My current course at Royal Roads – Inquiry into Contemporary Issues in Learning Technologies – is not my first introduction into inquiry in learning. My first deep dive into critical inquiry as a pedagogical strategy came in 2004/2005 as I was studying at Western for my Bachelor of Education degree, where my History teacher training included a great emphasis on the power of critical inquiry for students. In that context us eager student-teachers explored the power of using primary sources in History classes, allowing students to read news paper and diary accounts from individuals experiencing the events at the time, and – as teachers – guiding those students through their critical examination of past events. In that context, early in my teacher training, my role in the classroom was instrumental in guiding students through the inquiry process, presenting them with questions to investigate, and discussing findings as a class, what Pedaste et al. (2015) would refer to as Structured Inquiry. Now as a graduate student my experience is more similar to Open Inquiry where I am responsible for designing my own research questions and drawing conclusions (Pedaste et al., 2015, as cited in Spencer, 2017, 1:42 – 1:56). Now I empathize a bit more with my students as the realities of Open Inquiry are that they are messy, unpredictable, and a bit of a shocking reality check.
When I started on my critical inquiry journey for this class I expected to have some uncertainties on where I was going, some moments when I’d have to pull over and check Google Maps again, but eventually I would arrive at my destination. Essentially, I expected the my critical inquiry roadway would look something like this:
Image attributed to: Bruno Ticianelli
I had made the assumption that even thought it feels like AI Technologies are a new, emerging technolgy, in reality they have been around since at least the 1960s under the description of Intelligent Tutoring Systems Computer Assisted Instruction systems (Alkhatlan & Kalita 2018; Selwyn 2019, as cited in Williamson & Eynon, 2020, p. 224), so of course there would be an abundance of studies AI chatbots and their application to supporting or harming accessibility in eLearning. As an instructional designer who is interested in analyzing and developing digital learning accessibility standards for our current, modern learning environments (as well as a critical mindeset in order to evaluate the possible benefits, challenges, and threats of other emerging technologies) I had assumed this sort of research would be easy to come by. Boy, was I wrong.
Instead, this is what my journey in this critical inquiry project has felt like, with unexpected twists and turns, sometimes sending me off-kilter, and always making me wonder exactly where the road will lead me:
Image attributed to: Eberhard Grossgasteiger
Should I have known better than to assume that my research would validate the assumptions I already had? Of course I knew that already, but would it really be a graduate program if I didn’t have to keep learning my lessons the hard way, and being reminded when my wheels lift off the road as I take that one corner a bit too fast?
I think there is a lesson in all of this, and that’s to not assume where the road of crtical inquiry will take you, but rather examine the road ahead one turn at a time. I know that my final research paper will reflect heavily on the experiences and representations of people with invisible (intellectual, neurodiversity, and learning) disabilites in AI learning technologies, but I’m still thinking about what conclusions I will draw from that. As luck would have it I’m faced with some unexpected family challenges these past two weeks, so a lot of my thinking about this research paper is occuring behind the wheel of a car as I’m driving 68 kilometres one way, 68 kilometres back to a parent’s house to provide elder care, so I hope you’ll excuse me for the road analogy but I think it’s a fitting one. I think it’s also fitting that last weekend I read (or listened to on audiobook) Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book The Future is Disabled, which reminded me to not give up. In their book, Piepzna-Samarasinha (themselves a disabled and queer disability rights activist) described a world where they imagined a near-future where much greater proportion of the world identifying as being disabled, and that not being a negative. They describe a reality we are all familiar with where summer forest fires, pollution, and pandemics are making an increasing number of people disabled from illnesses (2022, p. 22), yet those same coping strategies which people with disabilities inevitably develop making them more resilient to the challenges of an unsatable world (p. 37). If the only constant going-forward will be change, perhaps I shouldn’t give up on my original topic, to examine AI learning technologies through the lens of people with disabilities, after all.
References
John Spencer. (2017, December 5). What is Inquiry-Based Learning? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlwkerwaV2E.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2022). The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Williamson, B., & Eynon, R. (2020). Historical threads, missing links, and future directions in AI in education. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(3), 223-235. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1798995