What kinds of expertise do educators need in relation to a context of widely-available GenAI?

In thinking about this, I returned to some pre-ChatGPT work that I was involved in with Edinburgh colleagues (Gill Aitken, Derek Jones and Katy Warran). It was focused on clinical education but I think it applies more widely.

In our paper, we argued that developing educational expertise is underpinned by “repertoire building” – the building-up of a bank of skills, methods, experiences, and theories, along with a growing confidence with the language of education. This was helped by exposure to different methods of teaching, readings, discussions with peers and modelling. A key element is thinking about and trying new approaches, and engaging in a wide range of experiences.

Educational expertise also involves “perspective shifting” or developing new and more complex understandings of teaching, learning and educational practices more broadly. Examples include understanding learning as non-linear, ongoing, collective as well as individual, embodied as well as cognitive, distributed across materials and technologies as well as independent, etc. The building up of experiences and a repertoire of theories of learning and education is an important part of this.

Another important element of expertise is “embodied practice” – going beyond thinking and talking about things that would be good to do and starting to develop attuned practices that do not always require careful planning because they are becoming second nature. We described it as “a holistic sensibility, where different elements of a teaching repertoire are integrated”. This one is particularly challenging, and unlikely to be accomplished without a lot of more intentional engagement in practice, dialogue, practice sharing and reflection.

Finally, we talked of “appreciation of context” – an “expanding appreciation of the wider contextual influences on teaching practice.” This includes a “reflexive awareness of the teacher’s situation within institutions and cultures”. Here, educators develop their understanding of situational, institutional and cultural obstacles, barriers, and enablers. It helps them attune what they are doing in line with the complexity of educational situations and the external factors that complicate them (e.g. policy, infrastructure, staffing, buildings and room booking, available technologies, etc.).

From this, I would argue that

1. Expertise is not static.

2. The challenges of our current context will not be solved for educators through scalable solutions or template approaches.

Therefore, educators need to navigate challenging contexts through developing new expertise through practising, exploring, experimenting, thinking and talking.

I believe that the more difficult the situation, the more these aspects of expertise are important. There is probably no way around having to spend a lot of time and energy intentionally working on developing new educational practices in this dynamic context, preferably collectively, building up a repertoire of possible approaches, broadening perspectives, embodying attuned practices and enriching their understanding of the complex contexts of higher education.

Open access paper here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10459-022-10144-4

I would be interested in your thoughts!