With summer break around the corner, I’m eagerly beginning to plan what books I might read this summer (maybe this is the year I’ll finally crack open Emily Wilson’s Iliad . . .). I’m also reflecting on the books I read this year as I prepared to teach my own course, an AI literacy elective, for the first time. Today, as we ease ourselves into summer break, I want to share four quickfire reviews of books I’ve recently read about pedagogy and AI. If you’re looking for something to read this summer, I hope you find something intriguing in this list!
I won’t bury the lede: Pedagogy of Freedom by Paulo Freire is the most impactful book I read this academic year. This book is a necessary antidote to how higher education is currently (de)valued, understood, and discussed, and it helped me refocus my teaching philosophy. Many people argue that politics should be removed from the classroom, but as Freire reminds us, education is inherently political because there can be no democracy without an educated population. While I do think post-graduation outcomes like salary and job placement can be part of how we evaluate a university, particularly when students take on so much debt to acquire a degree, it should not be the end of the conversation. Exemplary institutions, programs, and teachers do as Freire says: foster lifelong learning, develop critical thinking skills, and graduate students who are locally engaged and, yes, tuned in to the injustice around them with the desire, skills, and knowledge to make change.
Next up: The Skillful Teacher by Stephen D. Brookfield (third edition), a recommendation from my wonderful colleague Angie. This is an engaging, down-to-earth guide to teaching, filled with practical tips and examples of assignments, instructor feedback, and rubrics. I found the chapters on critical thinking and classroom discussion particularly useful, and I plan to try several of the discussion activities in my course. I also appreciate how Brookfield grounds his philosophy about teaching college in the context of adult education studies, and I think he has a keen understanding of college students today. This edition was published in 2015, so some material about emerging technologies and teaching online may be outdated; however, it’s still a worthwhile read on the whole, particularly for those seeking concrete tips and examples.
Finally, I read two books about AI (both recommendations from my wonderful colleague Aj). Mastering AI by Jeremy Kahn is an accessible, engaging introduction to AI issues across society, including education, medicine, politics, business, and more. At times, Kahn is more bullish on AI than I would be, but in general, I think he fairly represents and evaluates both AI-critical and AI-optimist viewpoints. This is a book I would share with my mom or another layperson who wants to understand what’s going on with AI but feels overwhelmed trying to follow the news. If an unlimited ebook license were available to us, I would assign excerpts from this book as readings in my course.
Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford is more scholarly than Mastering AI, but for a scholarly text, it falls on the more digestible side. Crawford focuses on making visible the invisibilized human and environmental harms of AI, like the electricity costs of data centers, the brutality behind mining rare earth elements, and the psychological trauma endured by content moderators in the Global South. She effectively punctures the idea of AI as something abstract, far away, “in the cloud,” grounding these tools in human blood and sweat. This is essential reading for those concerned about the planetary and human costs of AI.
Finally, some non-work-related book recommendations to wrap up this post 🙂
- I Was the Jukebox by Sandra Beasley
- With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang
- Ararat by Louise Glück
- Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
- Ghosts by Edith Wharton
What have you been reading recently (library-related or not)? What do you plan to read this summer? Please share in the comments below!
Thanks for this, Eleanor! Brilliant, timely reading roundup. Pairing Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy with modern AI literacy is the exact intellectual grounding we need right now.