Teaching and Working in a Time of Technological Determinism

[00:15:41] “Surveillance is not new to this country. It's always been a pillar of this country. I always go back to the origins of slave patrols. I go back to COINTELPRO. It has always been a pillar of this country. I think some people care now because it's impacting their class. But I feel like the general understanding we're so far behind.” - Elijah

[00:27:37] Why could a professor's physical presence so easily be replaced by a talking head? Why was [online teaching] not as existential as we thought it would be? One possibility [Houman Harouni] talks about, building on bell hooks's critique of disembodied pedagogy, is that 'the average humanities classroom, long before the pandemic, had rejected interaction, the body, and spontaneity - Dana

[00:31:18] AI is going to make these things happen faster, but until we slow down and really think about how we got here to begin with, we'll never solve the problem. - Elijah - Elijah

[00:14:42] “I'll speak specifically about UC Berkeley, as being an institution that really seems to push AI. I encourage you as an individual, if you're not comfortable with that, push back.” - Elijah

[00:25:08] It's interesting to say [that students] are outsourcing their thinking, because what they're doing is outsourcing their writing — and those two things are very tied to each other in our imagination, in our understanding of how education and learning work - Dana

[00:38:48] I asked my students: ‘why would anyone write an essay in the age of generative AI?’ And one of them responded with what she thought I wanted to hear. And I said something along the lines of, 'You sound like generative AI right now.' And there was that wry smile — [unlike writing] she isn't so infused with the technology that [my comment] didn't make sense to her. - Dana

[01:36:30] “Your [Dana’s] research is, is really beautiful because, like, you're thinking about, like, what drives students to be prompting to AI, rather than, it's like an inherent thing like that anyone is just going to do it if like they get their hands on it.” - Esha

[00:36:27] Unknowing is a generative space, the ‘place where theory is forged’ (Harouni), where frameworks come from — that place of all your easy answers being taken away from you. And the first condition for students to sit in unknowing is for the teachers to sit in unknowing - Dana

[00:41:38] “We explore something and in through that exploration, we find our way back to material. Maybe it goes off, but to not foreclose that student’s creativity in the room, to hold space for a lot of ambiguity in in a creative learning environment, it's messier. It's harder to grade. It's harder to like, assess in that specific kind of way that we're used.” - Lisa

[01:09:25] And part of that is any individual assignment (non-group related assignment) that I assign to students, directly impacts their lives. The group assignments impact them connecting with the client organizations and the client organizations we work with requires human to human interaction to be effective. You can't machine your way into those interactions. - Elijah

[01:38:13] I've been in faculty meetings where faculty will say, "I am proud that half my class fails because it's such a competitive major it winnows them out." Until that stops, you're going to have students using AI to ensure they pass classes. - Lisa 

[01:43:43] “We can't control the institution. We can try to influence, but we can be accountable to ourselves and to our community members.” - Elijah

[00:19:39] I would really love to see a much more interconnected (or relational and subjective), feelingful, body-ful kind of future. And how do we get that in our classrooms, you know? I feel lucky I get to teach movement and dance, but you see a lot of students struggling who aren't getting material experience-based learning in their classes. They’re just learning in classrooms where they have to abstract everything, theorize everything, and make everything countable and quantifiable. - Lisa

[00:34:04]“What we have the power of humans to do is to learn in relationship, to have our subjective embodied knowledge.” - Lisa

[00:56:10] “But I think for me, the more we as humans can understand that we all are creative and that we can challenge these technological systems with our human creativity. I think that's where the future lies, sort of what I just talked about, like setting up situations, where we can problem solve with multiple perspectives in the same room, not just specific only discipline or certain domains in the room.” - Lisa

[01:23:01] If this technology now exists, then isn't the only thing that matters, somehow, that one learns how to create the conditions where these texts can come to life — that one can follow their implications rather than abstracting them away?"  - Dana