How is AI changing university teaching? The answer is: a lot! So why are we not talking about it more? This workshop is targeted at everyone involved in education and interact with students, as teachers or as administrators or coordinators. Darcy Thompson will introduce a co-written article (with Anders Ackfeldt) – The Elephant in the Classroom: Educators, AI, and the Changing Shape of Teaching – followed by a discussion around a set of questions about our experiences as educators and of student interaction, focusing on challenges but also opportunities. The article is available for pre-reading on request.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a transformative force in higher education, with the potential to reshape how institutions design, deliver, and support teaching. Universities have faced technological disruptions before, but generative AI stands apart in both scope and depth. Yet despite this rapid uptake, open discussion of AI in higher education often remains muted. It is, in short, the proverbial elephant in the classroom: even though AI is already widely used by educators in practice, universities and even colleagues often avoid openly discussing it. This contradiction frames the central question: how is AI reshaping teaching in higher education, and what does the prevailing quiet around its adoption reveal about the challenges and opportunities facing educators?

For people in the humanities and social sciences, the impact of AI in teaching is likely to be strong – in both a positive and negative sense. Critical reading, interpretation, exploratory discussions and even debate are, at their core, human skills and harder to automate. As AI continues to advance and encroach on these defining practices, disruption appears not only inevitable but already underway. Despite this, discussions in faculty meetings, curriculum planning, and strategic documents often mention AI only in passing, usually reduced to issues of academic integrity or framed as a challenge too unsettled to address directly.

The result is that AI remains both hidden and unspoken, even as its influence grows powerful enough to unsettle established practices and in some cases, reinvent them, leaving teachers in the uncomfortable position of having to respond and adapt, rather than set the terms of change themselves. 

After an introduction by Darcy Thompson, this workshop will be devoted to discussing questions about our experiences with teaching or student interaction generally, focusing on challenges but also opportunities.