“Is It Cheating?”: How can a sociological reading of Artificial Intelligence inform our teaching?

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Description

As higher education institutions grapple with the rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence, between prohibition and pressures to “incorporate AI” across the curriculum, institutional policies increasingly position instructors as the key actors determining how these technologies are engaged in the classroom. This workshop invites participants to consider how a sociological reading of generative AI can offer practical pedagogical insights for navigating this moment. The learning goals for the workshop are:

Apply a sociological lens to generative AI to inform pedagogical design that moves from deterministic stories about AI to a situated analysis of this technology.

Identify sociological ethical guidelines for teaching about generative AI that move beyond “bias” toward structural analysis of inequality, and that cultivate students’ critical digital literacy.

Develop a course-ready pedagogical strategy grounded in a sociological reading of generative AI as a sociotechnical system shaped by power and inequality.

The workshop offers a brief overview of theory-driven insights for reading generative AI and draws on pilot teaching strategies from two courses: AI for Social Change Research Lab (a small, inquiry-based seminar) and Social Problems (a large, fully online asynchronous general education course). Participants will also take part of a team-based exercise built around common classroom scenarios that reflect how we might encounter AI in our teaching, analyze the sociostructural contexts that shape classroom dynamics beyond AI, and reflect on how we can transform these encounters into opportunities for our students’ critical thinking. In the final segment, through another guided exercise, participants will adapt these principles to their own course context and leave with a course-ready activity/strategy template they can implement. Rather than focusing on better prompting or simply encouraging instructors to “incorporate AI,” this workshop puts sociology to work to create teaching spaces that better prepare learners to analyze and navigate the new inequalities, challenges, and opportunities emerging with the rise of AI.

Sub Unit

• Workshops / Teaching Workshop

Presenters

• Iris Aleida Pinzon Arteaga, University at Albany, SUNY

• Angie Y. Chung, University at Albany, SUNY

Session Organizer

• Iris Aleida Pinzon Arteaga, University at Albany, SUNY