Promoting a technoskeptical position towards generative AI in teacher education

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are being increasingly adopted by pre-college teachers to plan lessons, generate assessments, and complete other instructional tasks. Teacher educators have thus been called upon to enhance teachers’ ‘AI Literacy,’ typically defined as a set of competencies related to AI technologies and their use in education. While such competencies are important, we argue that teacher educators need to also attend to teachers’ positions towards AI technologies. Especially valuable is developing a critical orientation that supports thoughtful, reflective, and purposeful use of AI. In this conceptual paper, we propose ‘technoskepticism’ as such a position. We describe what a technoskeptical position entails and discuss how it offers insights that notions of AI literacy or competencies do not. To elaborate upon and illustrate those conceptual foundations and discuss how teacher educators might promote technoskepticism, we present several vignettes from our ongoing work with current and future teachers. We use those vignettes to clarify our theoretical propositions and provide suggestions for teacher education practice and research.