Teaching with GenAI: building ethics, critical inquiry, and innovation

• AI

As generative AI tools become more embedded in higher education, we as educators face both exciting opportunities and important responsibilities. In my subject, students are asked to develop their own research questions and independently source material for their essays. I saw a chance to explore how GenAI could support this process, while also encouraging critical engagement and ethical use. In this blog post, I share a classroom activity I designed to help students interact with GenAI in meaningful ways, and reflect on how they responded and what this might mean for teaching and learning going forward. 

Developing an original research question

The students had an assignment where they had to develop their own research question and find their own sources for their essays. As students now have access to UTS support GenAI learning tools such as Copilot and the Library Research Assistant, I wanted to create an activity that scaffolded ethical and effective use of these tools to enhance student learning. 

We had a tutorial class scheduled to workshop their essays. I developed a two-part activity where first, students were asked to close their laptops and work the ‘analog’ way with just a paper and pen. The paper was a two-sided sheet that had a brainstorm bubble on one side and a set of boxes on the other.  

For the first 10(ish) minutes of class, we asked students to write their topic of interest in the centre of the bubbles and spend the rest of the time mind mapping their interest in this field and any other key points they thought would be relevant/interesting to follow up for their essay. For the next 10(ish) minutes, students turned their papers over to brainstorm a series of potential research questions that related to their initial brainstorm/mind map.  

Following this, I asked students to open their laptops, log into Copilot, input their questions and have a dialogue with the AI to further finesse and develop their potential research questions. Once they had a question, or set of questions they were happy with, students were instructed to access the Library Assistant tool and input these newer questions to generate answers to help them better understand their topic, as well as generate potential sources they could use in their essay.  

We also made students aware of the limitations of both tools as part of the scaffolding activity, particularly for the Research Assistant tool that only provides 5 initial sources and does not have access to all publications. To navigate this particular limitation, students were instructed to click the button that took them to the full library catalogue so they could explore more comprehensive resources. 

You can download the slides I created for this activity here.

Starting a conversation with GenAI

Overall, this activity was a successful exercise in encouraging and supporting original thinking and critical engagement with AI tools. Students were able to draw on their own interests and creativity to explore and develop their research questions, which they could then workshop with the help of AI and effectively find sources to inform their research through the library catalogue. 

This activity supported students to: 

• Gain awareness of the tools available to students within the evolving world of AI and learning. This also helps to navigate equity challenges in terms of uneven understanding or knowledge of AI tools and their capacity to support student learning outcomes.  
• Develop skills in effective prompt engineering by engaging in dialogue with AI and having the oversight of teaching staff to assist with the wording of questions and comprehension of different answers.
• Understand the limitations of AI tools and emphasise the important of independent, critical thinking and engagement with peer-reviewed sources to support claims.
• Engage with AI in creative and exploratory ways that increases transparency of AI use in teaching and learning contexts and to be forthcoming with their AI use. 

This activity emerged from my own experimentation with GenAI tools, alongside insights from current literature and conversations with colleagues and library staff about ethical and effective engagement. Student responses were varied with some embracing the opportunity to iterate on and combine questions creatively, while others chose not to use AI at all, reminding us that engagement is shaped by personal learning preferences. Importantly, using AI didn’t remove the inherent challenges of formulating good questions, which sparked rich discussions about learning as a social and iterative process. I’ve shared this approach with colleagues and am keen to hear how it works in other classrooms. More broadly, I believe educators must actively engage with GenAI to support equitable outcomes and create transparent, inclusive learning environments – something we’re continuously exploring in FASS (now New Faculty!) through our Faculty GenAI Community of Practice. 

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