AI is everywhere. Many teachers these days are understandably afraid of how AI may undermine teaching and learning. Some have developed an “us” against “AI” posture. Culturally, we are still in the early days of this technology, which also means we are in a place of adaptation, learning, and evolution. Poised at this inflection point, let’s open our hearts and minds and look closely at how AI can be wildly helpful for our classrooms and our imaginations and how it can also erode the learning process and move us away from the hard work of learning. Against the backdrop of a fractured, shallow, mass-produced media landscape, how as teachers can we encourage reflection, deep creativity, and localized attention and care from our students?

AI requires us to be even clearer about our pedagogy and to understand the boundaries of how a technology can be a means but not an ends. How can we use the differences between human creativity and AI generation to understand our selves and our communities?

With that in mind our Essential Question for this institute is:

What makes us human?

This year’s Habla Teacher Institute will demonstrate how we can create spaces that amplify our students’ stories, lived worlds, languages, and their creative and intellectual capacities. Teachers will receive a set of concrete, interdisciplinary tools that can be applied to different age groups and settings.  Experience what project-based, student-centered, hands-on learning can be.