UNESCO Digital Learning Week: The Need for Creative Pedagogies in an AI-Driven World
Last week I attended the UNESCO Digital Learning Week in Paris, keen to hear how educators, governments, organisations and tech companies across the world are seeking to respond to the impact of AI on education.
As someone who advocates the need to ensure creativity is at the heart of the educational experience, I was interested to see how the conference might reflect the challenges of ensuring that students at all levels retain their capacity for creative and critical thought while at the same time making the most of the opportunity which Generative AI presents.
I was optimistic going into the conference that there would be debate about how to both educate and train students and teachers in the risks and challenges which AI presents whilst also ensuring that education encourages human creativity at the forefront of the learning experience.
The problem is, of course, as Sir Ken Robinson and others have expressed so eloquently in the past, creativity has never really been at the heart of the central education systems of the world. Governments have created a standardised system of industrial education suited to an age which needed trained workers to work in the new factories and people to manage them.
The education system created for this industrial structure has hardly changed over the last one hundred and fifty years despite the rapid transformations in our society, of which Generative AI is the latest innovation to which our education system needs to respond.
However, at the UNESCO conference in Paris, the relentless drive for comprehensive standardisation, supported by AI, emerged. The unintended outcome of this focus became clear to me. Students will learn the skills of AI rather than creativity, which will accelerate their future redundancy not prevent it.
There was no discussion of the current emphasis of our education systems on a ‘knowledge in, testing out’ culture. This culture is driven by standard rubrics such as the PISA international tests. These performance tables influence state educational policies and reinforce a continued focus on single subject studies at all levels of education, with Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) given priority, and creative areas marginalised or absent.
As Peter Drucker has said, culture eats strategy for breakfast, and this is exactly what is happening in the strategic implementation of AI within centralised education systems dominated by test outcomes and league tables.
The adoption of AI within standardised approaches to learning means the hardening of a limiting educational culture — not an escape from it.
The clear message from the majority of presentations at the UNESCO conference could be summarised as follows: Generative AI is here so we need a curriculum which focuses on it, we need to train teachers in understanding it better so we can teach the key areas of machine learning, algorithms and artificial intelligence to our students.
On the surface this sounded sensible. However, no consideration was given to how this approach would ensure that the already dominant STEM educational curriculum will now be augmented by an AI driven focus, ensuring that other aspects of learning, particularly in creativity, are further marginalised and given little or no time on timetables.
Delegates agreed that the AI curriculum needed to include an ethical consideration of how to counter the increasing reliance on the technology by students for assessments. There was a also brief consideration of how to utilise AI to create personalised learning — but the vast majority of presentations demonstrated a move towards greater standardisation.
Many of the conference presentations demonstrated how Generative AI can be used as a tool to create curriculum and assessment for teachers and students, whilst simultaneously downplaying or even ignoring its status as in essence a massive plagiarised essay, scraping the original writing of others and passing this off as something new, which represents a contradictory message at the heart of our education system.
‘Use AI but don’t trust it’ is not a thought through implementation strategy. It is a fig leave to try and cover the naked shameful truth: Those who run education systems want to use AI to save time, money and to have an outcome that appears to be effective as students get better test results and achieve a higher PISA score, while the creativity and critical thinking of humanity diminishes even further.
And while it would be wrong to blame AI for the fundamental problems at the heart of our mass educational systems, the emerging narrative from the UNESCO conference was that the rapid adoption of Generative AI will enhance the dehumanising effects of these systems, not remove them.
Presenters at the conference frequently referenced the world shortage of approximately 40 million teachers and the lack of access to or exclusion from education for an estimated quarter of a billion of school age children.
AI was seen as a way of bridging these gaps by providing tools for generating curriculum content without the need for teachers (while also saving existing teachers the time it takes to create a new lesson). AI could also be placed on devices to give access to content to those who may not always have internet connectivity.
On the surface these could be seen to be positive developments, but at no point in any of the presentations I attended over the four days of the conference did anyone ask — ‘where is the human in all this?’
A quote kept going through my mind about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
A clear narrative emerged. AI can create curriculum content with or without a curating teacher; AI can design assessment ‘tailored’ to the individual student. AI can mark and provide instant generated feedback to the student and AI can collate the marks into the overall result.
We already know that students themselves are increasingly using AI to write assessments, and as delegates acknowledged, new technology is being created to circumvent assessment methodologies and AI detection.
Curriculum, assessments, student responses, marking and feedback can all now be delivered by AI with minimal human intervention. This concern was not raised by any speaker at the conference. Evidence, perhaps, of how our education systems already encourage conformity and acceptance of delivered ‘facts’.
Justification for this approach came from emphasising the ‘best intentions’ of giving greater access to education across the world, combating teacher shortages, training teachers and students to have greater knowledge about AI and streamlining systems of assessment and administration to reduce workload and ensure efficiency, consistency and fairness.
This was seen as a way of encouraging more people to become teachers, rather than a thinly disguised way of ensuring teachers are no longer necessary. The level of resources that many governments are putting into focusing on both education on AI and the development of tools that can streamline delivery of the curriculum to students is growing exponentially — and this focus on AI takes the emphasis away from creative learning.
As someone who used to teach teacher training students I wondered where the passion, joy and love of a subject would be located in the process — particularly as the AI systems could now produce standardised lesson plans, without the need for these human qualities in the mix.
What became clear to me by the end of the conference was that AI will enable our centralised, systemised, ‘knowledge in, assessment out’, factory-based education systems to achieve their standardisation goals more rapidly, efficiently and effectively.
Thanks to AI implementation our centralised education systems will move more efficiently in the wrong direction — further away from creativity and critical thinking and increasingly towards the very automation that AI will replace.
We should be starting from the opposite premise — not with conferences on AI but with summits on creativity and humanity.
We need a gathering which explores how we can capture the natural human appetite for learning and creativity and the best ways to nurture this in the world we are living in. This is where students and teachers can excel, by being passionate and creative thinkers themselves, and sharing that passion to enhance the love of learning that comes from within.
My concern was not just for those who are excluded from education, but for many of the 1.25 billion students in education now. Those who, like members of my own family, are experiencing an education system which they find to be disengaging, mind-numbing and uninspiring.
As Sir Ken Robinson says, our current education systems squander the talents, creativity, love for learning and joy of our students pretty ruthlessly. Rather than enlisting AI to make the experience of education even less inspiring we should start with looking at how we can make learning a truly creative experience.
We should start with the person at the heart of the educational experience, the pupil and student, what they bring, what they aspire to and what potential and passion they have. Anything else comes after this.
Learning should be something where the student and teacher work together collaboratively, to get to a better understanding of the potential in themselves and not an experience that is imposed by a mechanised process, designed to create industrial workers for a world that technology has already replaced.
