Teaching the Humanities with AI: Innovation, Creativity, and Critical Thinking

Description

In many classrooms today, students perceive the Humanities as something distant, boring, and overly theoretical.

As a consequence, teachers often struggle to make lessons in History, Geography, Philosophy, Literature, and Art History truly meaningful and memorable.

At the same time, students eagerly experiment with generative AI tools, but they tend to use them only to complete homework (“to get them done”), missing the creative and critical potential these tools can unlock.

This course is designed to offer practical and innovative strategies to bring Humanities subjects to life, thanks to responsible and creative uses of Artificial Intelligence.

What if, for instance, students could interview their favorite historical figure, a poet, or a Renaissance painter using AI — and then compare the answers with their textbooks, evaluating accuracy and bias?

Even simple (yet incredibly fun) activities like this could allow them to turn passive learning into inquiry, helping students develop both curiosity and critical thinking toward digital information.

During this course, teachers of Humanities will learn efficient prompting strategies to create and adapt material for their lessons and will explore and design engaging activities for their students.

Through hands-on workshops, they will explore creative classroom activities such as generating poems “in the style of” a given author, reimagining classical artworks, or creating digital dialogues between philosophers, artists, and writers.

Participants will also reflect on broader ethical and educational questions related to creativity, authorship, and copyright in the AI era.

They will become aware of the risks and challenges of the use of AI for children and teenagers and develop successful strategies to ensure a safe learning environment for everyone.

By the end of the course, participants will have built a ready-to-use AI Humanities Toolkit — a collection of classroom ideas, adaptable resources, and best practices — while gaining a clearer, more critical understanding of how AI can enhance engagement, creativity, and reflection in Humanities education.

Concept by Ada Rigacci

Learning outcomes

The course will help participants to:

• Apply efficient prompting strategies to create and adapt lesson material for History, Geography, Philosophy, Literature, and Art History;
• Integrate AI creatively into Humanities teaching through interactive and inquiry-based activities, making Humanities lessons more engaging and relevant to nowadays students;
• Experiment in hands-on workshops engaging activities for Geography, History, Literature, Philosophy, and Art;
• Reflect on the importance of reliable sources and teach students to critically evaluate AI-generated information;
• Recognize and address issues of bias, misinformation, and “hallucinations” in generative AI tools, and evaluate their impact on today’s society;
• Promote digital responsibility by developing classroom codes of conduct for safe and ethical AI use;
• Encourage students’ critical thinking and creativity through hands-on experimentation with AI-supported projects;
• Build a ready-to-use AI Humanities Toolkit with lesson ideas, classroom activities, and adaptable teaching materials.

Tentative schedule

Day 1 – Introduction to the course and AI in education

• Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
• Icebreaker activities;
• Presentations of the participants’ schools;
• AI in education: opportunities and challenges for Humanities teachers;
• Discussion activity: Think-Pair-Share on the role of AI in fostering engagement and creativity.

Day 2 – Creative prompting

• Prompting Strategies for Humanities Teachers: how to generate, refine, and adapt prompts;
• Designing classroom materials with AI: summaries, mind maps, timelines, and quizzes.

Engaging and creative activities in geography

• Workshop: “Interviewing locals with AI”: simulate intercultural dialogues and analyze stereotypes;
• Generate guides about your city or country and check out information.

Bias and hallucinations in AI-generated content

• Practical guidelines for students and teachers.

Day 3 – Engaging and creative activities in history

• Interactive Workshop: interviewing historical figures with AI, AI Time Travel Journals, and exploring “what if” scenarios with AI;
• Critical thinking in practice: comparing AI outputs with textbooks and reliable sources.

Literature

• Interactive Workshop: use AI to imitate the style of an author or specific literary movements and critically evaluate the results;
• Creative co-writing: modernize a classic text with AI. Which differences do you notice?

Art

• Generate artworks “in the style of”, check the results, and list the discoveries.

Day 4 – Self-directed learning with perplexity

• Exploring Perplexity for students to deepen their knowledge and understanding of school topics;
• The importance of sources and source checking;
• Group activity: checking for inaccuracies in AI outputs.

For an ethical use of AI in the humanities

• Identifying bias and misinformation in AI-generated outputs;
• Evaluating the impact of AI on culture, history, and society;
• Ethical issues: using AI responsibly with children and teenagers;
• Academic integrity: co-creating a classroom Code of Conduct for ethical AI use.

Day 5 – Creating your toolkit

• Group Workshop: designing lesson plans, classroom activities, and AI-based learning resources;
• Reflection and sharing: “What have we learned about AI, and how will I apply it in my own school?”;
• Collaborative exchange and networking for future Erasmus+ and school partnerships.

Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities

• Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion;
• Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance;
• Excursion and other external cultural activities.

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