My teaching philosophy is informed by what I take to be our common goal as educators: producing educated, thoughtful, and engaged graduates prepared to address environmental, cultural, political, and economic challenges of our time; however, writing in 2026, it feels important to share how I see this common goal in relation to emergent technologies that have, in a few short years, begun to reshape the landscape of teaching and learning (Miranda 2026).
In December 2022, while preparing to begin teaching a class, I overheard students at the periphery of the classroom describing to each other a new tool that was changing how they were approaching the written assignments in their coursework. What I heard then, in the first few weeks that ChatGPT appeared on our campuses, indicated that they were already using it in ways that raised serious questions not just about academic integrity, but also about the ways that assignments are designed to scaffold learning and assess achievement.
Since then, LLMs that generate text, images, and videos have reshaped teaching and learning in secondary and higher education, changing the landscape of what it means for a student to do assigned reading, transforming how formative writing assignments can be leveraged to support learning, and inspiring a rethinking of the assessment practices. Recent surveys, which comport with my intuitions based on classroom experience, suggest that college students use AI tools regularly at very high rates, ranging from 57% to 95% (Chirkov, Smirnov, and Kizilcec 2026; Stephenson and Armstrong 2026; Lumina 2026).
Drawing on a long experience exploring the promises and pitfalls of successive generations of information technology in higher education, I have sought to be proactive in exploring ways to redesign classes in response to this technological change, experimenting in my own classroom and actively sharing my findings with others. But this engagement with generative AI has occurred against a backdrop of uneven institutional response across the secondary and post-secondary educational landscape. While some institutions have largely confined their responses to directives about academic integrity statements or “best practices” seminars from their centers for teaching and learning, others have sought to take the challenge head-on, but often in ways that are themselves problematically uncritical. Laying out the problem space with unusual clarity, MIT’s much publicized report draws attention to the risks of cognitive offloading and surrender and calls for institution-wide AI-aware changes to policies, assessments, and class structures (MIT 2026). In response, some selective institutions have pursued policies intended to exclude these technologies from classes intended to cultivate critical thinking (Luo 2026, Archipov 2026, Palmer 2026). Meanwhile, my personal and intellectual engagements with DC-area leaders have revealed there is a widespread view that near-immediate deployment of these tools across the full range of teaching and learning experiences is “no longer optional” or “inevitable.”
Although I remain open-minded and curious about these technologies in the learning process, my experience exercising leadership concerning technological change in higher education leads me towards a constructive, but critical stance. Being responsive to AI may mean that students in some disciplines can reasonably expect to have learned to use these tools in sophisticated ways, but it need not entail deployment of these technologies to all parts of the teaching and learning enterprise. We should avoid adopting marketing talking points, especially when those are crafted by organizations for whom “disruption” is framed as a primary virtue. Choices to deploy technologies, as always, must be defensible: they should be individually judged against curricular goals, learning outcomes for a program, or class-based learning objectives.
Redesigning our learning experiences in response to these tools should be approached with care and concern, both with respect to our responsibilities to the environment and our expectations of students and teaching faculty. Accordingly, I have been an active participant in college-wide meetings and workshops, conversations with employers in my role managing the Honors College’s external relations, our George Mason Center for Humanities Research’s “AI & the Humanities” series, various events in Washington DC, and a sustained reading group with leaders from government, NGOs, and private sector consulting.
My experiments in the classroom have been occurring almost exclusively in classes in which AI is a topic among others to be assessed from the standpoint of sustainability, energy use, and environmental concern, so I approach questions about these technologies both as subjects for critical reflection and as a significant aspect of the conditions under which students learn and I teach today.
Table 1: Classroom responses to Generative AI tools
| Semester | Class | Engagement with Generative AI | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fall 2023 | HNRS 131 Contemporary Social Issues: Responses to Climate Change | In a lecture- and discussion-based seminar format class, I adopted oral exams as a way to explore what students were learning. This built upon a pedagogy that already foregrounded welcoming office hours and invitations to students for research consultations. Additionally, I designed weekly assignments for the first half of the semester in which students were provided models for using generative AI to explore the readings, the topics we were studying, and related materials. Students provided records of what they did with the tools and to write reflective critical assessments, both of Generative AI outputs and of the impacts on their learning. Students were permitted to opt-out of these assignments by completing assignments focused on critical evaluation of other evidentiary sources. | In classroom conversations, many students reported concerns about bias, misinformation (“hallucinations”), and lack of creativity in the outputs, but many had a hard time observing “anchoring” effects of the outputs in their learning. Several students opted out of the AI assignments on the grounds that the tools had appropriated the work of creators unfairly or environmental grounds. Both regular informal surveys I conducted and end-of-semester student evaluations of teaching suggested mixed reception of these assignments. |
| Spring 2024 | HNRS 360 Multidisciplinary Topics: Climate and Culture | In a research seminar class, I modeled AI disclosures, provided direct instruction about issues regarding sourcing and accuracy in AI outputs, and facilitated open conversations in one-on-one and small group settings with students about the ways they were using these tools. | Students produced nuanced AI disclosures and I heard some descriptions of how students were using the tools in ways that were more sophisticated than I anticipated, but fewer students appeared to choose to utilize the tools in this class than I had expected. |
| Fall 2024 | HNRS 131 Contemporary Social Issues: Responses to Climate Change | In a lecture- and discussion-based seminar format class, I re-designed many assignments as process-based writing, reflective writing, and other assignments that are somewhat more difficult to fully automate. Additionally, throughout the semester, my intention was to explore the “policing” strategy that the majority of faculty appeared to be adopting at the time, warning students about the risks of academic integrity violations, due to unauthorized assistance, fabrication of evidence, and plagiarism. | Very few students were suspected of using the tools for written assignments, although a much larger group were suspected of substituting AI summaries for reading. In the former group, the most obvious indicators were invented quotations (fabrication of evidence) or unattributed nearly-direct quotations from other secondary sources that were later found to be artifacts of generative AI, rather than old-fashioned copy-paste plagiarism. I found an environment of suspicion emerged in relation to some students, all of whom I would have much rather been helping. There is clearly a role for enforcement, but it felt particularly corrosive in the context of this small seminar. |
| Spring 2025 | HNRS 122 Reading the Arts: Climate Fiction | In a discussion-based seminar format class, required students to use print books for classroom conversations, had in-class daily formative writing assignments and summative writing assignments conducted during class time using the Respondus Lockdown Browser to prevent AI use. | This approach ensured that the formative written work and summative assessments reflected the students’ work, which proved to be quite strong, if somewhat less polished. The lockdown browser technology was somewhat intrusive and sometimes students faced technological difficulties as a result of its use. Most importantly, this approach sacrificed the sustained attention that longer at-home written assignments can enable. |
| Fall 2025 | HNRS 131 Contemporary Social Issues: Responses to Climate Change | I continued my efforts to re-design assignments as process-based writing, reflective writing, and similar assignments that generative AI tends not to execute very well. Rather than punitive policing, I provided nudges to students who appeared to be relying on these tools either as a writing aid on formative assignments or using them instead of reading. For summative writing assessments, I provided a topic that students would write on and students submitted up to three pages of quotations from our assigned readings, which they were permitted to put under organizational headings. I reviewed these submissions and then provided them to students for an in-class writing assignment, conducted using the Respondus Lockdown Browser during class time. | This was an effort to find a compromise between the approaches I had taken in Fall 2024 and Spring 2025. It was an iterative improvement on these two semesters that reduced the problem of suspicion. |
| Spring 2026 | HNRS 131 Contemporary Social Issues; Responses to Climate Change | I adopted a device free classroom. Students read on paper, wrote a formative writing assignment for the first 10 minutes of class on paper, and implemented a 3-class sequence for the three summative writing assessments. Class 1: students received a very general version of the summative writing prompt and wrote about it for 10 minutes as their daily formative writing, which then formed the stimulus for a class-long seminar discussion of the topic. Class 2: as their daily formative writing, students were provided an opportunity to revisit what they had written and revise, take notes, or add to it. Class 3: students had a full class period during which they wrote a single essay on paper. They were permitted to consult all of their formative writing for the unit when doing so, but not to consult the book or any other source material. | The quality of the student writing, both in formative writing assignments and the summative assessments was remarkably strong, thoughtful, and earnest. The major drawback to this approach involves teaching labor and it would likely not be scalable to a significantly larger class without graduate assistants. A secondary drawback, which was relatively easily addressed, was students who had accommodations related to testing length or handwritten materials. Students showed surprising enthusiasm about this format. |
| Fall 2026 | HNRS 260 Society and Community Engagement: Honors College Connects – Environment | In a class-based experiential learning course in which students work in small groups on semester-long projects with environmental nonprofits and sustainability initiatives in local governments, called on each group to consider (1) research on the potential negative impacts of AI reliance on creativity in brainstorming and problem-solving as a framing activity and (2) environmental impacts of these tools. Then, asked each group to make a “charter” to which all group members could agree that included, among other elements, statements about appropriate and inappropriate use of AI. | This class is ongoing, but the student charters reflect a real range of perspectives about what appropriate AI use might be. While I anticipated needing to have constructive conversations with some groups about AI disclosures or over-permissive charters, in fact each group included an AI disclosure guideline and often adopted quite restrictive charters. |
Through these experiments, I strive to cultivate an ethos of openness, flexibility, and responsiveness to change, while maintaining appropriate care and caution about these tools and their consequences. In doing so, I extend my long and deep engagement with questions about how new information technologies shape teaching.
Table 2: History of leadership concerning changing information technologies in higher education
| Time Period | Engagement | Affiliation | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-2011 | ePortfolio for English Studies | Virginia Tech | While exploring literary hypertextuality in some of my scholarship and helping with digital humanities projects, I worked with the XCaliber Award-winning team implementing ePortfolios to support metacognitive development and career readiness for English majors |
| 2012-2015 | Technical Director, Research, Technology, and Online Community project | Honors College, George Mason University | Starting as a part-time internal grant-funded opportunity as a graduate student and gradually transforming into an effort that spanned multiple roles at my institution, I led a project developing Open Educational Resources, including a very popular online video series about undergraduate research processes, an interactive tool to help undergraduates understand the anatomy of a scholarly paper, a multi-user interactive tool to help students peer review each other’s research questions, and print and online tutorial materials. We were guided by the idea that peer modeling and interactivity were the key affordances of these new technologies that could enable their effective integration into inquiry-based learning. |
| 2012 | OER Development | Saylor Foundation | I developed online interactive Open Educational Resources as a consulting professor. |
| 2013-2014 | Distance Education Assistant | University Libraries, George Mason University | While seeking to create a sustainable model for OERs in my institution, I worked with our academic librarians to reimagine library services in light of the rise of distance education, electronic resources, and a growing proliferation of online resources beyond the library. I was awarded the Exceptional Support Award for this work. |
| 2014-2019 | Digital Initiatives Coordinator | Honors College, George Mason University | As the Honors College’s Digital Initiatives Coordinator, I systematically investigated what aspects of our highly interactive curricular and co-curricular offerings could be improved with emerging technologies. I had a 4/4 teaching load, so I both made recommendation that impacted the Honors College’s approach to these and began the process of experimentation that informs my approach to AI. |
| 2020-present | Director of Communications | Honors College, George Mason University | After I had begun in my current position as the Director of Communications in the Honors College, the COVID-19 pandemic thrust me back into an informal EdTech role, providing technical support and helping faculty redesign their courses to function in synchronous online, asynchronous online, and hyflex formats. Because my college lacks an Information Technology Director, I also retained the role I had as he “Digital Initiatives Coordinator” as the acting representative of our College in spaces for IT leadership during this period. |
Although I have taken leadership in adapting to technology change in higher education for a decade and a half, I believe that the current conjuncture is distinct from what came before.
This moment demands creative and critical responses: the practices of teaching and learning have already been transformed, whether we would like it to be so or not. The challenge that I aim to meet, whether I am leading a lecture-based class, facilitating a small seminar discussion, advising a student research project, or coordinating an extended experiential learning experience, is to ensure that my students are learning the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind required to address the challenges that face us. This, I believe, requires meaningful reflection on what technologies are fit to the purposes of our relationships with these students and what the appropriate uses of these technologies might be. No one knows the right answer to how we should respond to this disruption, so I try to approach it with a combination of environmental concern, care for our students, serious regard for the evidence, and a spirit of experimentation.