AI-Aware Teaching with Annette Vee, Marc Watkins, and Derek Bruff

It’s book release week! The ebook version of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching publishes on July 1st, the day after this episode drops. I am very excited to have this book, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, out in the world! 

I wanted to put the spotlight on the new book, but I didn’t want to have to interview myself, so I asked my colleague and friend Stacey Johnson to interview me, Annette, and Marc about the book. Stacey and I worked together at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, and she’s now the director of learning and engagement for the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. I'm happy to share that wide-ranging interview in this episode. Thanks, Stacey!

You can order The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching ebook through Norton, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your ebooks. The ebook will be available for free to faculty who have adopted Norton textbooks--contact your local Norton representative to get access.

If you would like to order multiple copies for a campus reading group or some other faculty development effort, Norton offers a significant discount. To take advantage of this offer, contact Peter Wentz at pwentz@wwnorton.com with subject line “Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching.”

Norton is hosting a launch party for the book on July 8th at 1:30pm Central. It's free to attend, and you can register here. Perusall is hosting an asynchronous book club for the new book from July 6th to August 2nd on their social annotation platform, and you can find out more about that here.

Episode Resources

Stacey Johnson's blog and LinkedIn page

Annette Vee's blog and LinkedIn page

Marc Watkin's blog and LinkedIn page

Transcript

Derek Bruff (00:05):
Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. It's book release week! The ebook version of the Norton Guide to AI Aware Teaching publishes on July 1st, 2026, the day after this episode drops. I am very excited to have this book, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, out in the world. We wrote the book to provide practical strategies for instructors across higher education to respond to the challenges and opportunities that generative AI presents in our teaching. And it is full of examples of AI aware teaching from colleagues across higher ed from a variety of disciplines and institutional contexts. In the show notes, you'll find some options for purchasing the ebook and for pre-ordering the paperback, which comes out September 24th.

(01:02):
If you've already adopted a textbook from our publisher, W.W. Norton, they're giving you free access to the e-book on their platform. If not, look in the usual places you find e-books like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And if you're interested in purchasing multiple copies of the ebook or paperback for a campus reading group or other faculty development effort, Norton can provide a substantial discount. Again, see the show notes for information. Our friends at Perusa are providing another way to read the book this summer. They're running one of their most excellent engaged book clubs from July 6th to August 2nd. The book will be on their platform. We'll have a reading plan for the four weeks and you can connect with fellow readers and us, the authors through comments and questions anchored in the text itself. Y'all know I love social annotation. I can't wait to interact with readers through this format.

(01:50):
The cost is just $15 and you'll have access to the book and the discussion for eight weeks. See the show notes for a link to sign up. But wait, there's more. To celebrate the release of the book, Norton, our publisher is hosting a launch party on Wednesday, July 8th at 1:30 PM Central. Annette and Marc and I will be there to intro the book, share our favorite parts, and have an Ask the Authors Q&A. It's a free event and you can find a registration link in the show notes. I'd love to have some podcast listeners at the event.

(02:20):
Speaking of the podcast, I do have an interview for you in this episode. It's me. Well, it's me and Annette and Marc. I wanted to put the spotlight on the new book. I didn't want to have to interview myself. That would be weird. So I asked my colleague and friend, Stacey Johnson, to come on the show and interview me, Annette, and Mark about the book.

(02:39):
Stacey and I worked together at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching and she's now director of learning and engagement for the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. She's also a longtime podcaster having hosted and produced the We Teach Languages Podcast from 2017 to 2024. Stacy is a fantastic interviewer and I'm glad she was up for this. I get to be a guest on my own podcast. Now, let's go to that interview, which Stacy conducted with Annette, Mark, and me a few weeks ago.

Stacey Johnson (03:10):
Welcome to all of the intentional teaching listeners today. I am so excited to be your guest interviewer. I get to interview someone you're very familiar with, Derek Bruff, along with Marc Watkins and Annette Vee to talk about their new book, The Norton Guide to AI Aware Teaching. Thank you for having me on the podcast today, which I think isn't what the interviewer normally says.

Derek Bruff (03:38):
No, I don't say that.

Stacey Johnson (03:40):
And thanks to all of you for being here as well.

Derek Bruff (03:43):
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on and sitting in the interviewer chair, Stacey. I really appreciate this.

Stacey Johnson (03:48):
Well, you know it's my pleasure. I love the attention. And so since we are here to talk about your book, I thought maybe a good way for us to get started would be if you could each introduce yourselves and maybe tell me about one interesting way you used AI in your work this week. Annette, do you want to go first?

Annette Vee (04:08):
Sure. I'll go first. So this is a great question, Stacey. Thank you. So I'm Annette Vee and I'm an associate professor of English at University of Pittsburgh. I'm also the faculty liaison for AI enablement and I work with our IT folks there in that role. So I use AI a lot for a lot of stray tasks, but it is the year-end report season where we have to kind of look back on our lives and say, "What have we done this year? What have we accomplished? Did we meet our goals, et cetera." So I have Claude hooked up to my email and I asked Claude to tell me what I did this year. And it was great because it surfaced a whole bunch of things that I forgot because I can't possibly remember and I have eight billion emails in my inbox like probably every other faculty member.

(05:01):
So anyway, obviously I'll write the report myself, but it was really helpful. So that's my best use of AI this week.

Stacey Johnson (05:08):
That's interesting.

Marc Watkins (05:11):
That's great. So I guess I'll go next. My name is Marc Watkins. I'm a lecturer of writing and rhetoric here at the University of Mississippi. I also have a dual role in faculty development as an assistant director of academic innovation, which is something they kind of put together to address these issues with AI. So I work in the classroom with students and I also work with a lot of different faculty navigating these choices to use, refuse, or kind of ignore AI systems. What I used AI this week that is interesting, I actually had to turn it off because there's a lot of problems with it, but AI detection's back in the news. There's a new feature that you can actually install in your Chrome browser that puts a label next to everyone you see on social media to say if their posts are human AI or AI assistant.

(06:00):
And that has really warped my sense of engagement. So I'm going to go ahead and turn it off to you and write a little report about it to make people aware of it because that's kind of the theme that we chose with this book too, is testing these different tools, putting them in context to think about if it's going to be helpful or if it's going to be in certain use cases distracting to our goals.

Derek Bruff (06:21):
I'm still thinking about Annette's use case and the annual report I have to write in the next couple of weeks.

Annette Vee (06:25):
Oh my gosh, do it, Derek. It's so good. We have a pro version. I want to say specifically too that it's institutional data, it's all private. It's important that that's the way that I'm using it, but highly recommend.

Derek Bruff (06:38):
Yeah. So I'm Derek Bruff. I'm an associate director at the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia, working remotely from my home outside of Nashville. I produce a podcast in my spare time you may have heard of. My AI use is, I mean, I use it in a lot of ways, but I wanted to share one that was a litle bit less serious. I mean, it started serious. So the other night my wife lost an earring, well, mildly serious. She lost an earring that I had given her for Christmas in our yard and it was a small, silver earring, not one of her big dangly ones that you would easily spot. It was like probably gone forever. And so I remembered late at night that my stepson had gotten a metal detector on a previous Christmas and I thought, "Hey, I've never actually used a metal detector.

(07:24):
He had some fun with it for a while. Maybe I can go find the earring." And I was trying to get it to work and I was totally incompetent and there was this cord hanging off the metal detector. And so I took a picture and I shared it with ChatGPT and I said, "Why is this plug on my metal detector?" And there's probably lots of ways I could have answered this question, but AI gave me a nice explanation of what that cord was supposed to do and that was indeed supposed to be plugged in to another part of the detector. And so I was like, "Oh, maybe there's a place to plug it in. " And I look more closely at the metal. Oh, lo and behold, right underneath, there's a place to plug it in. I probably could have figured that out myself. So that was fun.

(08:01):
The metal detector worked but did not find the earring, but the next day in the daylight, I was able to spot it with my eyes. So happy story at the end.

Stacey Johnson (08:12):
I love that that story ends with your human eyes being a superior tool.

Derek Bruff (08:19):
To be fair, AI did its job. The metal detector, I don't know.

Stacey Johnson (08:25):
I'm still calling it a win for humans.

Derek Bruff (08:27):
Okay. I'll take it. It certainly earned me some points with my wife.

Stacey Johnson (08:33):
All right, everyone. Let's jump into talking a little bit about your book. So once again, it's called the Norton Guide to AI Aware Teaching. It comes out this summer and in my reading of this text, it really is a course design workshop that is AI sensitive rather than just being a book about AI. So if you want to really dig into what it means to design a course, what it means to teach in an AI world, I think this is a full resource for that. It's not going to put you into the deep end without taking you through every step along the way. And so I'm curious, who is your audience for this? Who did you write this book for and what problem were you trying to solve?

Annette Vee (09:15):
So I can start with that. I mean, when writing this book, I started thinking about the audience that Norton generally writes for, which is faculty who are not necessarily resourced with enough time to kind of keep on top of every single development in a thing. So that might be folks who are teaching a five five, folks who are kind of curious, but this is not going to be the thing that they spend their time on, like AI research. I mean, I think about AI all the time all day long. I think Marc and Derek do too, but I mean, most people don't want to do that, right? They just want to teach and do the things that they want to do. So that was kind of what I had in mind when I was contributing my parts to the book.

Marc Watkins (10:10):
I do a lot of events where I go to these giant sort of corporate sales pitches from the AI companies and I sort of listen and write down notes and I go back and basically talk to faculty and say that they really do think that teaching and learning is going to be a problem AI is going to solve. I say, "I don't really believe that. " And I think that the one thing that we need to be working on right now too is human agency within this process and making these choices that are intentional about using these tools or avoiding them and starting to think about that.

(10:44):
That does mean engaging AI. That doesn't mean you have to use it, but you still have to think about these tools your students are bringing in the classroom, why they're bringing in there too. Also, your own choices to bring these tools or to avoid them too and really center those choices around your learning outcomes. I do think the one big focus I've had really since I started working with Annette and Derek too, is to really shift this from, I hate AI or I enjoy AI to asking more specific questions about, okay, what are the learning outcomes for my class? How will AI fit within that sort of dynamic too? And how can I sort of help my students navigate with that? And that's kind of the sort of audience I'm looking for too, is faculty who are, I think, rightly skeptical thinking about AI too, but also interested in about their actual students and how they're using these tools or navigating that space.

Derek Bruff (11:33):
I remember when I was scoping out my previous book, Intentional Tech and I was working with my editor, Jim Lang, and I was kind of thinking about either the faculty who were really attracted to these shiny new technology objects and figuring out how to use them well, or the faculty who are kind of being told they have to use technology and they're not excited about it and they're trying to find purpose. And Jim was like, "That's great, but most faculty are somewhere in the middle and they just want to teach well. They want to do right by their students and they want to ... Sometimes technology helps, sometimes it doesn't. Can you give them some more constructive ways to approach that? " And so I think if you had asked me 18 months ago, how are faculty responding to AI? I probably would've said, I mean, a lot of my talks were like, "It's awesome and also it's terrible." And there was this kind of split between the good and the bad, the bad and the ugly.

(12:24):
And I think over the last little while, and especially through writing this book, as I continue to talk to faculty, most faculty, again, they just want to do right by their students. And so they're focused on their student learning and they end up not in a camp with AI. They just want to make sense of it in some useful way and that may be leaning into it. They may be leaning away from it. It may be different approaches in different weeks of the semester. And so that's why I like the AI aware framing. We're not kind of pro- AI in this book or we're not anti-AI. We're saying it's there and we're going to have to respond to it in some way. And hopefully, I think what we've done is provide a lot of very concrete examples from our own practice, but also from lots of other faculty, what are they doing right now in response to AI?

(13:13):
What do their assignment descriptions look like? What are their syllabi statements are? And so I think for faculty who are trying to do what Mark was saying and just kind of make sense of this, it's really nice to see a lot of examples. And so I think that's another strength of the book.

Stacey Johnson (13:28):
I agree. I actually made a note of a couple places that weren't necessarily AI related but are just hard things in teaching and learning where even if you decided my course is going to have nothing to do with AI when you're finished with the book, you would still walk away with practical examples.One that I noted in chapter two was it's really hard to write learning outcomes, like wordsmithing them is a challenge. It's harder than imagining what the learning outcome should be. And so there's just like seven or eight sentences with fill in the blanks to help you get that process started. So even if you don't want to use AI, you can still enjoy the process of reading the book.

Annette Vee (14:09):
One other demographic I want to say that is important here I think is I spent maybe four years doing graduate training for our prospective teachers at the University of Pittsburgh in the English department and thinking a lot about folks just stepping into teaching. And I think that, Stacy, I really like the way that you characterize the book as kind of a course development book is that I think you could kind of take it and regardless of AI, it certainly takes in AI into account, but you could kind of design a course thinking through backward design, learning outcomes, how to be present in a course. There's a lot of different advice there that we give that I think is just generally good teaching advice.

Stacey Johnson (14:52):
I think that is one thing that I hear people voice concerns about also is maybe throwing out what we know about good teaching and learning and replacing everything with this like AI first approaches, like just experimenting with these new tools to the extent possible instead of really focusing on what we know works in the classroom. So how would you respond to people? Because I think your bok does do a good job of incorporating that perspective in a way that's really productive. So how would you respond to people that are worried about that?

Marc Watkins (15:30):
Well, I think we're trying to find as much balance as we can. There's so many studies, surveys that come out almost every week and some of them are corporate sponsors, some of them are independent research. Just trying to figure out what AI tools are doing right now to student learning is very difficult. There are a handful of metacognitive sort of studies that are coming out there too that says that students can benefit from using AI too if it's limited, if it's intentional in that landscape, but we are also seeing the sort of version of these free tools being adopted by students very, very quickly. So it's hard to balance how AI is going to fit as a learning technology going forward, but we are doing our best to include examples that show faculty actively asking those questions with different activities in their classrooms and getting as much information as possible.

(16:21):
One area that I am really concerned about is that adoption of these tools is really high in students, but it's also increasingly high in K-12 faculty. So by fall we're coming up here too, we're going to be talking 2026. It's going to be four years since ChatGPT was released. You're going to see an entire generation of students from high school that had access to these tools and in theory, some of their teachers are going to be using these tools with them. They're going to be entering our classrooms. They're going to have some very different expectations about how AI is going to be used in higher education than frankly what's going to happen right now, which is a total different mix of approaches. And we value the agency within that too. So far, no university has told faculty they have to use AI. There have been some instances where they've said that they're going to have some bigger conversations about it or turn on tools, but we really are focused on that sort of agency question about using or not using this and what it means.

(17:20):
So hopefully it's going to be attached to learning in some way, shape or form.

Derek Bruff (17:25):
And I would second that and say it's agency and its relationships. I'm a survivor of the MOOC years in higher ed and there were a lot of these massive open online courses that were supposed to transform everything we did. And lo and behold, if you have a whole bunch of great video content and some fun quizzes, like 10% of students thrive in that environment and the other 90% don't. And so that's great for them, but most students need relationships to motivate them and sustain them and help them learn. And that's relationships with peers and relationships with their instructors. And so I heard twice this week of faculty who said publicly that they are basically using AI for all of their teaching. They're having AI agents generate their slides and make their videos and grade student work. And I was like, "What's left for you, dude?" And that's what their students are saying too.

(18:22):
That's what I hear from students like, "Yeah, we hear about faculty who are doing that and that seems wrong." And so I think that's what ... I just come back to the importance of relationships. And so yeah, it may be tempting to think that this magic AI thing can do some magical things and in some ways it does. What Annette described using Claude for was really cool, but that doesn't replace the act of teaching, right? That doesn't replace the value of relationships that we have with our students.

Annette Vee (18:50):
Absolutely. I mean, I think that the AI aware framing is helpful for that because I think at this point, as Mark mentioned, we're three and a half years into ChatGPT. I mean, literally every single one of my colleagues, including the one who doesn't use email now knows about ChatGPT. We have to be aware of it at this point because students are using it, it's really obvious. And so the point is not like let's lean into it or let's ... It's much more complex as Derek had said. Most faculty want to do right by their students and so they're trying to navigate this and I think that that's kind of what we would like to provide here is that kind of help in navigation.

Stacey Johnson (19:38):
So what are some of the different ways that you've seen faculty approaching AI in their classrooms?

Annette Vee (19:44):
Well, I'll say the most exciting thing I've seen recently and I also run the AI and the disciplines program in our school of arts and sciences. So that means I do a lot of faculty development and it's faculty coming from all sorts of different backgrounds and departments, neuroscience and psychology and biology and chemistry and languages and stuff like that. But one of the things that they've been doing this term is vibe coding apps to support their teaching and it's so cool. I mean, it's just like legitimately awesome and there's folks who are basically like, I used to teach this really complex kind of topic where we would run through this public data set and that public data set and we would try to get across this idea about some complex political science topic based on all these public data things. And what if we then combine all of these things in an interface such that you can query it and kind of understand this concept comprehensively?

(20:50):
And this person designed something in Claude that's like immediately, I mean, when they presented it at the faculty and seminar, all of us were like, "Wow, I just learned something significant about this topic in the last 20 minutes through interacting with this thing." That's amazing. I had another faculty member who was designing something like using slides like tissue samples and slides here, these things are hard to identify like all the little parts of the tissue, whatever. This is obviously not my strength here. I could not identify all the little parts in the human tissue, whatever that they were looking at, but you can use ... He used AI to then diagram it, like turn it into a diagram that was then labeled so that you could more easily identify and then he could have students switch back and forth and try to identify the in vivo part and the diagramic part and he could do it with like real time, the tissue samples that they were looking at in class.

(21:52):
I mean, those are really good educational applications that I think those aren't teaching AI literacy for students and it's not students cheating and like all of the big framework about like AI I think is really bypassing some of the more innovative things that can happen with AI. And so I just love seeing what faculty do to experiment with it as they think about really centering their students' learning and the problems that they want students to work through in their classes.

Derek Bruff (22:21):
The example that jumped into my mind and I think in the book we try to lay out kind of six general approaches from refusing AI to maybe teaching AI literacy but not engaging it with it beyond that, making the AI part of your learning objectives for a course. And that's probably the example I'm thinking of now. There's a colleague who teaches legal research in the school of law at UVA, Daniel Radthorne. He's one of our faculty AI guides this year. And I got to look at his syllabus recently and he said I could share it. So I don't mind mentioning here. And it was really interesting because the work of legal research done by practicing lawyers has changed a lot in the last few years because of AI tools that change how lawyers interact with all the legal databases. And so he acknowledges that in his syllabus, but he also says that essentially you're not going to understand how to use the old tools or the new tools if you don't understand the underlying structures of how legal resources are put together and organized and used.

(23:27):
And so there's a kind of conceptual mind mappy layer underneath all of that that they need. And so he said, look, we're not going to use a lot of AI in this course. Generally we're not, but sometimes we are. We are going to try these new tools out, but we're going to do it in the context of understanding conceptually what's going on. And so he's walking a very different line there, but I think it's a reasonable line for his field and the work that he's preparing his students to go into.

Marc Watkins (23:53):
Yeah. And my sort of approach that I liked to sort of lean faculty toward, again, they have agency to pick what their approach is too. And that's the main key factor of our book that is trying to find a little bit of the middle ground. I am seeing a huge increase among our humanities faculty and even some of our professional schools to just go to strictly oral exams or in class writing and that has caused a lot of second order problems that we're just now beginning to face namely that faculty generally speaking that have never given an oral exam have no idea how to give an oral exam and going through that process. We are starting to see this pop up in our support centers. Our writing center is seeing students come there and said, "I didn't get done with my in- class writing assignment too.

(24:37):
They sent me here for you to watch me. " And our writing center has told a faculty member that's not our job to do these things. Same thing with our speaking support center too, being come there too to say that, "Would you give our students an oral exam or be able to grade them if I give you a rubric?" It's like, "No, that's not what we do. We can help you walk through some of these choices and questions." In fact, Derek actually had a guest on his podcast a few weeks ago too who was using in- class writing but was using a laptop to actually allow students to use in class writing was turning off the wifi and putting in focus mode so that students that actually had accommodations did not stick out like a sore thumb, which is why I've been trying to tell faculty too if they go nothing but blue books.

(25:19):
And my own classes, I've got 21 students in an online class right now where I was teaching in person, I have at least seven accommodation requests for a word processor. If I had that situation set up there too, those students would be sticking out and I don't want that to happen. So we're trying to find out some middle of the road examples here too, that if you do want to engage some analog learning opportunities, we're going to give you those examples in the book. We're going to talk through that. But we also want you to be open with the fact too that this is a new technology. It is something that students want to have some level of back and forth with you as the teacher too, to understand how this is going to play out in their discipline, to understand from your perspective as a teacher too, what's effective, what's not.

(26:00):
And so having those types of examples are going to be important as we go through here. It does take a lot of time to navigate that though. And that is something I think we're very sensitive about when we wrote the book too, to consider the fact that as Annette mentioned earlier, some faculty are teaching a five five and some faculty don't have institutional support to think about these types of decisions.

Stacey Johnson (26:20):
Yeah. One through line in all of your answers that I really tuned into was there's no opt-out button on generative AI in the classroom. You're going to have to consider it. You can consider it how not to use it, but then you're going to have to think about how to do other things well. You can consider how to use it in very specific ways, but then you have to set up guardrails or you can use how to learn how to vibe code apps to support your teaching. There's a lot of different ways you can spend your time, but everyone's going to have to invest some time because when big technologies have this big of a splash in education, we all have to figure them out.

Annette Vee (26:58):
I think that's true. And you're either investing time on the front end or the back end, right? So if you invest time in course design and thinking really carefully about intentional choices with the technology and how to engage with AI or how to resist AI, then you're going to have a better semester, especially when you look at the end at your student's results, right?

Marc Watkins (27:20):
Most definitely.

Derek Bruff (27:23):
One thing I want people to take away from this is the importance of having these conversations with your students and finding ways to open up lines of conversation with students depending on your campus culture and what students believe to be true about the honor code and AI and plagiarism. They can be very reticent to tell you how they're using AI and what they think about it. And so our chapter and getting to know your students has national data that you can look at, but also some ideas for actually engaging your own students in conversation. Because as Annette said, it's either in the front or the back end, right? You're probably going to have an awkward conversation with the student about AI at some point. You can get ahead of that and try to structure it well, or you can wait until something really uncomfortable happens later in the semester and then you've got to figure out what to do.

(28:06):
So finding ways to have those conversations, I think is essential.

Stacey Johnson (28:11):
So that actually leads into another question I was going to ask, which is if people are listening today and you want them to remember sort of one idea about AI aware teaching, what would you want people to take away with them?

Annette Vee (28:26):
I would say that they can do it. I mean, one of the things I feel like Marc was the best contributor in this space, just like this kind of like, "Hey, you can do this. " And the best thing that you bring into a classroom is you. And as Derek was just saying, the relationships that you have with students, that all still obtains, that's all still really important. And I think whether people are starting out as a brand new teacher, like grad students who are just going through training or whether you've been teaching for 30 years and you're like, "Oh my God, do I really have to change things at this point?" That it's really possible to do because you can kind of go back on really important fundamental aspects of teaching, but you just have to think about this aspect of technology. But you don't need to know all of the nitty-gritty details about how large language models work or whatever.

(29:21):
We have a chapter on that, it's beautiful, it's accessible, but you don't need to dive into it too much to understand how it's impacting your classroom and how to succeed in that. So that would be my most important take-home point.

Marc Watkins (29:36):
If people are reading the book or if they're just listening to the podcast too, I think the biggest takeaway is that don't allow AI to get between you and your students. I think we've all had that situation to where it's happened before in the past three years. I think this can be an opportunity to have a reset. What faculty and students have told me too, that if you could sit down and have a conversation about these tools, how they're actually playing out is Is that if you can talk with them and not at them, they're much more receptive to a course policy, whether you're going to engage AI to or refuse it and set up a really strict policy too. Having those types of conversations, those types of engagement are so important and so valuable. And students are going to remember that a lot more than they're going to remember seeing an ad on TikTok advertising the next AI app that they come across.

(30:24):
And that is something I think we should all be leaning into more and more. And you can do that in person, but you can also do that asynchronously online. You can set that up in a lot of different ways. I know that's been very difficult for many of our faculty going through there. I'm currently teaching partly online, partly hybrid courses, and it is very challenging to find those types of spaces to create those relationships with students. But we use different types of tools and techniques from video to more authentic language when I'm actually writing. It's actually one thing AI is helping with too is to think about ways that my language is more accessible to students. Is this something an 18-year-old would actually pay attention to asking for that for feedback if I'm doing assignment directions instead of just going back through and copy and pasting assignment templates that I've had for now almost eight or nine years.

(31:09):
And I think we can all kind of navigate those types of questions together. We just have to give ourselves a little bit of grace and realize that it's not students doing this. It's not their fault that AI has come here too. They've not asked for this situation.

Stacey Johnson (31:25):
I always appreciate a message of grace when it comes to teaching advice because I think teachers can be really hard on themselves. Sometimes the relationship between teachers and students can become contentious or adversarial unintentionally even. And so just remembering that most people are just doing the best they can and these tools are really complex and a little bit of grace is going to go a long way. Derek, it looked like you were going to chime in with what you want listeners to take away.

Derek Bruff (31:54):
Well, I said the thing about talking to students. I think I was just remembering, I think I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but I feel like it took higher ed a long time to become internet aware in how we teach and kind of changing what we teach and how we teach to kind of take advantage of the ready availability of information online and misinformation online. I don't know that higher did a great job of responding to that. And so I feel like we're in a similar moment in that, yes, the technological landscape has changed and none of us asked for that.

(32:32):
Teachers didn't ask for it, students didn't ask for it, but it has changed. And that means we need to adapt in some fashion. And so that can feel like a lot of work. But I also think it's really important because I think the internet is a hot mess right now. And so I don't know if we could have changed that as higher ed, but I felt like we could have done a little more. And so I think we need to kind of use our voice in the AI space and how it's affecting our students' lives, how it's affecting our culture. We have agency, not just in our own classes, but in kind of speaking into these hard conversations that are happening around AI in our culture. That was kind of a ramble, but I feel like there's a, I don't know, there's a soapbox there I haven't quite figured out yet, but I want to stand on it.

Marc Watkins (33:20):
I like it. That makes sense to me.

Stacey Johnson (33:22):
I'm going to jump in with a personal note too, because before you and I met at the Center for Teaching, I was a faculty member in Spanish for a couple of decades. And early on in my teaching career, Google Translate came out and it felt really revolutionary. People were asking, "Do we even need a language requirement anymore if our phones or our computers..." Back then we weren't using phones for Google Translate, but if our computers can do all of this translation for us. And then before ChatGPT came out, they moved from a statistical model to an AI model and it felt like Google Translate was always a gremlin in the system, keeping my assignments from reaching their potential, keeping my students from learning as much as they could, keeping us away from whatever my target was. And I think over the years I came to figure out that teaching students how to use Google Translate just wasn't in my learning objectives.

(34:22):
It's a really neat tool and if I go to Amsterdam, I'm going to pull it out so I can figure out what the science mean or communicate with people who don't speak English. But in my classroom, we're actually there to do something completely diferent that Google Translate doesn't have any bearing on. And I enjoyed teaching I had to really understand the tool. I had to understand how my students were using it. I had to redesign all my assignments and fine tune them every semester for decades. But I really enjoyed teaching in a way that focused on the human connection and understanding each other and making the most out of that face-to-face time. I feel like we get that opportunity all over again in a very deja vu sort of way now that AI is here.

Annette Vee (35:08):
It does force questions about like, what is it that you're doing in a classroom? Why are we here? And I think students really, we need to answer that question as teachers, but students need to come up with an answer for that too and we need to help them come up with that. Because one of the things that we know is that students are, I mean, of course, like everybody knows, students are using AI in sometimes bad ways, shocker. But a lot of times they have kind of legitimate reasons to do it or they think the reasons are legitimate. They don't think of what they're doing as cheating. What they're doing instead is they're like routing around busy work, they're pressed for time. They have a lot of different reasons for turning to AI. And I think that these conversations that we can have with students can kind of help refocus them on like, what is it that you want to get out of a Spanish class?

(36:02):
Do you want to get out of a Spanish class? How to plug Spanish into Google Translate? That's kind of a waste of your time, right? This is not a difficult tool to use. So would you like to instead get like some cultural knowledge and exchange and how to have idiomatic expression and I mean like all sorts of different human facing kinds of things that you might get out of a language class. So I think each discipline has to kind of figure out the answers to those questions, but also help students figure out what it is that they're doing in that class that will help them meet their own goals so that it feels meaningful to them.

Stacey Johnson (36:42):
Absolutely. I love that. Anything that promotes empowering students to be the masters of their own fate when it comes to their education feels like the right direction.

Derek Bruff (36:53):
And Stacey, your story also is reminding me that one of the privileges I have of working in a Center for Teaching is working with faculty in all disciplines and all departments on campus and Annette and Marc get to do versions of that in their positions as well. And so it's remembering that like in the languages AI technology is not new, right? These kind of disruptive technologies have been around for a while. And so as a field, I think language pedagogy is better at adapting and responding. When I think about the language instructors on my campus or the ones we knew at Vanderbilt, Stacy, like technology didn't scare them. They were ready to grapple with it. And I think it's because as a field they had to, and that's not true for every discipline. And so I think it's nice to have these conversations across disciplines so that folks who are in fields who haven't had to adapt as fast can learn a little bit about how to do that from faculty like you, Stacey, who are in fields where that has had to happen.

Stacey Johnson (37:51):
That made me feel pretty important and special. I like that way of thinking of it and not just that I've been tortured by technology for decades now. As we wrap up, I'm curious, I know you all write extensively, but I'm curious what it was like to write collaboratively and if there's any interesting ways that the collaborative writing process informed your thinking or changed your approach at all.

Marc Watkins (38:18):
I love the process. The caveat that we kind of mentioned before too is that we kind of wrote in a time of chaos this spring. I was involved with the ice storm. Derek was involved with the ice storm too. And Annette, you weren't involved with the ice storm, but you're involved with your own winter apocalypse of sorts too in Pittsburgh. So we at some points in time were facing writing without power, without water, without heat and it was just kind of chaotic. But I really do enjoy the different sort of voices that both Annette and Derek and the perspectives that they brought to it. I feel like they challenged me in a lot of different ways, both as a writer too and as someone who's thinking about these tools and that actually really did help me because collaborative writing can be terrifying in different ways.

(39:07):
You can have someone who has a really dominant voice that wants to go in and take over their too, but I always felt like Annette and Derek were very open to everyone else's opinion too going through this. So it was really a joy to write with them too. And I did like that experience quite a bit.

Derek Bruff (39:22):
I think it's a little interesting, especially given some of Annette's answers today. So I was brought on later in the evolution of this project in part to be the STEM guy given Annette and Marc's disciplinary backgrounds. But I think also there was a little vibe at that point where I think Annette and Marc were responding to a lot of the conversations in the writing world, which were very critical of AI. And so they were walking this very fine line of wanting to make sure that those critical voices were acknowledged and respected and heard. And I kind of got the vibe I was brought in to be a little more pro AI because over in science, they're like, "Okay, this is not the scariest thing in the world. It's not. " But I feel like in some ways we've kind of reversed. I feel like I'm a little more critical about AI and its role in learning now because of this writing process.

(40:15):
And Annette was just raving about all of these awesome vibe coded projects that her colleagues have done. And so I think that's been interesting to see our own kind of positions on this kind of spectrum of resistance to engagement kind of shift around through this writing process.

Annette Vee (40:29):
I want to say for the record though, I've been fascinated by AI for like many years actually. I mean, I'm a writing technology researcher, so this is for me, it's like what a time to be alive. I mean, I'm not saying I'm like pro AI, but it is wild. It's so interesting. So for the collaborative writing process, I mean, one of the things that I really valued so much here is that as I said earlier, I spend all day thinking about AI. I listen to AI podcasts, I play around with AI, I talk to people about AI, I do faculty development about AI, I read articles in the Chronicle about AI. My kids talk to me about AI and they're like, "Are you really listening to AI podcasts again, mom?" And I'm like, "Yeah, actually all the time." And I actually want to, which sounds a little perverse, but it's true and yet I don't know all the things.

(41:24):
It is not possible to keep up with it. And so when we're writing things and Derek's adding like, "Oh, you should think about, " in the nicest possible way, not in this, but here are some other examples of people who are doing this thing and here's ... Mark would bring up, "This is a current controversy, did you see this article?" And it just felt like that's the only way that we can do this is collaboratively, figure out how to navigate AI moving forward. I mean, the three of us are, to be fair, actually pretty up on AI, but it's not even possible for us. And so I do feel like there's a kind of lesson there that's pro and we end on this in the book that's like pro learning in a community. So lean on your colleagues, have conversations with students, have conversations with your teaching center, have conversations with your colleagues and together kind of figure out how to navigate these spaces because it really is, it's moving too fast, it's too complex, there's just too much to navigate.

(42:27):
And so I feel like that we really experienced that in the collaborative writing process for sure. And I think that that would be useful for any teacher moving forward.

Stacey Johnson (42:39):
I want to just, before I give Derek a chance to give his two cents, I want to sneak in with Annette. You are the reason I love faculty so much. I am faculty's biggest fan and it is because when you meet someone who chooses a topic as a young person and then spends the rest of their life excited and learning about that topic and never ever feels like they've reached the end of the topic, those are cool people to hang out with. Those are people of boundless enthusiasm. I love that.

Annette Vee (43:12):
Ask me about my academic book and you might get a different answer.

Derek Bruff (43:18):
I don't have much to say. I was just imagining, I find that I think in metaphors a lot, I was just this past weekend playing a board game called SETI, and it's about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And the box cover is one of those really giant satellite dishes that's scanning the stars, scanning the sky. And I thought like here we are, we have three different satellite dishes, me, Annette, and Mark, and we're all scanning different parts of the sky. There's some overlap, but there's also some different parts of the sky. And then it's like we get that data and we come back and we chat about it like, "Oh, what did you find? What did you find? What did you find?" And so I don't know, that was a fun process. I wasn't sure that I would like co-authoring as much as I did, but I really did.

(43:57):
And I think that was a big piece of it.

Stacey Johnson (44:01):
Well, I really enjoyed getting to be an early reader of your book. I appreciate you trusting me with the opportunity to interview you and I'm just grateful to all of you for putting this work out there so we can all learn from you.

Annette Vee (44:13):
Thank you, Stacy.

Marc Watkins (44:15):
Yeah. Thank you, Stacy.

Derek Bruff (44:16):
Yeah. Thanks for being a great guest interviewer, Stacy. I appreciate you.

Stacey Johnson (44:20):
It was my pleasure.

Derek Bruff (44:23):
Thanks to Stacey Johnson for being a fantastic guest interviewer on this episode of Intentional Teaching. As I mentioned at the top of the show, Stacy is director of learning and engagement for the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, where she leads professional development for university faculty and administrators. Stacey is also, like me, a bit of a slow blogger. She doesn't blog often, but when she does, it is well worth reading. See the show notes for more info on Stacy and her work. Thanks also to Annette Vee and Marc Watkins for joining me and Stacey for this interview. Three of us have done a few interviews now in support of the book and I expect we'll do a few more. As I said during the interview, Annette and Marc were a joy to write with and I'm glad we'll have the chance to collaborate on supporting AI Aware Teaching in the coming months through this book and other engaged books.

(45:10):
Please do check out the new book. It's called the Norton Guide to AI Aware Teaching and let us know what you think about it. You can find all three of us on various social networks, se the show notes for links and you're welcome to email me directly at derek@derekbruff.org with thoughts and questions. There's also a link in the show notes to text the podcast. If you do that, just be sure to include your name in your text.

(45:33):
Intentional teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website and socials and to the intentional teaching newsletter, which goes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday.

(46:01):
If you found this or any episode of intentional teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.