By Dr. Gregory Sutherland (he/him), lecturer in Indigenous pedagogies and practice, Simon Fraser University
Another way forward
Lately, I have found that a great many conversations with fellow teachers inevitably circle around to the complexities of teaching in the milieu of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). When I learned we can actually use AI to detect the likelihood of a student using AI to cheat on their class assignments, I was struck by an overwhelming feeling that there must be a better way forward. I felt as though such approaches didn’t align with my pedagogical sensibilities as an Indigenous educator. I am uneasy about the idea of affirming the assumption of wrongdoing on the part of my students. I am equally uncomfortable solving a problem with the technology that created the issue in the first place.
Instead, I believe that the way ahead can be productively forged by looking to educational values that have guided meaningful and rigorous scholarship since time immemorial. My classroom teaching experience, lived experience as a Métis educator, and inquiry into Indigenous research practices have helped me to understand how the tenets of Indigenous education can help us to reframe the discourse around GenAI from one of surveillance, academic dishonesty, and appropriation, to one that is about relationships, ethicality, and respect.
Before outlining some concrete actions that we can all take in our classrooms to foster these values, it is worth acknowledging that, beyond potentially shifting the nature of classroom relationships, the use of GenAI has some implications that can be understood as contrary to the aims of moving this place called Canada toward healing and reconciliation through education.
“... the tenets of Indigenous education can help us to reframe the discourse around GenAI from one of surveillance, academic dishonesty, and appropriation, to one that is about relationships, ethicality, and respect.”
Features of GenAI through the lens of Indigenous education
The following five examples of the ways that using GenAI can be seen as contrary to the aims of honouring Indigenous knowledge systems represents only a few of the significant points of divergence, but I am hopeful that they might be of value in your future discussions with colleagues about how, or the extent to which, you wish to embrace GenAI in your classrooms.
1. Indigenous scholarly protocols vary from nation to nation, but all include an understanding of permission and the appropriateness of sharing stories, songs, and art, whereas GenAI synthesizes, summarizes, and subsumes any information to which it has access regardless of permission or copyright. The ways in which GenAI changes, manipulates, and takes from all knowledge, art, and stories, many of which may have deep cultural importance, normalizes appropriation in our classrooms.
2. Indigenous scholarly protocols are grounded in a careful acknowledgment of the source of information, whereas GenAI does not acknowledge authorship; it often disguises, misappropriates, or misattributes original source material, and it can create false works-cited pages to disguise this process. Using GenAI in our classrooms perpetuates this kind of disrespect to traditional protocols and, in turn, models this disrespect for our students.
3. Mississauga Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (1) teaches us that Indigenous education can only be called so if it comes through the land. Indigenous knowledge systems from coast, to coast, to coast are rooted in place and relation to the land, whereas GenAI is fundamentally placeless, as it is diffused between servers across the planet. As such, the information that is produced through GenAI cannot reflect the teachings that the land offers us.
4. Indigenous knowledge systems recognize the self as part of the process of learning and understanding, whereas GenAI prevents users from honouring themselves as participants in knowledge creation. Who we are and what experiences we bring to learning shapes how we understand the world. If users allow the work of meaning-making to be done by GenAI, no real learning is occurring.
5. Indigenous scholarship is connected to our ethical obligations to the world around us, which includes concern for the other-than-human beings in our ecologies, whereas the energy consumption required to fuel GenAI contributes to deleterious environmental impacts. Accordingly, the use of GenAI in our classrooms is to undermine what Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson (2) calls our ethical accountability to support the well-being of our communities.
Reframing the conversation
While consideration of Indigenous ways of knowing and being can help us to articulate the ways in which using GenAI in our classrooms may be contrary to goals of healing and reconciliation through education, these ways of knowing and being can also enable us to better prepare students to engage in ethical learning practices. In an educational system where many students experience anxiety over academic performance, where so many students are overburdened with extracurricular activities, where the complexity of living arrangements require students to support families with child or eldercare, where increased cost of living forces students to work to support their families, there is little wonder that many students elect to seek out the shortcuts afforded by GenAI. However, I would suggest that Indigenous practices of teaching and learning can help us to welcome students into a better way of learning. The following are three such practices.
Ethical accountability
Strong relationships in our classrooms are the best way to inoculate students against the practice of academic dishonesty. If we have strong relationships with our students, they are more likely to recognize their ethical obligations to us as their teachers. If we place trust in students, rather than damaging relationships through an assumed guilt, that trust will be rewarded with ethical conduct because it is about your relationship rather than a set of rules or a contest to determine whose GenAI is smarter. Neither student nor teacher benefit from such contests. Instead, I invite students to make a personal written pledge to themselves that they will engage in the work of the course ethically.
Self-situating
Inviting students to self-locate in their studies can make the work produced in schools more personal and meaningful. Ts’msyen and European scholar Jo Chrona (3) teaches us that acknowledging who we are, where we come from, whose land we are on, and the nature of our relationship to our learning is foundational in Indigenous scholarly practices. As such, affording our students opportunities to do the same in their work can create a more engaged and honest kind of knowledge creation in our classrooms. Students can begin presentations or written assignments with acknowledgment of territory, a statement of their own ancestry, or an explanation of why their work is important to them.
Understanding of protocol
Orienting students to local protocols regarding the sharing of knowledge, gifting of songs, granting of permissions, and respecting privileged knowledge can help students to avoid appropriative practices inside and outside of school, but can also provide students with a framework for critiquing scholarly practices that do not align with these values, such as using GenAI. If students understand the harm that appropriation continues to inflict on Indigenous communities, students will be more likely to see the unethical functions of GenAI as an extension of this harmful practice. A simple practice that I teach my students is to recognize the ancestry of a writer (Indigenous or otherwise) that they are referencing as I have done throughout this article.
Final thoughts
I believe that we must walk carefully in our work to heal some of the harm that school systems have done to Indigenous Peoples in this country, so we must be wary of practices that undermine the curriculum and pedagogy that has been taken up in the name of healing. These three suggestions that I offer here are just a few of the concrete practices that you can implement in your own classroom to create a more ethical space, where students feel connected to each other, connected to their learning, connected to their teacher, and connected to the land. I believe that these sorts of relational approaches will help support an educative, rather than prohibitive, approach to GenAI as it becomes more and more commonplace in classrooms in the coming years.
1 L.B. Simpson, “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation,” 2014: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22170, retrieved 11 6 2024.
2 S. Wilson, “What is an Indigenous research methodology?” Canadian Journal of Native Education, 2001, 175–179.
3 J. Chrona, Wayi Wah! Indigenous Pedagogies: An Act for Reconciliation and Anti-Racist education, Portage and Main Press, Winnipeg, 2022.