Embrace AI through Ignatian pedagogy
By Michael Burns, Susan Haarman, and Joseph Vukov
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) — especially large language models (LLMs) including OpenAI’s ChatGPT — has sent shockwaves throughout the world of higher education.
New university task forces have been assembled, policies have been revised and syllabi have been overhauled. Student essays have been analyzed and fed into algorithms and sniffed at for any whiff of AI-generation. All in an effort to mitigate the infiltration of AI into the lives of our students, and into the educational ecosystem.
None of it will do any good and there are several reasons for that.
First, the dam has broken. Even as we collaborate on this essay in Google Docs, an integrated floating icon offering AI-generated autocompleted text is omni-present. Staying the flood of AI infiltration at this point is like keeping students off Google in the early 2000s, or like salvaging the card catalog in the early days of library databases.
Second, LLMs produce genuinely novel content, and keep getting better at it. This means catching an AI-user is less like catching a Wikipedia essay pilferer and more like catching a cheater who has hired an English MA grad to pen a standard essay. Sans a paper trail — and only by using more surveillance than any well-meaning educator should care to endorse — we won’t be consistently catching AI-plagiarizers any time soon.
Third, while models for detecting AI-generated content are available, they are falling behind. OpenAI just sunset its own tool for discriminating between human and AI-generated text due to its low accuracy. In AI-detection, there will always be false positives and negatives. The former comes with the threat of designating honest students cheaters. The latter lets the cheaters slide. Either dooms the enterprise.
Thankfully, those of us working in Jesuit higher education don’t need an ad hoc committee or new set of policies or revamped assignments to thwart the novel threats of AI. We already have strategies to deploy. Strategies that are rooted in Jesuit heritage. Our position: Ignatian pedagogy provides a way forward for addressing the new challenges of AI. Here are three ways to do it:
- Engaging the Imagination: in the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius introduces the idea of the “composition of place.” Those making their way through the exercises are encouraged to imagine the sights, smells, textures, and noises of the Gospel stories that occupy a privileged role in the exercises. Ignatian pedagogy riffs on this idea, encouraging teachers to engage our students’ imaginations and sensoria in education. And while this isn’t the place for a step-by-step argument, there are reasons to think that these LMMs cannot in principle replicate the human experience. The reason is that the imagination activates spiritual, emotional, and intuitive dimensions of the human person that are difficult for AI to mimic. An Ignatian understanding of imagination also begins in lived experience and engagement with the world. Former Superior General of the Jesuits Adolfo Nicholas said, “The Ignatian imagination is a creative process that goes to the depth of reality and begins recreating it.” Can an AI generate novel content? Absolutely. Can it do so in a way that is thoroughly imaginative? We think not. Work to engage your students’ imaginations and you will AI-proof your instruction.
- Making Reflection a Hallmark: Ignatian Pedagogy involves activity, yes. The Spiritual Exercises are active, and any pedagogy based on these exercises must be likewise active. Yet the Spiritual Exercises are also deeply reflective. And here’s the thing: Sincere personal reflection, like imagination, is AI-proof. The reasons go deeper than they do in the case of imagination. Reflection in an Ignatian context is deeply personal in a way that inevitably eludes the workings of LLMs. In the Ignatian context, reflection is characterized by an ongoing dialogue with the self, others, and with God (or deeply held values in the case of individuals who do not identify with a faith tradition). Students deepen their understanding of concepts in the classroom, but then they go a step further and interrogate what those concepts mean for themselves and the world. They do so on a deeply personal level, involving questions of their own vocation, responses, and values. AI cannot currently mimic a person’s interior life. Because Ignatian pedagogy sees reflection as integral to the learning process, not ancillary, reflective practice will always offer a substantive AI-independent aspect to the learning process.
- Trusting Our Students: At the heart of the Spiritual Exercises is the idea of flexibility founded on trust. Directors are not to guide their directees in a lockstep fashion through the exercises, but are rather to discern the spiritual movement of their directees, and let the exercises evolve from there. The Spiritual Exercises, in short, are constructed on a basis of radical trust. Trust in the workings of the Holy Spirit, yes, but also trust in those making their way through the exercises. We educators could learn from this. Will students be tempted to use AI to polish assignments, craft emails, and knock out essays? Of course. But are educators really much different? We, too, use technology to increase our efficiency, and most of us will likely adopt AI in some fashion in our own workflows. We should recognize this, and in recognizing this, trust that our students will engage in good faith with their educational lives within this new technological paradigm. Is this approach naive? Maybe. But it is also necessary. Without building our educational practices on a foundation of trust, the kind of good faith engagement is one we’ll never see. We have always needed to trust our students. AI is simply giving us a nudge in the right direction.
These are not the only lessons educators faced with AI can learn from St. Ignatius, or from the principles of Ignatian Pedagogy. The Ignatian pedagogical tradition runs deep, and has much to offer. For now, here’s what we hope to have convinced you of: Our Jesuit heritage has gifted us not only a rich history, but also a sure-footed strategy for the future. Yes, even a future that includes AI.
Michael Burns is an associate professor in the Biology Department at Loyola University Chicago and an Innovative Experiential Pedagogy Fellow within Loyola’s Center for Experiential Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship (CELTS). Susan Haarman is the associate director at Loyola University Chicago’s CELTS where she facilitates faculty development and the University’s service-learning program. Joe Vukov is an associate professor of philosophy and the associate director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago.
