I’ve just updated my Teaching Philosophy Statement for the first time in a decade, and the addition that surprises me most is a new section called “AI as Co-Intelligence.” Not because AI surprises me — I’ve been tracking its emergence like everyone else — but because of how naturally it fits into my existing pedagogical framework.
The best moment from this past term came when a student shared her experiment with Claude. After receiving an essay outline from the AI, she turned the tables: “I did an experiment with the outline that Claude AI gave me, asking it to criticize itself within the parameters of your essay’s requirements.” This recursive critical thinking — getting the machine to evaluate its own machine-generated text — strikes me as exactly the kind of intellectual jujitsu we need to teach.
So throughout the updated statement, I’ve tried to capture how AI changes and (crucially) doesn’t change what we do. Students still need to master the conventions of the essay before they can thoughtfully break them. They still need what I call rhetorical awareness, though now that includes recognizing when they’re being persuaded by an algorithm. And they still need to read actual books with actual margins to scribble in (my perpetual refrain: “books aren’t sacred; ideas are”).
This update also kicks off a larger blog renovation project, including proper homes for my Open Book podcast episodes (available on Spotify or wherever you find podcasts). More on that soon.
