It’s the Wild Wild West”: Teacher Sensemaking, Street-Level Discretion, and Divergent Responses to AI in Education

• In Event: Teaching and Learning in Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 1: AI and Technology

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has arrived in secondary classrooms not through deliberate policy design but as a disruption that teachers are largely left to manage on their own. Drawing on 30 in-depth qualitative interviews with grades 6–12 public school teachers in Rhode Island, with data collection ongoing toward a target of 50 or more participants, this paper examines how teachers make sense of AI, how they exercise judgment in response to it, and how those responses end up reproducing existing educational inequalities.

The analysis is grounded in Weick's (1995) sensemaking theory and Lipsky's (1980) street-level bureaucracy framework. Together, these frameworks illuminate how teachers, in the absence of clear institutional guidance, have become de facto AI policymakers, making consequential decisions about technology and learning from the ground up. Two distinct orientations emerge from the data. Adapters integrate AI into their practice while building their own frameworks for what responsible use looks like. Resisters make active, values-driven choices to keep AI out of their classrooms entirely. Neither orientation is simply a matter of individual preference. Both are responses to the same underlying condition: a policy vacuum that has left teachers to navigate these decisions on their own, under vastly unequal structural circumstances.

The paper concludes that this vacuum is not a neutral gap but one that actively widens educational inequality, and calls for governance frameworks that treat AI guidance as a labor issue, not merely a pedagogical one.

Author

• Quentin Jenkins, Brown University