Generative AI through inquiry (Part 1)

Welcome to FOSIL Education and School Libraries, a conversation about liberal education, signature inquiry, and how generative AI fits, or doesn’t, into real classroom practice.

This episode follows on from last week’s podcast, Clarifying the purpose of education, explains the Year 9 Signature Work inquiry: an interdisciplinary, schoolwide project embedded in English that builds thoughtful reading, writing, and speaking skills and culminates in a spoken presentation and Q&A. It contrasts authentic human texts (like Laudato Si’) with AI-generated summaries, raising concerns about AI’s tendency to flatten voice and strip nuance.

We argue that tools must be judged against clear educational aims: supporting student attention, authentic authorship, and the dialogic process of learning.

* Eric O. Springsted -- discussing Simone Weil’s notion of attention in Attention, Availability, and the Reading of Books (2025).

* Janet Salmons and the flattening of language in Finding Your Voice in a Ventriloquist’s World – AI and Writing (2025).

* Claudio Nastruzzi and semantic ablation in Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation (2026).

* Jane Rosenzweig (2022) on why we are not doing the thinking if a machine is doing the writing in The Fight About AI (2025) by Christopher Newfield.

Please subscribe so you don’t miss our next episode, which explores practical ways (or limits) for using generative AI at each stage of inquiry.