Our ongoing unregulated massive public experiment with generative artificial intelligence began in earnest in November 2022. While forms of AI had been increasingly integrated into our everyday lives for decades, OpenAI’s public release of ChatGPT marked the first time many people had access to a technology that could imitate human writing in such an uncanny way. Panic set in, and questions abounded. Was there any point in teaching writing anymore? How could we make sure students didn’t cheat? Would education as we know it be inevitably and completely transformed?

My recent HERJ article, “Why think historically when AI can do it? Understanding the relationship between generative artificial intelligence and history teacher identity”, examines the perspectives of five history teachers in British Columbia, Canada as they grappled with these and other profound questions shortly after the public release of ChatGPT. As a history teacher, media scholar, and teacher educator, I was especially interested in understanding how teachers made sense of themselves at this particular moment of uncertainty. Through teacher-guided research conversations, history teachers shared their thoughts, worries, hopes, and fears about AI, and described how they understood the technology in relation to their goal of teaching students to think historically.

Overall, teachers viewed the new technology as a professional call to arms of sorts, emphasizing the increased value of their work and their profession in the face of AI technologies that can mimic the work of meaning-making. Their particular perspectives, however, differed greatly. For example, one teacher saw historical thinking as an important set of competencies to be ‘leveraged’ in order to assess AI-generated content, and felt historical thinking was mainly valuable to the degree that it could help students develop ‘transferable’ skills to be applied elsewhere. Another teacher viewed historical thinking as a method of reinforcing students’ human capacities in the face of technologies that threaten to undermine those capacities. And another responded to the release of ChatGPT with a renewed commitment to building community and encouraging activism through history education to arm students in the fight for a human future.

Most importantly, the five history teachers in this study demonstrated a notable depth of thought and eagerness to engage with the messy, complex issues raised by generative AI. Maybe the value of GenAI in history education lies not in what it can and cannot generate, but in what its existence generates within us, what it forces us to interrogate, what it calls into question, and what it makes clear. Maybe the value of GenAI is in how it helps us remember the significance of human relationships in education, how it reminds us of why we study the human condition in the first place, how technology has always been part of that condition, and how, despite dominant assertions to the contrary, we have a say in what happens going forward.

Why think historically when AI can do it? Understanding the relationship between generative artificial intelligence and history teacher identity by Rachel Moylan (The University of British Columbia, Canada) is part of the HERJ series Investigating the Relationship Between Generative Artificial Intelligence and History Education and published in History Education Research Journal, volume 23

Rachel Moylan is a PhD Candidate and Public Scholar at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. She teaches media studies education, social studies education, and teacher inquiry courses in the Bachelor of Education program at UBC and was a history and English teacher for eleven years in New York City; Austin, Texas; Manokotak, Alaska; and Budapest, Hungary. Her doctoral research critically analyses the roles and effects of algorithmic technologies in education with the aim of identifying opportunities for and methods of resistance. She also contributes to the Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future research project and leads the NARRATE research project, which is focused on youths’ agentic capacities in relation to algorithmic technologies. Rachel looks forward to defending her doctoral dissertation very soon.

historical thinking history education AI artificial intelligence genAI generative artificial intelligence teacher identity interview-based research