’ But I try to look at it more from an objective point of view, and not, you know, say ‘Everything’s terrible. Here’s why.’ So, I say, ‘Let’s look at this. What do you think about it? What’s the significance of this? What has led to this AI being a thing we are seeming to accept and maybe embrace as part of life now? What are the ethical questions about this?’ I think it’s important to not let my own feelings or inclinations cloud what I do. I’m not neutral, but I try to point out things, and I try to get them to think about them. And maybe those are things they wouldn’t think about otherwise.

Thomas’s approach to discussing GenAI with his students seems firmly grounded in historical thinking concepts, and his position seems to be that students benefit from learning how to think historically about AI. As a history teacher, he feels it is important to restrain his rather blunt and negative language and to focus on guiding his students in their own enquiries.

At another point in our conversation Thomas described his students as ‘not thinking about it, and just using it, and not thinking about the larger implications’. His initial reaction – that AI is not going to make anyone think more deeply – seems to align with what he has observed. Although he feels the impact he can make is somewhat limited because ‘lots of other teachers seem to just say, “oh, it’s another teaching tool, no big deal”’ and because ‘everything with teaching is tied to some type of technology’, he is also committed to taking a stance as a teacher who ‘sees the problems with this thing’.

Thomas is also very clear in his belief that something needs to be done to halt the unbridled growth of AI and that this is largely out of his hands. He again draws lessons from history to explain this position:

We need regulation. It’s leaded gas, basically. The car runs. You don’t see the problem. Everything’s great. No big deal. And, you know, I don’t think anyone’s going to die from ChatGPT. Not immediately, anyway. But people’s livelihoods are going to be destroyed, people are going to be exploited. It’s another utopian idea that’s invented by, I don’t know, wilfully naive people who think technology solves all your problems. Technology doesn’t solve all your problems. Just an example, the cholera epidemic in Victorian London, it happened because people were living in cities and started using water closets, and having plumbing, something we think of as good and sanitary. Because of this new technology, the whole water table was polluted, and people were dropping like flies. Technology is not necessarily the solution. What solved the cholera epidemic? Regulation. Not technology. So, you can only have one that works if you have the other, you know? Cars didn’t have seat belts, and they did have leaded gas. They were not safe. So, things changed, and not as many people are dead. And when it comes to AI, why would the people in charge pass any regulation if we don’t make them?