How Firm is Our Foundation? : Towards a Pedagogy of AI
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
The role of AI in education, particularly in English and composition studies, has provoked sustained and often polarized debate. Educators and students are already generative and agentic AI in ways that reshape how they engage with texts, with knowledge, with writing, with code. In response, many pedagogical approaches have moved beyond the question of whether to adopt AI and toward the more difficult work of reckoning with its ethical, intellectual, and practical implications, good and bad alike. As educators race to make classroom engagements with AI at least net neutral, if not positive, we would do well to look back to the digital pedagogies of the last twenty-five years.
Drawing on digital, critical, and constructionist pedagogies, this paper argues that contemporary classroom engagements with generative and agentic AI are best understood not as a rupture, but as part of a longer tradition of digital pedagogy. This argument is grounded in examples from my own high school English classroom, alongside other exemplary and experimental practices.
Keywords: AI Pedagogy Education K-12 Teaching “Digital Pedagogy” Writing
How Firm is Our Foundation? : Towards a Pedagogy of AI
Narratives & Worlds
The role of AI in education, particularly in English and composition studies, has provoked sustained and often polarized debate. Educators and students are already generative and agentic AI in ways that reshape how they engage with texts, with knowledge, with writing, with code. In response, many pedagogical approaches have moved beyond the question of whether to adopt AI and toward the more difficult work of reckoning with its ethical, intellectual, and practical implications, good and bad alike. As educators race to make classroom engagements with AI at least net neutral, if not positive, we would do well to look back to the digital pedagogies of the last twenty-five years.
Drawing on digital, critical, and constructionist pedagogies, this paper argues that contemporary classroom engagements with generative and agentic AI are best understood not as a rupture, but as part of a longer tradition of digital pedagogy. This argument is grounded in examples from my own high school English classroom, alongside other exemplary and experimental practices.
Keywords: AI Pedagogy Education K-12 Teaching “Digital Pedagogy” Writing
Bio
Katherine Parrish is an educator and writer based in Toronto, where she has spent over twenty-five years teaching literature, writing, and digital media in the high school classroom. After early work in digital pedagogy and electronic literature in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she found herself urgently pulled back into questions of digital pedagogy, by the growing ubiquity of AI in educational spaces.
Her current work explores how generative and agentic AI complicate long-standing questions of authorship, voice, reading, and meaning-making, particularly in secondary English classrooms. She is interested in situating contemporary AI pedagogy within longer traditions of digital, critical, and constructivist pedagogies.
She writes outloud about these ideas on her substack, Process Notes: https://substack.com/@katherineparrish
Selected publications can be found at https://katherineparrish.ca/