Infosphere Agency and Teaching as Anthropology

AI is everywhere, and things are spinning out of control. It is evolving faster than it is modernising the world. It is, therefore, natural for learners to ask what is actually in our power anymore. What residual authority do we have? What would it mean to have digital agency to control the way AI fits into our lives?

Can educators endure the unbearable lightness of an occasion for learning without a prospectus, goals, and appraisals? Generative AI opens a vision of instruction as aiding Papert’s “bricolage”. The construction of new things out of what is available, namely, the brittle knowledge of the child.

This is not a formless process. It means changing the ecology of schooling by infusing new constructive elements and minimizing old-fashioned ones. Infosphere agency demands the breaking of a fundamental assumption of the school, that all learners of a similar age learn similar things.

Violating the constraint of a bequeathed Ford Factory assembly line model of schooling with “Standards” and “Grades” is unthinkable to many, but it will allow each child to follow their interests and learn different things at different speeds in the Age of AI.

The teacher in the AI studio must instinctively understand each child’s theories and recognise the intuitive opportunities to build on that knowledge, resulting in a deeper understanding of concepts. In the AI studio, the teacher becomes an anthropologist.

Children have innate theories, which they give up later in life through theory building. Learning never happens by diffusion. The process of personal theory construction is recursive.

The resistance to the iterative construction of knowledge invalidates the natural way children learn. To converge toward Newton’s F=ma, learners begin with brittle but useful theories about the relationship among Force, Mass, and Acceleration.

These frail theories are constructed from skateboarding, or from a line behind which they begin and a ring, a circle scratched in a dirt yard, into which friends pitch marbles with Force. Formal notations are useful. However, the intuitive sense of mathematics can only have its Eureka moment when students find the right non-mathematical representation of the idea that is securely moored to something they already understand.

It does not require the teacher to take the learner through Newton’s decade of personal torture and his multiple representations. However, no learner can arrive at Newton’s identical intuition by just encountering its propositional form printed on the page of a textbook.

These formal notations are concrete expressions of systematic procedures. They are descriptions of action in the world and a means for reflecting on action. But they are not useful for learning.

Rote learning of formal representations invigorates the divorce between the problems at the end of the chapter and the meaning of the algorithm in the world and in a child’s life. Rote forces the teacher to be unfaithful about the importance of the algorithm. The teacher knows that the formulation is of no value to the learner, except to pass the test.

AI in the school creates the opportunity to uproot any resistance to the need of the learner to refine their personal theories over time. AI in the classroom opens a space for the iterative development and improvement of ideas using tutoring bars and personal playlists. Children learn by debugging their beliefs.

In this sense, AI makes classrooms places in which debugging is essential, encouraged, and supported. There is no useless knowledge, only useful personal knowledge that is to be improved. Any use of AI that does not support the iterative construction of knowledge will invalidate the natural process by which children learn. Schools are unequal, and many children struggle to thrive in a habitus of inherited inequality stemming from intergenerational immobility.

Paulo Freire, in his “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” understood that the oppressed cannot perceive the unfreedoms that their oppressors have created. Moreover, they cannot recognise that they can change them. Once this ambiguity persists, the oppressed are reluctant to resist. They have a “diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor” (p. 64).

Prejudice and prejudgements from the Enlightenment have rhizomes in written history, social structure, labels, and ideology. The widespread centring of European narratives has led to the erasure of the experiences of indigenous peoples. This skewed understanding of the region’s past neglects the agency of the indigenous peoples. Their knowledge systems are downplayed and underrepresented. This dismissal reinforces historical hierarchies, power imbalances, distorted narratives, and impacts identity.

In the AI classroom, students can create a bricolage of the actions of Bishop Diego de Landa of Yucatán, who ordered a large-scale burning of all Mayan books in the town of Maní in July 1562, and the revolt of the indigenous peoples in Arina, Trinidad, in 1699. Landa deemed the Mayan literature to be “superstition and lies of the devil”.

In Arina, on 18 December 1699, it was decided that all of the men over fourteen who staged the revolt on 1 December 1699 should be hanged and their dismembered bodies displayed in the streets. The only possibility for a planetary civilization, therefore, depends on AI restoring the dignity of the losers and, together, frontrunners and losers, make a step together towards peace.