Abstract
Our paper illustrates how we used Artificial Intelligence to teach the tools of ethnohistory and highlight American Indian voices in our classrooms. It overviews our integration of ChatGPT in both survey and upper-level history courses at two different institutions: a small liberal arts college in the Midwest and a regional-comprehensive university in Texas. Though it acknowledges the benefits and pitfalls of using ChatGPT to teach Native American history, this article emphasizes the pedagogical value of large language models (LLMs) for student engagement and analytical thinking through a variety of critical review, peer review, and group annotation assessments; this included analyses of ChatGPT produced book reviews and textbook chapter summaries. Consequently, our findings illustrate that large language model-generated projects encourages students to think critically about the perpetuation of dominant, Eurocentric historical narratives and challenges students to identify and deconstruct the problematic ways that Native Americans and other minority groups in American history are approached in both academic and non-academic settings. Our paper provides a template that instructors can apply to motivate student inquiry in the history of marginalized groups. In so doing, our goal is to teach students and educators in the Humanities how to use this new technology to supplement rather than subvert the learning process.
Recommended Citation
Washburn, Jeffrey, and Jennifer M. McCutchen.
"AI Meets AI: ChatGPT as a Pedagogical Tool to Teach American Indian History."
Critical Humanities
2,
2
(2024).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33470/2836-3140.1037
Included in
Native American Studies Commons, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons, United States History Commons