Commercial generative AI operates as an opaque technology; it is often deployed by for-profit corporations in a top-down approach. Without proper guidance and framing, students input prompts and receive outputs without understanding the underlying processes. This opacity limits students’ ability to think critically about AI’s social roles. Promoting a culture of openness and embracing open pedagogy—collaborative, transparent, and student-centered approaches—counters this unhealthy trend by fostering active inquiry and emphasizing learning processes over deliverables.

This hands-on workshop demonstrates in-class activities that teach meta-cognition and enhance participatory justice. AI’s interfaces are modelled on a chat experience. In drama, characters—prompted by situational inputs—often impart expository information that may be biased or incomplete. Theatre audiences are compelled to question that information and to work through dramatic ambiguity. In the process, they practice meta-cognition, becoming aware of their own thought processes. Instead of viewing AI’s outputs as a singular source of truth, students can take on the role of a theatre audience to engage thoughtfully with the flawed information.

AI makes us strangers to ourselves in a productive manner. AI can produce a lot of uncertainties, but AI also compels us to think deeper about our assumptions and actions. Informed by an ethics of care, open culture supports the development of critical thinking skills. Open pedagogy has the potential to transform students from consumers of AI to informed participants in the digital world.

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About the speaker:

Alexa Alice Joubin is a leading voice on AI, social justice, and higher education. She is Professor of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she directs the Digital Humanities Institute. She is a faculty of the Trustworthy AI Initiative and an affiliate at the NSF's Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society. In 2024, she was named the inaugural Public Interest Technology Scholar. She held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Warwick in the UK. The inaugural recipient of the bell hooks Legacy Award, she has received the Modern Language Association's Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies.