On Texts & Tech: Unit Planning in the Age of AI

Untitled by Michelle Han, 2017, via ArtStation, with Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1817, via Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg

I ended my last post with a pedagogical call-to-arms about how we build courses, curriculum, and instruction in the age of AI. It’s rhetoric that most of us are familiar with, though I think my framing was fairly unique. However, it’s fair to say that what I’m advocating for sounds great in theory, but isn’t possible or practical in any real sense. This post is meant to detail how I approached planning my first unit in a course I’m developing with a colleague called Text & Technology. I hope that it will make concrete the poetic, abstract ideas about how we design flourishing ecologies of learning in the age of AI.

---

I’ve always been fascinated by the different approaches people take when building out new courses and units. Though there are affordances to curricular documents, I’ve found them to be an inert and rather lifeless form. Aesthetically, they are often filled with cumbersome tables, huge text walls, and generally little if any consideration of user experience. Functionally, they often come in the form of uneditable PDFs, locked Word documents, or in weighty binders filled with laminated pages. All too often, they are—in both form and function—resistant to iteration, customization, and play.

It’s not that I’m against the recording and documenting of curriculum; in fact, I think it’s an important part of building and retaining institutional knowledge. What I’m against is conflating the document with the lived practice of designing curriculum and instruction. I use the word design really intentionally, too. As Lim and Tan-Chia put it:

The role of the teacher is best expressed through the word design… Designing for learning is an expression of the teacher’s artful orchestration of embodied resources and semiotic technologies to effect student learning (Lim, 2021).

The goal of this article is to share how I designed the first unit in my school’s newly launched “Texts and Technology” course. Though there are various entry points one might take when creating curricula/courses/units, it made sense for a Tech and Technology to start with things happening in the world right now—because obviously.

As someone who is enmeshed in many conversations about the relationship between texts, technology, and humanity, I had a lot of ideas going into the summer. Considering I’m a nerd, this is often the case. To prevent my course content from spiraling off in a million directions, I try to build them around one (or maybe a few) overarching questions and/or tensions. These questions or points of tension provide a structure to our shared inquiry, but are always up for interpretation and negotiation if students are passionate about other ideas.

My process for developing these essential questions and tensions requires me to disentangle my swirling thoughts into a series of more concrete topics or issues, and/or familiarize myself with authors, scholars, creators, and researchers exploring similar terrain. Only then do I feel comfortable selecting the threshold concepts that will structure my essential questions/tensions, inform my text selection, and guide our inquiry for the year. Bring on the books!

Before you’re too impressed, I definitely didn’t read all of these cover to cover this summer. Some I’d read previously, but the majority I skimmed and excerpted.

As I read, annotated, discussed, mused, shared, skimmed (lots of skimming), riffed, and rutted through my mountain of texts, I kept coming back to two foundational points of tension and contradiction:

1. We fear that technology might fundamentally alter what it means to “be human,” BUT how we define “the human” is itself a social and historical construction that has shaped and is shaped by technology.

2. Technology offers the potential for utopian possibilities, BUT under our current system, it undermines actual autonomy, encourages self-exploitation, and enables endless extraction

Even though these are separate questions, I see them as exploring similar terrain. Exploring tension #1 will help students understand and historically situate their evaluation of humanity’s relationship with technology. Exploring tension #2 will allow us to more closely examine where we’re at today in that longer history. Now that I’d started to define the problem space we’d be exploring, I needed to determine the threshold concepts that would help my students navigate it.

Threshold & Anchoring Concepts in Text & Tech

I’ve written about them elsewhere on my Substack, but as a quick primer: think of threshold concepts as intellectual fault lines. Once students cross them, their cognitive landscape permanently restructures itself. Unlike the decontextualized knowledge-out-of-context that characterizes so much traditional schooling, these concepts represent genuine knowledge-in-action. They're not just ideas students memorize for tests and promptly forget; they become integral to how learners navigate complex phenomena in a given domain moving forward. They are understandings that students return to iteratively when engaging with complex phenomena in a particular domain. For secondary English students, I quite like this list of concepts from Zoe Helman and Sam Gibbs, The Trouble with English & How to Address It. Consider how often we take these principles for granted despite the fact that they underpin just about everything we teach!

Personally, I’d change number two to say “Texts make use of patterns, all of which are conveyed through signs” instead of merely “language” to account for a more expansive view of the discipline.

I share all this to note that these threshold concepts are always (re)introduced in my mini-introductory unit on “Doing English” and are humming in the background all year. At the risk of overcomplicating things, I believe there are concepts, principles, and generalizations that exist on top of this baseline layer of threshold concepts. I’ve co-created a conceptual taxonomy of sorts in my previous book Learning that Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World, but it’s important not to get hung up on fine-grained distinctions, as how these are defined can shift based on age, content, curriculum, etc. I share the taxonomy only to illustrate the fact that threshold concepts might open the door for new forms of understanding, but they must be supplemented by additional terms, tools, and theories for students to deepen their disciplinary expertise.

Returning to my course, I wanted to search for some concepts that would anchor students’ exploration of the aforementioned tensions. I kept coming back to the fact that, depending on your philosophical orientation, our “human-ness” could either be seen as intimately entangled with or in direct opposition to technology. That means that, for my students to explain how technology impacts our humanity, they first needed to understand the tacit assumptions they have about what it means to be human. Luckily, I was able to draw on previous units I’d taught and research I’d done on the Enlightenment, British Romanticism, and educational psychology when fishing for some preliminary ideas. After some brainstorming and discussion, I was able to use those three different theorizations of “the human” and boil them down into what I felt were the foundational concepts that shape how we define “the human” today. These would then anchor my course and serve as the raw materials for constructing my overarching question.

1. Reason: To be human is to have the capacity to think and act autonomously

2. Experience: To be human is to feel, create, and possess interiority

3. Relate: To be human is to relate to others through interaction and language

With those established, it was time to place them in dialogue with each other and tie in the role of technology. Then voila! An overarching course question is born.

From there, I leaned on my colleague, who had taught the course previously, and we selected a group of texts that we felt would allow us to explore this question from a variety of perspectives and vantage points. We only have one semester, so we had to really squeeze! Here’s a non-exhaustive list:

• Novels: Eggers’ The Circle & Ishiguro’s Clara and the Sun

• Films/Shows: Jonze’s Her & Black Mirror’s Nosedive episode

• Short stories: Bradybury’s The Veldt, Smith’s The Lazy River, HG Wells’ The Machine

• Theory/Non-fiction (excerpted): Han’s Psychopolitics, Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman.

Planning The First Unit

After I complete the broad outline of the course, I dive into planning my first unit in depth. I like to begin by inviting students to develop their understanding of the concepts that will anchor the course. Instead of assuming I can perfectly transmit these concepts into my students’ brains through a week of lecturing (too didactic) or assuming they can just discover these complex philosophical concepts through their own inquiry (too unstructured), I often lean on an adapted version of Dr. Hilda Taba’s concept development model—which has also been called concept attainment, concept, formation, etc.

I say adapted because I sometimes eschew some of the typical steps of this method (like example/non-examples) and mostly focus on inviting students to leverage their inductive reasoning to generalize across a curated list of poetry, art, non-fiction excerpts, images, etc., of a particular concept to ensure they’re constructing their own understanding of that concept. That meant I needed to curate the following:

1. Art, fiction, essay excerpts, poetry, etc., that function as examples of how Enlightenment thinkers emphasized reason as the core of humanity.

2. Art, fiction, essay excerpts, poetry, etc., that function as examples of how Romantic era thinkers emphasized experience as the core of humanity.

3. Art, fiction, essay excerpts, poetry, etc., that function as examples of how modern cognitive, social, and cultural scholars emphasize relating as the core of humanity.

4. Art, fiction, essay excerpts, poetry, etc., that function as examples of ways people have attempted to transcend humanism via philosophy and/or technology.

Now, dear reader, I have a confession to make. Up till this point, using a large language model would have done little to help my process. I had my own unique ideas, framing, and presentation of this unit, and it was imperative for me to develop those mental models through my own reading, questioning, interpreting, and brainstorming. However, curation is one of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of planning concept formation lessons, so I turned to Claude. I share this in the spirit of transparency and to demonstrate (what I see) as a useful application of LLMs that I don’t see many people discussing. Here are some examples:

I know efficiency isn't everything, but this saved me an insane amount of time and was really intellectually stimulating. Also, ignore the typos and lazy prompting.

It goes without saying, none of this would’ve been remotely possible without my disciplinary knowledge and training, which is why I’m way more skeptical about student use. I have an incredible amount of anxiety about how this technology is being rolled out in a lot of districts and universities, but I have to admit I’ve found personal use cases like this beneficial on multiple occasions.

Moving on and saving the best for last, I want to share how I used the Canva whiteboard to curate, revise, remix, change, and evolve my planning over this whole curation process. Tools like Miro, Mural, and Figma all accomplish similar things, but Canva was the easiest for me to share with colleagues who were less inclined to go app hunting. One of these days I’ll write a whole post on the power and potential of taking a Gamestorming approach to curricular design, but for now, consider how much more interactive, dynamic, and aesthetically empowering this mapping process is during the R&D phase of curriculum planning.

For a closer look, click here to access the full whiteboard

This is probably the 20th permutation of this whiteboard, but it was really satisfying to see it fill up and fill out over the course of my experimentation process. It served as a space for me to externalize and manipulate my thoughts, make connections, and visualize my first unit all in one place. Returning to the point I opened this article with, both its form and function invite the forms of collaborative iteration and play that most curricula planning models really lack. That said, it’s certainly not an ideal model to formally record and share curricula across an institution.

My final step was designing the slides I’d use to move through the unit. These were more for scaffolding and support than anything else, but I like to have a structure I can lean on for timing and sequencing purposes. I also curated videos for each anchoring concept—and that’s where I have my second confession. Considering I was really struggling to find a video that framed the “To be human is to relate to others through interaction and language” concept in an accessible manner, I turned to NotebookLM to generate a quick video overview based on excerpts I’ve curated. The same goes for my slides exploring how philosophy and technology have been used to attempt to transcend humanism. Again, I don’t share these as ringing endorsements of the magical power of AI and LLMs, but I did find it a useful way to create a short, accessible video about a topic that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Take that for what it’s worth.

Click here to view the presentation. You’ll find my slides and the NotebookLM-generated videos within.

As you can see, the slides introduce students to the key concepts in the course and then prompt students for their concept formation activity. It really is an ideal strategy for getting students off their devices and engaging in active forms of knowledge construction in ways that are fully AI-proof and typically well-liked by students. I’ll share how I actually implemented the lesson on my post next week(ish).

Wrap Up

With the start of school and my adjunct work picking up, I have been super delayed with this post, but it felt great to reflect on my practice and get some of these ideas out there. Ideally, my discussion of enacting a living practice of curriculum design would be a bit more dialogic and collaborative, but considering it largely happened over the summer, my process was a bit more individualized than normal. I’d love to hear thoughts and feedback. In my follow-up post, I’ll be doing a deeper dive into how I actually ran the concept formation routine with the students, sharing work samples, and reflecting on the visual notes students took to consolidate and share their understanding. Until next time!