The Norton Guide To AI-Aware Teaching & Using AI As Provocative Pedagogy

Most writing about AI in education treats it as a problem to manage. Worse still, some of the AI developers take this as a signal that teaching and learning is a problem for AI to solve. I’d argue the opposite. Teaching about AI and its impact on our culture makes for some of the best teaching material in a generation. AI is the subject of provocative pedagogy. It is contested, consequential, ethically tangled, and changing weekly. In the past month alone, we’ve seen commencement speakers booed on stage for talking about AI, an AI reader malfunction at graduation, Granta publishing an AI story that won a Commonwealth prize, Sam Altman telling the world he expects increased capacity limits as AI demand increases, and communities pushing back on the gargantuan buildout of data centers and what these mean for their towns and local resources.

Generative AI is impacting our world, and students want to know what their response should be. I think educators can help students understand AI and shape some shared values around it. The alternative may well be something like the Department of Labor’s response—Make America AI Ready is a training course for the public offered exclusively by text message! I believe that our students deserve better. There is an opportunity now for educators to engage AI with students in meaningful ways beyond GIFs and memes:

One of the reasons I wrote The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with the amazing Annette Vee and Derek Bruff, was because there weren’t many resources that addressed AI from a faculty perspective. The purpose of our guide is to center human agency in choices faculty and students make around machine intelligence. There are opportunities to engage AI in all of our classes, and no, by engage AI I don’t mean use or adopt AI. Having critical and thoughtful discussions with students about their AI use and AI’s impact on their community can create the type of creative and curious responses for students to learn about this technology without asking them to use a chatbot. And if a teacher does ask students to use AI, then it should be intentional and aligned with course learning outcomes, depending on your AI stance and overall policies for the class.

I realize that it is daunting to deal with AI. It takes an immense amount of time and work on our part to make the types of choices and create the spaces for students to actually learn. Faculty need a variety of scaffolded support to address these issues. Here are a few examples:

Communities of Practice

There are funded communities of practices, like UNT’s Generative AI Institute for Teaching, that ask faculty to grapple with the ethical challenges posed by AI before making intentional choices to engage or resist AI.

AI Guides

Other campuses have launched embedded faculty AI support initiatives like UVA’s AI Guides program, which allows every department on campus to have some of its faculty trained to work with their home departments about AI’s place within their discipline.

Course Redesign

Some institutions have launched wholesale course redesign programs, like Yale’s AI course redesign pilot. What impresses me most about Yale’s approach is that they are committed to funding faculty course redesigns that involve the following:

1. explore using AI in the classroom

2. teach students about the ethical issues surrounding AI

3. redesigning teaching and learning approaches to curb AI’s influence

With proper support, faculty can help rethink their teaching in this era of ubiquitous AI. But you can start small on this journey with a simple conversation. Below is a list of topics from the introduction to the third volume of essays about generative AI’s impact on education that Stephen Monroe and I had the privilege to guest edit for the Thresholds in Education series. You can explore using AI as a Divisive Topic to Create Pedagogical Opportunities with your students in a traditional discussion, or use a tool like Claude’s Cowork or OpenAI’s Codex to “vibe-code” an interactive workshop, like the two below.

Excerpt from Using AI as a Divisive Topic to Create Pedagogical Opportunities

The rise of AI is a goldmine of provocative pedagogy. It is a subject that our students need to engage, a subject that will likely define our era and have profound consequences far into the future. Almost every facet of this dynamic subject offers confusing and contested material useful to the effective teacher. The questions are myriad:

• Should governments regulate AI? If so, how?

• Does AI pose an existential threat to humanity?

• Will AI exacerbate socioeconomic gaps? Will AI create new opportunities?

• What are the gaps between corporate marketing of AI and reality?

• Can we trust companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic?

• How will AI compromise individual privacy? Does privacy matter?

• What about linguistic diversity? Will AI move all humans toward a small set of standardized languages?

• What will AI mean for learning in K12 and beyond? Should children have access to these tools? Should colleges have policies limiting AI use?

• What ethical responsibilities should technology developers and policymakers consider when designing and regulating AI-mediated relationship bots?

• Are we adequately prepared to assess the risks of excessive reliance on AI Bots, particularly as they may contribute to social isolation, mental health challenges, or even self-harm among young adults?

• What are the environmental costs of AI data centers?

• Such data centers are proliferating across rural America and the Global South. Are local communities benefiting from their presence?

• What are the religious and/or ethical implications of AI? What do students think about AI’s rising deployment in churches?

• How will AI influence geopolitical conflicts, including America’s relationship to China and Russia?

• How is the federal government asserting power to control major AI companies for military and surveillance?

• Until recently, why were most computer scientists skeptical about the potential of neural nets and Large Language Models? How can an entire field of experts be caught off guard? Can orthodoxies be blinding?

• How will AI impact scientific and medical research and practice? Would students be comfortable receiving care from a non-human doctor?

• Should our society pursue AI development, even if AI will replace many human jobs?

• If AI does displace human workers, how will those people find purpose in life? How does work help to make modern lives meaningful?

These are big, exciting, and debatable questions with no clear answers. Divisiveness abounds! Indeed, educators are already making good use of this material by teaching students practical discernment—when to use AI and when it must be avoided within the context of their learning. One example is a robust and developing project called the Two-Lane Approach from the University of Sydney (2025), replete with creative lessons and assignments that both resist and embrace this new technology. And, as for classroom reading materials, the internet and library databases are already full of insightful and provocative texts, like Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, a book that confronts the juggernaut of OpenAI. Our point is that the novel, complicated, and ever-shifting subject of AI is perfect material for college teachers in need of debatable and divisive content.

Preorder The Norton Guide to AI Aware Teaching

Thanks to the wonderful team at Norton, the guide is now available to pre-order! My coauthor, Derek Bruff, wrote the following in his newsletter. The ebook is expected to be available July 1st, and print copies are expected to start shipping on September 24th. Here’s how you can get a copy:

1. Our publisher Norton is pleased to offer the guide as a free ebook for all instructors currently using a Norton textbook. If that’s you, you’ll receive access from the Norton team when the ebook is available July 1st and can contact your local Norton representative with any questions.

2. If you would like to pre-order the ebook so that you have it July 1st, you can now do so through Amazon and Barnes & Noble and perhaps other retailers.

3. If you would like to pre-order the paperback version of the book, you can now do so through Norton, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and likely other retailers. If you go through Norton, be sure to use the code AIFREESHIP at check out to get free shipping!

4. If you would like to order multiple copies for a campus reading group or some other faculty development effort, Norton has an option for you: On orders of 10 or more print copies, we offer 50% off the list price and free domestic shipping. (Such orders must be on a nonreturnable basis.) To take advantage of this offer, contact Peter Wentz at pwentz@wwnorton.com with subject line “Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching.”