Edward Dunsworth
While a small but vocal minority of historians have embraced the use of generative artificial intelligence in their research and teaching,[1] many of us find ourselves trying to hold the pedagogical line against what we perceive as serious threats to students’ ability to learn, reason, and express themselves intelligently.[2]
In this post, I share my attempts to “teach against AI” in an undergraduate course taught at McGill University in fall 2025. HIST 299, The Historian’s Craft, is an introductory theory-and-method class recently made a requirement for history majors. My objectives were for students to consider some of the major questions in the philosophy of history, learn about important changes over time in historiography, learn about some of the main ways that people “do” history, and then to try their hand at doing it themselves, via research and writing.
As I’ve made clear in past pieces, I don’t believe that generative AI has anything useful to offer students towards the attainment of any of these goals. To the contrary, I think it poses a significant danger to students’ ability to think independently and develop as thinkers, writers, and human beings. Emerging research supports my concerns.
I thus adopted a number of strategies in this course to encourage students to do things the “old school” way, with the aim of fostering the learning and skill development at the core of our mission as educators in humanities and social sciences. In what follows I outline what I did, what I didn’t do, and what students thought about it all.
Continue reading
