Teacher Dr Alice Elwell from academically selective school Queensland Academies Creative Industries says the marked shift in attitude has become quite obvious across the board.
“To really zoom out, in schools for the last four years we’ve been dealing with the ‘AI issue’ and it started out with ‘how are we going to police this thing?’” Elwell reflects.
“Now it’s moved to students basically saying, ‘we don’t want this thing’.
“Some teachers feel they have a responsibility to try and teach students ‘this is how AI works’ so that they can be critical (of it) and they can be citizens of the world, but students are saying, ‘I’m not going to use it – so you don’t have to teach me how to do it’.”
According to Elwell, when students get a sense that their teacher might have used AI in their lesson planning or as a support tool to help with feedback, they are quick to question if this is the case.
“Students can respond quite [strongly]. There’s often no nuance. It will be, ‘is this AI?’ And it will be said with a real vehemence.”
Sitting behind this is a brewing sense of injustice and broader concern about AI’s impact on the world, the teacher suggests, especially as many of her school’s students are passionate about the arts and creative industries.
“I think they see this as an attack on something they care deeply about.
“But even students who aren’t arts students, I think they also see the environmental issue (AI presents) and they think, ‘how [can the teacher] do that?
Elwell suspects there’s also a perception that teachers are ‘looking for a quick way out’ by using AI.
To be clear, Elwell doesn’t begrudge any teacher who uses AI to help them with the ‘grunt work’ now required in the role or to assist with lesson planning and the like.
“I think everything has to be nuanced. It’s really important to note that the structural conditions for teachers have not changed in forever – we still get paid for 25 hours of work a week when there are more and more and more things constantly added to our plate.
“So … I’d like to try and help students see a little bit more nuance in this.”
Dr Alice Elwell, an IB teacher and sessional academic at Griffith University, says students have generally become unaccepting of AI and really value their teacher's own feedback and input.
Elwell has also picked up on a frustration amongst students around what they see as a double-standard: why should their use of AI be restricted while teachers use it in their lessons?
This line of argument is infantalising to teachers as professionals and doesn’t stack up at all, the educator argues.
“It’s something that I rail against because teachers and students are not the same.
“And I say this as someone who’s a passionate advocate for student voice, who involves my students in the learning process in very deep ways, like we co-design our entire English curriculum,” she says.
In Elwell’s view, the student perspective on AI is often left out of conversations about how schools and teachers should teach and work with the technology, and what it means for assessment.
“So, in our school we’re working towards a plan for how we can involve students and teachers in deciding what happens when it comes to AI use…
“There’s the reality of (looking at), how does this actually work? What do we do if we think someone has suspected AI use in a summative assessment? Who are all the stakeholders?”
Widely used AI detectors have proven to be highly problematic, Elwell flags, and can get it very wrong in some cases.
“When you have conversations with students, nine times out of ten, the student hasn’t actually used AI anymore – and they can show you their planning documents, and they can show you how the idea is theirs…
“So you have these big workload issues around how do we figure out what authorship is?
“And I think the conversation that schools need to be having is, how do we involve students in helping them to understand authorship in a time when digital writing is changing what we see as being an author.”
In what was a telling exercise, Elwell recently ran a poll with her Year 11 students which probed how they would like to receive feedback on an upcoming summative assessment task.
The cohort reported that the number one example of “what makes feedback useless” was AI-generated comments.
“I don’t think [AI is] as widely loved as people are making it out to be. Because I’m also a casual tutor across two universities, and the university students are saying the same thing,” Elwell says.
Aware of the huge commercial interests within the AI in education space, Elwell says she’s become a healthy sceptic when it comes to nailing down the benefits AI truly brings to learning outcomes.
“I’ve really seen this shift over the last four years from students going from, ‘hey, this is kind of neat’ and teachers [thinking] the same, to everyone using AI to make horrifically ugly memes of themselves.
“But now people are saying, ‘maybe we should be thinking about what we’re doing with this’. It’s kind of like giving a toddler a bazooka. Like, maybe we should calm down a little bit with this.
“We’re seeing a lot of young people who would probably describe themselves as conscientious objectors, who are just saying, ‘I don’t want this’.”
As the EdTech sector pushes a particular narrative about AI and its promised education revolution, Elwell is making it her mission to help students see that their own voice really does matter.
“I want to hear your own messy voice. I don’t want to read the filtered voice of a large language model…”
