Integrating AI in Teacher Education: Faculty Perspectives on Opportunities and Challenges (Poster 4)

• In Event: Expansive Views on the Role of Computing and Digital Literacies in Teacher Education

Abstract

Summary
With the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, preparing teachers for their use in education has become crucial. This exploratory study examines teacher education faculty's views on AI's role, its potential to support teaching and learning, and the need for critical and ethical awareness among future educators. The findings highlight faculty beliefs that AI education should be integrated into teacher training to enhance the teaching and learning process. Additionally, faculty emphasize the importance of equipping teachers to think critically and understand AI's ethical dimensions.

Objectives and significance
As AI increasingly permeates various aspects of education and society, it is crucial for educators to understand how to harness its potential to enhance learning experiences and manage administrative tasks efficiently as well as its limitations. While much of the focus is about how AI could make a positive impact in education, we believe that teachers must also be prepared to critique and counterbalance AI's limitations and biases, ensuring equitable and just educational practices. In this paper, we discuss our effort to work with teacher educators to implement AI within their courses and how they conceptualized AI’s role in education.

Theoretical framework
We use the EnCITE (Entry Points for Integrating Computing and Tech into Teacher Education) framework, which addresses problems and opportunities in designing technology-integrated teacher education curricula (Vogel, Yadav, Phelps, and Patel, 2024). The framework is based on the idea that technology-integrated education should prepare pre-service teachers to teach and learn about, with, through, and against computing and digital technologies. Developing teachers to teach about technology focuses on developing pre-service teachers’ knowledge and skills to understand the literacies required for discussing technology and its role in society; teaching with technology is about the literacies needed for utilizing digital tools to enhance teaching and learning; through technologies focuses on mobilizing computing and digital tools for creation and expressive purposes; and, finally against technologies provides pre-service teachers with skills to develop a critical stance and resist technologies that cause harm.

Data and methods
To explore teacher education faculty's perspectives on AI in education, we conducted semi-structured interviews with participants who attended a summer professional learning workshop on AI and Education. Following the workshop, 12 faculty members were interviewed to understand their views on AI's role in education and its relevance for preparing future educators. Each interview was transcribed and analyzed thematically to identify key insights.

Results
Results from interviews suggest that faculty saw the importance of preparing pre-service teachers to leverage AI to support their instruction, including lesson planning, assessment, and developing their students' AI literacy skills. At the same time, faculty also raised concerns about the use of AI in education that is driven by for-profit companies without adequate support for teacher training as well as issues of equity (such as accessibility). Faculty also discussed the need to prepare educators to understand limitations and biases of AI so they develop critical AI literacy.

Authors

• Aman Yadav, Michigan State University

• Rosa Angela Calosso, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Anne Drew Hu, Michigan State University