Harnessing AI to Enhance Student-Centered Learning: Elevating Agency and Sense-Making in Education

• In Event: Confronting Complex Educational Challenges in Instructional Design and Technology Research and Practice

Abstract

Cathy’s expertise is grounded in 30+ years of teaching and leading and instructional design in formal and informal environments (K12 and higher education) as well as creating and facilitating professional development programs. She understands educational systems and teacher development across all stages of the career-long professional growth continuum and is passionate about strategic ways to integrate real-world experiences and technology for what she calls ‘in-process’ learning to elevate student agency and sense-making across content areas. Her research has involved student use of technology for feedback across constraints of time and space, innovative practices and good teaching, and strategic application of ideation for instructional task redesign.

As technology advances and interacts with our current culture and culture of education, we are continually faced with gauging it’s influence both as a driver and responder to societal expectations. New tools including generative AI have transformative potential and effectiveness only with access and adoption, with effects not only for information on demand and opportunities to increase creation efficiency, but increased risk for harm if co-opted to support the status quo. From a historical perspective, technology can easily manipulate and be manipulated if not understood, as seen in rising concerns such as the training of models with data sets with inherent biases and challenges in developing regulation, oversight, and accountability.

Within this context, what does responsible innovation look like in practice? Is this different from previous innovative disruptions in terms of how we support new adopters with an understanding of technical development and research along with the skills and knowledge to use it wisely and well? What are the ethical imperatives in preparing practitioners who often frame what epistemologies are valued in a classroom?

Technology integration has been a focus of schools due to strong evidence that it can support learning (Bransford, 2000; Yang & Baldwin, 2020) yet we are still finding that classroom use in everyday instruction is limited pedagogically to teacher-centered dissemination of information (Blikstad-Balas & Klette, 2020). Driven by learning theory, much is still needed in developing dispositions and skills to see “learning as an interaction not just a presentation” (L. Lee, personal communication, June 2024).

Educational systems are complex, and as part of this symposium, Cathy will highlight teacher/instructor use of technology to sustain student-centered sense-making toward meaningful integration. This focuses on what we really want students to know and be able to do to evidence conceptual understanding and multiple perspectives while opening space for conversation in an era of AI information and disinformation.

Author

• Cathleen K. Kim, Pacific Lutheran University