AI and Education: Is It Any Different This Time?
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Today’s blog is a cross-post from the Connected Learning Alliance blog, which you can find here. It is posted here with permission.
Over several months in 2025 and 2026, Dr. Roderic Crooks, Associate Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine, and Michelle Ciccone, PhD candidate in Communication at UMass Amherst, held a sustained dialogue on AI, edtech, and critical research. This post summarizes their wide-ranging conversation on the limits of technology in education, the role of critical research, and how the research community, including the CLA, might engage with the current moment.
Use AI…or Else
Classroom AI has been thrust upon educators from multiple directions. Students were using ChatGPT to produce essays before teachers understood what generative AI could do. Pressure has also come from above, with administrators issuing AI policies largely without consulting classroom teachers. Absent meaningful guidance, individuals must invest significant energy redesigning courses around emerging best practices — with no corresponding resources or compensation. This dynamic benefits tech companies while burdening educators; profiteering disguised by language about access.
Even well-designed AI integration can lead to student and educator burnout. Students in one of Roderic’s large upper-division writing courses learned to use AI as an editing tool and turn AI into a co-pilot, with a revised AI-informed curriculum that included multimedia resources like podcasts to engage students in major concepts. Classwork focused on revision strategies; students produced a term paper from smaller assignments and were rewarded for changes made to AI output or earlier drafts of papers. One student shared, "I got very tired of AI by the end of this course and it made me start to hate writing.” This is the impossible position teachers are in: having to make consequential decisions about AI integration without shared norms, adequate resources, or even areliable definition of what kind of thing AI is supposed to be.
Educators also face pressure to integrate AI based on arguments about workplace "readiness." But this rhetoric about the future obscures important present questions: Is a potential career path sufficient reason to fully integrate AI into classrooms? Might it be more valuable to preserve classrooms as spaces forquestioning what technology is, what we want it to do, and what it does to us?
What’s Different Now?
In Michelle’s research, some teachers describe the arrival of generative AI as feeling like "what it must have felt like to be teaching when the Internet came about." We should take this seriously while situating the current AI moment in histories of technological change. MillennialInformation Society scholarship included theorists who argued that the Internet and its constitutive technologies had initiated a long-predicted post-industrial society; other theorists argued these technologies merely represented a phase of existing political-economic relations. While that debate wasnever resolved, it’s useful to think about what features of previous inquiry are relevant to the current situation with AI: how are critical narratives from previous decades shaping today's AI policies and practices in K-12 schools?
One thing unique to this moment is that we seem to bepost-“techlash.” The public holds a baseline skepticism toward Big Tech that wasn't present a decade ago, reinforced by the limitations of edtech exposed during pandemic schooling. In this environment, wecontinue to observe contradictory school-based technology policies and practices: some statesmove to ban phones while others mandate tablets and laptops. Each policy may have individual merit, but together they create confusion. In public schools already prone to over-disciplining students, device-related conflicts can carry harsh penalties. What’s more, this prevailing narrative still frames AI as an external force producing direct effects. Beware the binary, however: rejecting techno-utopian promises risks sliding into techno-dystopian fears, which equally obscures the material workings of edtech.
Though public opinion on AI may shift, it’s unlikely to impact investment or adoption in schools. Experience shows new technologies are gradually incorporated into classrooms, and we will figure out how to use AI, just as we did with earlier tools. But the AI hype cycle, like past speculative booms, won’t sustain endless growth, and there’s no reason to believe that the current zeal for AI will continue indefinitely. With that in mind, educators and stakeholders, in addition to asking what we want schools to be, must ask what we want tech to be, and what place we want it to hold in our classrooms and communities.
What Educational Researchers and Practitioners Can Do
Facilitate spaces and support for reflection among teachers
In the context of Michelle’s ongoing research, teachers repeatedly say that they appreciate opportunities to reflect on their thoughts and feelings about AI. There’s the sense that “the technology is moving too fast” and there’s no time for this. Researchers can prioritize facilitating this kind of reflection in community with colleagues, and articulate the numerous different points along the full range of approaches to AI already underway in schools. Critical research can map space between the tired techno-dystopian/techno-determinist binary perspectives, and find ways to make visible how people are working through the technological and rhetorical arrangements where we work, study, and live.
Focus on making a positive impact on critical societal issues
Crucially, critical AI scholarship needs to describe the ground on which transformative AI exists. The major issues confronting public schools in the United States arepoor working conditions and segregation, and critical scholarship can contribute to meaningful efforts to mobilize people to address these longstanding problems. Seymour Papertwrote about one possible strategy: to use AI as a "cultural element” to inspire, sustain, and direct attention to important concerns.
Elevate and support teachers and communities
As with prior edtech eras, conscientious classroom teachers will devise appropriate educational uses of AI through trial and error in the classroom. Researchers can focus efforts on elevating and supporting teachers’ work. At the most basic level, teachers need material support, and the freedom to use their experience and creativity. Research can valorize practices that emerge from those closest to students, families, and communities, rather than issuing edicts and bland best practices from above. Research networks and communities like the Connected Learning Alliance can bring many perspectives to the table, a valuable practice even when those perspectives clash or disagree.
References
Ballotpedia. 2026. “State Policies on Cellphone Use in K-12 Public Schools.” Accessed April 20, 2026.https://ballotpedia.org/State_policies_on_cellphone_use_in_K-12_public_schools
Knight Foundation. 2020. Techlash? America’s Growing Concern with Major Technology Companies.https://knightfoundation.org/reports/techlash-americas-growing-concern-with-major-technology-companies/
Lin, Luona, Kim Parker, and Juliana Menasce Horowitz. 2024. What’s It Like to Be a Teacher in America Today? Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center.https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/04/04/whats-it-like-to-be-a-teacher-in-america-today/
Milberg, Tanya. 2024, April 28. “The Future of Learning: How AI is Revolutionizing Education 4.0.” World Economic Forum.https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/future-learning-ai-revolutionizing-education-4-0/
Papert, Seymour. 1987. “Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking.” Educational Researcher 16(1):22.https://www.jstor.org/stable/1174251
Rafalow, Matthew. H., and Cassidy Puckett. 2022. “Sorting Machines: Digital Technology and Categorical Inequality in Education.” Educational Researcher 51(4):274-278.
Suchman, Lucy. 2023. “The Uncontroversial ‘Thingness’ of AI.” Big Data & Society 10(2):1-5.https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231206794
Vakil, Sepehr, and Maxine McKinney de Royston. 2022. “Youth as Philosophers of Technology.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 29(4):336–355.https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2022.2066134
Webster, Frank. 2014. Theories of the Information Society. London, UK: Routledge.https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315867854