By Laura Meagher
‘Towards embedding responsible AI in the school system: co-creation with young people’ is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary project focused on the challenges posed by Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to education. While the principal thrust of the overall project is to bring young people’s voices into deliberations on meeting those challenges, an early work package was conducted to scan and ‘map’ the policy landscape regarding GenAI in schools in Scotland. This included gathering and analysing input from a range of relevant policymakers in multiple organisations offering diverse perspectives on the likely impact of GenAI on schools education in Scotland. Twenty-four interviews later, several key points became clear.
First of all, at this time there is no clear ‘landscape’ in which overarching policies have been developed or implemented regarding use of GenAI in Scottish schools, nor is there any neat interdigitation of local or organisational level preliminary policies. When asked for metaphors to help envision the landscape, interviewees often offered various forms of active exploration through messy, complex contexts. Inspired by this, another member of the work package (graphic designer Elspeth Maxwell) is developing a set of materials based on finding paths through a lush jungle. The absence of an easily described, static policy landscape is probably not surprising given the famously rapid pace of GenAI technology development, in contrast with the more deliberate pace of typical policymaking – and perhaps the even slower pace of change in the educational sector.
Importantly, however, in the face of this mis-match, Scotland possesses a vital resource in the number of thoughtful, informed individuals who are keenly aware of opportunities and challenges posed for Scottish education by GenAI/AI more generally – and who want to progress development of appropriate policies that will help young people as they are go through school and prepare for life and work beyond, in a world inevitably influenced by AI.
Furthermore, despite the currently fragmented landscape, interviews with these individuals uncovered in many of them a strong desire for greater connectivity and a willingness to be convened in order to talk, share insights and even work together across organisations. Early participation in a workshop and several dialogues convened by Professor Judy Robertson has demonstrated this willingness. The role of the university as a trusted convenor is timely, as bringing together key individuals from across organisations can help to identify practical steps, that can be taken soon, even before the emergence of any central policy. Examples of such steps could include the development of a common framework of understanding about GenAI for educators or the enhancement of ways to share results of experiments with use of GenAI in schools.
Communication and collaboration across governmental bodies, local authorities, teachers and school leaders – along with inclusion of young people’s voices and findings of research – will be necessary to create a functional and coherent, if ‘richly complex’, future landscape for GenAI in schools.
You can find a copy of the report on the interview findings here.
