It is impossible today to reject artificial intelligence (AI), whether at school, CEGEP, university, at work or in everyday life. It has already established itself, and software is multiplying and evolving at an astonishing speed. Will AI end up killing the preparation and creation of educational documents for teachers? Will it replace his personal reflections on the works he wishes to transmit and teach? Will it become the crutch for all questioning?
In September, many teachers turned to ChatGPT to produce teaching materials in lightning speed. But beyond the creation of tasks, AI “should fuel thinking and not replace intellectual effort”. AI proves to be an effective and formidable companion, both for the teaching staff and for the pupils (in secondary schools) and students. However, as Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, points out, “the question is not whether AI will transform education, but how we will shape that transformation.”
According to a study by the Wharton School carried out in 2024, “without supervision, AI can slow down learning, but well supervised, it can also strengthen it”. Either. It will then be necessary to review teaching and learning reading and assessment practices.
However, AI will never be able to read for the teacher and student. It will never be capable, like reading, of transforming them, of touching them, of moving them and of enriching their baggage. So, this reflection takes us elsewhere. How, with or without ChatGPT, to teach deep reading? What if reading became an experience, an adventure that connects us to the world, a sometimes unexpected way of diving into ourselves to better reach out to the Other.
The challenge is to change students’ perceptions of reading, especially since the advent of AI. The authors agree that if literature does not change the world, it sometimes changes individuals, one at a time. We must find the tools to motivate them and bring them, with us, into these multiple possible universals.
Can we swim against the tide in this dizzying age of quick clips, an overabundance of information and videos and AI? How, in “this fragmented world” – as Nicholas G. Carr already said in 2011, in Does the Internet make you stupid? — where “we become ever more reluctant to read long texts”, can we develop deep reading? So many questions we need to answer.
However, in 2024, numerous publications support this questioning and prove how screens and social networks weaken adolescents and reduce, among other things, their capacity for attention and concentration. What then can we say about their desire and their appetite to read long texts or major works?
What can we say about the reading skills of Quebec society in general?
The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies published, in 2013, a survey showing that of the six levels of literacy, 34.3% of Quebecers placed themselves at level 2, while 46.7% placed themselves at level 3 , 4 or 5. This demonstrates that the development of reading skills constitutes an immense challenge for teachers in Quebec. Young people today who have become readers of fragmented speeches, looking for information sheets and summaries of works, we need to better support them and continue the task tirelessly.
We must make young Quebecers strategic readers, curious and autonomous, happy to read, capable of tackling complex but accessible texts on their own, and allow them to rediscover the pleasure, and above all the power, that school reading gives them and leisure.
Language, reading and culture
I am deeply convinced of the power of culture as a vector of self-realization and identity construction. Let’s offer Quebec students the opportunity to discover and know (themselves) more and better. Let us be demanding in the creation of our educational paths, while respecting the abilities of the students, without fear of offering them individual and collaborative challenges. In this respect, it is imperative to offer them, through reading, a space of culture and freedom that they do not suspect, to open them to other universes so that they can then better return to themselves and become not only educated and cultured citizens, but also empathetic and critical thinkers.
Let us not hesitate, as teachers, to hope and expect more from the programs. Let us offer students the opportunity to interpret the works beyond their own limits and knowledge. Let us proudly transmit a national culture marked by openness to others.
Language teaching, to be rich, must necessarily involve literature and culture from here and elsewhere so that they become sources of inspiration for all to rise, speak better and take care of themselves. our language.
I hope that all schools in Quebec will give themselves the means to get ahead of the Ministry of Education in enriching the Quebec school reading training program. I hope that the students’ journey through the living museum of reading is not done alone, but with the help of a guide of flesh and blood, enlightened and cultivated, the teacher.
I hope that literary reading is not the prerogative of elites and intellectuals. Confining the teaching of reading to a restricted or complacent space is a collective defeat. Speaking and writing our language well has always been a struggle; let us also know how to make her dream.
Literary reading is in this sense an extraordinary and essential tool. Truly appropriating a work is above all an individual experience which consists of making it meaningful and making it your own. Books take us on a journey that is both intimate and outside of ourselves, to go elsewhere, towards the Other, and give us the power to define ourselves differently.
I believe that every teacher must first make this journey alone to appropriate the works, then offer them and make them vibrate so that they can live again in the students and transform them. Fortunately, artificial intelligence will never be able to realize the true experience of reading for us. Only human beings can, through reading, identify themselves, be moved, internalize knowledge, loved words, values…
I’ll let Gilles Vigneault finish this text for me. “The best way to defend a language is to speak it well, write it as best as possible and read it a lot. »