Abstract
Creative thinking and adaptability are key workplace assets, with employers seeking graduates able to exploit Generative AI’s (Gen AI) potential. University educators need to establish opportunities for students to explore GenAI whilst creatively adapting outside their disciplines. Yet, GenAI’s fast and fluent responses can undermine students’ thinking skills development, potentially subverting module assignment integrity also. I present a process-oriented pedagogy for interpreting short stories with GenAI, which is accessible to undergraduates university-wide. It is designed to cultivate creative thinking through slow, reflective engagement, whilst protecting academic integrity. Crucially, the approach facilitates generation of bottom-up problems: interpretive challenges in reading short stories that emerge unexpectedly from the zig-zagged interplay between human readers, qualitative GenAI output, quantitative text analysis software output, and psychological literature illuminating characters’ motivations. This iterative problem-addressing process fosters “slow creativity”—a capacity to dwell in the struggle to form coherent interpretation from multiple interpretive tangents and initial uncertainty—thereby evolving a non-predestined imaginative engagement that leads to satisfying solution. The elliptical nature of classic short stories renders them particularly amenable to this pedagogy, inviting a multiplicity of interpretive pathways. A case study using J.D. Salinger’s short story ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, interpreted by my module’s students in a formative assessment, demonstrates how the approach yields inventive readings. More broadly, I highlight that while GenAI offers attractive efficiencies—such as rapidly brainstorming psychological literature in this pedagogy—it can be harnessed to substantially enhance the slow and gradually deepening thinking that is necessary for fulfilling human creativity.
Presenters
Kieran O'halloranLecturer, School of Education, King's College London, Lambeth, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Generative AI, Slow Creativity, Short Story Interpretation, Process-Oriented Pedagogy
