Technocuriosity in the History Classroom: A Framework for Navigating GenAI from the Middle
Civics of Technology Announcements
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By Amy Allen & David Hicks
In September, the Civics of Technology blog offered valuable starting points for educators navigating generative AI. Perspectives for the Perplexed recognizes that GenAI is already in schools and provides a guidebook, designed to support teachers and other leaders as they consider what AI guidelines are necessary and worthwhile. AI Dilemmas highlights a set of resources to support conversation and reflection across a spectrum of perspectives centered on the affordances of using AI based on case studies. These posts both acknowledge the way AI is permeating schools and resonate deeply with our work as history educators and researchers.
We’ve spent the past year exploring what it means to teach with and about generative AI in history education, not from a place of technological hype or fear, but from inside the evolving terrain of classroom practice. As scholars committed to historical thinking, digital media literacy, and teacher preparation, we’ve felt a growing urgency to claim space for disciplinary expertise in the AI conversation.
We are seeing AI enter classrooms through PD mandates, district policies, and toolkits, often without any disciplinary context. In history and social science education, that’s a serious risk. Tools like ChatGPT can generate text quickly, but they don’t understand evidence, significance, perspective, or historical context. If teachers aren’t part of shaping how AI is used, it will be shaped for them often by edtech vendors, administrators, or policymakers who aren’t grounded in the discipline.
We don’t want to sit on the sidelines while outside forces define what GenAI will mean for teaching history. And we also don’t want to embrace AI uncritically. We wanted something else. So we developed and continue to flesh out a conceptual and methodological framework called technocuriosity. Technocuriosity offers a way forward: not by rejecting AI, and not by blindly adopting it, but by engaging it as educators and on our terms.
We define AI Literacy as the capacity to (a) understand how AI works and where it came from; (b) appraise its strengths and weaknesses for specific scholarly and pedagogical tasks; and (c) evaluate the ethics of its use in different situations. In this vein, rather than asking whether AI is “good” or “bad” for education, we ask: What happens when we inhabit AI in real classrooms? What might it mean to explore its risks and possibilities together, with care, critique, and curiosity? In our recently published editorial, There’s an Elephant in the History Classroom: Rethinking GenAI through Technocuriosity in Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, we try to capture our ideas about technocuriosity based on our experiences working with inservice and preservice teachers, and we outline key tenets of the Technocurious Framework:
Technocuriosity takes a posture of thoughtful exploration, not about the interface or novelty of GenAI but about the deeper issues and complexity it creates in classrooms and education. It is curiosity through and with the technology, asking what becomes possible, thinkable, teachable, or knowable when we treat GenAI as a speculative device or a problem space. We are interested in questions like: How does it reshape authorship? What epistemic violence and threats does it carry, perpetuate, or mask? Where does it align with disciplinary values within and across discipline, and where does it break from them? These questions are not born of naïve fascination; they are rooted in situated, speculative critique. Technocuriosity provides a way of working with GenAI tools like ChatGPT that is grounded in pedagogical values and attuned to disciplinary contexts. Technocuriosity builds on Ethan Mollick’s (2024) idea of co-intelligence, the notion that AI is not just a tool, but a collaborator that requires human discernment. But, like technoskepticism, technocuriosity insists on critical engagement. It does not treat AI as neutral, infallible, or above critique but pays attention to both what it enables and what it displaces, omits, or misrepresents within and through the contexts of its use. This stance is defined by six tenets:
Situated Liveness: We do not study technologies from a distance, we use them, test them, respond to them in real time. Inquiry happens in media res, in the middle, during the messy moments of engaging with tools like GenAI, even when it fails.
Speculative Ethics: Rather than just asking “Does it work?” we also ask “What could go wrong?” and “What futures are we building when we use this?” We imagine shadow possibilities, unintended effects, and the paths not taken.
Relational Configuration: Technology does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in schools, systems, and relationships. Technologies are always shaped by and shaping the sociomaterial systems they enter. Researchers map and engage these entanglements, including what things GenAI gets wrong.
Figural Thinking: We treat technology not just as a tool, but as a figure, something with symbolic weight that both stabilizes and mutates meaning over time. It carries stories about the future, about knowledge, and about what counts as “good” learning. We ask “What do tools like GenAI mean in our classrooms, and how might those meanings shift?”
Methodological Invention: Methods should be designed responsively to problems and may need to be improvised, hybridized, or invented anew. Technocurious teachers try, adapt, reflect, and sometimes invent new ways of working.
Reflexive Co-creation: Researchers and educators are not outside observers but co-constructors of the role of technology in education. Technocuriosity is dialogic, recursive, and self-implicating, and the teacher is a critical piece of the equation.
Ultimately, we conclude:
We view technocuriosity not as a destination but as a beginning: an invitation to think and teach with nuance, to remain open to surprise, and to resist both hype and fear. This framework will continue to evolve as we play with it, stress test it in classrooms, refine its conceptual groundings, and remain in dialogue with educators, researchers, and students who are navigating and mapping GenAI in real time. We share these early reflections and ideas, not as a definitive answer, but as a provocation and an initiating point for generative discussion around research and pedagogy related to GenAI… Though our work is still unfolding, we believe that a technocurious approach of curiosity that is critical, careful, and collective holds potential for educators seeking to navigate rapidly evolving technologies.
References
de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press.
Lury, C. (2012). Going live: Towards an Amphibious sociology. The Sociological Review, 60(1), 184-197. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02123.x
Lury, C., Viney, W., & Wark, S. (2022). Figure: Concept and method. Palgrave Macmillan.
Lury, C., & Wakeford, N. (Eds.). (2012). Inventive methods: The happening of the social. Routledge.
Mollick, E. (2024). Co-intelligence: Living and working with AI. Portfolio/Penguin.