Today’s post is Part Two of an interview with Lisa Delpit and Christopher Emdin about their new book, The Sacred Art of Teaching: The Delpit/Emdin Conversations.

A MacArthur Award winner, Lisa is the Felton G. Clark Professor of Education at Southern University and the author of Other People’s Children.

Christopher is the Maxine Greene Chair for Distinguished Contributions to Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and he directs creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the Schupf Family IdeaLab at Skidmore College.

You can see Part One here.

LF: In the book, you talk about artificial intelligence. It seems to me you’re arguing that we need to help our students develop some kind of AI literacy. Can you elaborate on what role AI should have in education—for both teachers and students?

Lisa and Christopher:

The first thing for us to recognize is that artificial intelligence is not going anywhere. In an education system that has always sought out the easy way to complex questions and covering up problems instead of addressing or attempting to understand and solve them, a set of platforms that distill complex knowledge into algorithmic patterns and simplistic landing spots quickly becomes framed as an undeniable necessity. That is actually a fallacy. We have to name that and teach it to young people. It would be irresponsible for any educator to act like it doesn’t exist or not try to understand it.

The work of the educator is to understand what has captured the imagination of the public and to teach young people how artificial intelligence pales in comparison to ancestral intelligence. Ultimately, the goal is for young people to gain authentic intelligence, and that requires taking what artificial intelligence offers as not the answer but the beginning of true exploration. This is what schools should be teaching: how to ask questions.

We are calling for a “prompt pedagogy” that teaches young people how to ask questions and not accept every answer they are given. Critical pedagogy for the AI generation is prompt pedagogy. This is an approach to teaching that is centered on pushing the limits of the algorithm. It functions to engage with AI by consistently throwing new ideas at it with the intention to throw it off. The goal is to see how AI answers/results either align with or are unrelated to your ancestral and intuitional knowledge.

For teachers, AI is simply a tool to fine-tune lesson plans and curriculum so it can free you up to do actual teaching. Nothing more, nothing less. Rather than spend 15 hours on a lesson plan, allow AI to make that 15 minutes, but when you get in the classroom, don’t strictly follow that lesson plan. Allow yourself to dance. Allow yourself to actually teach.

In terms of the practicality of AI, consider this. Lisa, an AI novice at best, was trying to get the AI assistant Claude to design a book cover. She had something in mind, but it took about eight iterations to get the cover to look mostly like she wanted. She learned how to be much more precise in her directions. This is an extremely good experience for young people to learn verbal precision, since this skill is needed in so many areas of academics.

She also recently discovered that Claude and other programs could speak or write in the words and perspectives of a historical figure. What kind of interviews could kids devise for Frederick Douglass, or George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson (How would he justify slaveholding), or whoever else kids are studying in history. It would even be interesting for them to devise a debate between two historic characters. Or create a play.

One teacher suggested to us that when her college students used AI for papers and essays, she was going to give them a test on what they wrote. I could imagine having kids exchange papers and devise a test on the paper for the original writer to take in class. That way both kids would have to know what was written!

LF: You write:

“It’s easy to live on autopilot. To make unconscious decisions every single day, thinking you’re free, when really your “choices” are just routines handed to you by the infrastructure you’re in. You think you’re agentic, but you’re trapped in a role, in a script someone else wrote for you.”

That passage can obviously speak to teachers, but when I read it, my mind immediately went to students in classrooms where I’ve heard some teachers say, “I give my students agency.” Of course, you can’t really give agency to anyone, but you can create the conditions where they can take it for themselves.

What can it look like in a classroom where students are breaking out of that autopilot role, and what can teachers do to help make that happen? And, finally, why should they?

Lisa and Christopher:

Autopilot is the enemy of any growth or progress. Most importantly, when autopilot fails, and you have never learned to fly, you are left without any recourse if anything dangerous happens. Breaking out of autopilot is about learning the scripts you have been given and knowing how to be nimble within it so you can exist beyond it.

In the classroom, it looks like leaving the strict curriculum in favor of wherever the students are and then connecting where they are to the academic content. For example, the Knicks just won the NBA championship. In a traditional classroom, that would be a thing separate from the classroom. A teacher in New York City who is breaking autopilot incorporates the energy in the city into the instruction. That doesn’t mean science, math, or English aren’t being taught. It means the way it’s being taught picks up on the energy of the city.

For both teachers and students, the classroom has to reflect the emotional tenor of the world beyond the classroom while still covering what needs to be taught. Those emotions aren’t always positive, but the students need to know that where they are and what they feel matters.

A classroom on autopilot has an all too familiar rhythm. It’s stale from sameness. All the classrooms look and sound the same. While some may see that as a good thing, we believe it is terrifying. It means that students wait to be told what matters. They raise their hands only when they think they have the right answer. They ask, “Is this for a grade?” They become experts at reading the teacher instead of reading, seeing, and knowing themselves. Their intelligence becomes performative rather than exploratory.

They stop making decisions because the institution has made every meaningful decision for them.

Agency begins when students start asking questions that even the teacher cannot answer in advance. It looks like students bringing their own experiences into the content instead of checking them at the classroom door. It looks like young people disagreeing respectfully with the text, with each other, and sometimes with the teacher. It looks like them designing investigations instead of simply following procedures. It looks like students explaining why they chose a particular approach, reflecting on what they learned about themselves as thinkers, and recognizing that their ideas have consequences beyond the classroom.

We must move toward classrooms that operate beyond autopilot because it is what prepares students to be changemakers in the world. They learn not to defer to power but to speak truth to it. They learn that their voice matters and, most importantly, they become prepared to become active citizens in a democracy that currently is a shell of what it professes to be.

LF: Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to share?

Lisa and Christopher:

We truly hope that educators spend time with The Sacred Art of Teaching, alone and in discussion with others. It was truly a labor of love that pushed us both beyond our boundaries in the most powerful way. It is a testament to our love for teachers and young people and could be the perfect read as teachers embark on a new school year.

LF: Thank you, Lisa and Chris!