Prompt Literacies and Affective Companions: First Graders Thinking↔Feeling With AI

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: AI in Early Childhood: Posthuman Perspectives on Digital Practices Across Children’s Geographies

Abstract

Purpose: This post-qualitative study explores how first-grade students in a southeastern U.S. classroom engage in prompt literacies: the ability to generate precise prompts for artificial intelligence (AI) systems, interpret AI outputs, and revise language to achieve desired visual and narrative outcomes (Hwang, Lee, & Shin, 2023). We extend this definition of prompt literacies to early learners, considering not only literacy learning but also affective labor and attachment as children think↔feel with AI. While dominant educational narratives often reduce AI to either a tool for efficiency or a threat to authenticity (see, e.g. Robinson & Hollett, 2024), this paper treats AI as a relational collaborator—examining how young learners affectively relate to generative AI during storytelling and writing tasks.

Theoretical framework: We “think with theories” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) of affect to unpack children’s relational engagements with AI. Drawing on Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism, we attend to how AI becomes both a desired and troublesome companion.

Methods and data sources: Drawing upon classroom observations and informal interviews, we explore how first graders in a Florida public school write and speak prompts into an image-generation tool (e.g., Adobe Firefly), revise them based on the visual output, and negotiate the emergence of complex affective experiences- e.g., AI as “friend” or “liar”. For instance, students may express joy when “the AI understands me,” yet frustration when visual outputs do not align with their thoughts and feelings. We contend that these affective intensities are central—not peripheral—to children’s meaning-making processes and literate identities.

Findings and discussion: As generative AI increasingly enters elementary classrooms, understanding how young students emotionally and cognitively engage with these tools is critical. This study offers insights into how prompt literacies emerge in early childhood classrooms and how affect shapes those literate practices. By documenting how first graders negotiate AI relationships and reimagine language in response to AI production, we position AI as more than simply an “efficiency” tool. Rather, it is as a generative and affective companion in children’s meaning-making.

Scholarly and scientific significance: This paper contributes to the design of literacy curricula that integrate AI critically, creatively, and affectively—helping teachers to scaffold children’s prompt literacies, enhance their affective capacities, and support more-than-human literate identities in a digital age fraught with both promise and ambivalence.

Author

• Bessie P. Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University