For La Salle’s religion department, questions of humanity, integrity, and love lie at the intersection of AI and the school’s core values.
And while La Salle introduced a new policy last year in every syllabus officially addressing AI, the role it actually takes in the community is still developing in every classroom, especially in those where teaching Lasallian values is fundamental.
“What we’re trying to do here is we offer students a human and Christian education,” religion teacher Mr. Noah Banks said. “When AI interfaces with education, we run the risk of not actually educating the students.”
Many teachers in the Religion Department agree that the core benefits AI seeks to add to any environment are more efficiency, more possibilities, and less roadblocks, whether that be for relationships or from an academic standpoint. But what that actually looks like, and what that actually means, manifests in each classroom and each educator’s mind differently.
“I just want to make sure we’re always focused on actually giving [students] a human education that will help them be well rounded to people beyond just being … able to get points,” Mr. Banks said.
This is at the core of La Salle’s relationship with AI — drawing the identifying line on where and how it interferes, rather than furthers, the human relationships and compassion that are the foundation of Lasallian education, according to Director of Campus Ministry Mr. Carter Powers.
“From a Lasallian perspective, we truly believe that if we love you, that’s the best way for you to develop a human education,” Mr. Powers said.
“If ChatGPT makes your life easier and being able to focus on your relationships, then I think you should use it, because relationships are what really give us life,” Mr. Powers said. “It’s not necessarily knowledge, it’s not the grade you get. It’s relationships.”
AI can cut out many different, and often tedious, aspects of both instructors’ lesson planning and students’ learning, according to Mr. Banks and Mr. Dan Marcantuono, also known as Mr. Marc. But whether that fosters relationships and promotes learning (or does the opposite) is not as certain.
From Mr. Marc’s perspective, the second possibility is more prevalent.
“It reinforces grading based teaching, which obviously most teaching results in a grade, but it prioritizes the grade,” Mr. Marc said. “[It says] that we care about the product more than the learning or the growth of the experience.”
On an institutional level, policies and thoughts are also developing beyond the scope of the individual classroom.
In January, the Vatican released a document focusing on the relationship between “artificial and human intelligence,” which grappled at the highest level with the topic of AI. However, religion teachers expressed that the roughly 13,000 word document can feel daunting and that most of them have lacked the time to explore it. Yet, they feel the values that it and shorter messages have sought to empower people with in relation to AI are still crucial to La Salle.
Religion Department Chair Mr. Edward Kendrick did however read the introduction of the document and some other smaller statements. And he believes that if La Salle and its educators continue to follow the core principles of Lasallian teaching, their unifying set of values will align them with the Church’s teachings.
Overall, for Mr. Kendrick, a few things are crucial to following those underlying principles.
“Systems should serve real people,” Mr Kendrick said. “[They] should all be to the service of students, and I think [the] concern with using AI is sort of, is it going to help us be people, versus us trying to [give] it our human roles, and us becoming more like machines.”
Besides this broader concern, in the classroom, integrity and plagiarism is a constant consideration with AI and a theme in the Vatican’s writings.
Integrity has already played probably the most crucial role out of everything, according to Mr. Kendrick, in building the existing AI policy at La Salle included in every syllabus.
But to most of La Salle’s religion teachers, every opinion, from that at the highest level to that of educators on the ground and their students, should be considered in forging a healthy culture and policy around AI in the community at La Salle.
How La Salle can build that policy comes back to the question of where to draw the line between increasing efficiency and losing educational and emotional value, according to Mr. Powers.
Mr. Powers, while expressing that La Salle’s policies are good at encouraging integrity around AI, posed another question.
“How can we use this … so that teachers can have a better work life balance and spend more time building relationships with students?” he said. “It would be interesting if the school kind of started speaking more in that language and was more encouraging with that approach and [for AI’s use in] teachers’ planning and preparation.”
For all Lasallians’ approach to AI, both to teachers and students, Mr. Banks offered a final consideration.
“AI is … the hot technology topic that we’re talking about right now, and I think that we as educators, especially at a Catholic institution, can lose our focus with whatever happens to be relevant,” he said. “I’m trying to get students in touch with concepts, stories, ideas, the eternal God, things that are important and bigger than our present moment.”
