Generative and non-generative AI have unsettled long-standing pedagogical habits and forced historians to articulate what, exactly, we value about the work we ask students to do. A recent debate on Activehistory.ca involving Edward Dunsworth, Mark Humphries, and Mack Penner sharpened concerns I was carrying into the classroom about what meaningful historical learning looks like and how course design might better reflect it. While planning and teaching Modern Canada, a third-year seminar, I found myself returning to lessons that had stayed with me from my years teaching at the high-school level and supervising Model United Nations. Staring at an old syllabus, I began with a question: what is the historian’s craft, and what learning might a shift away from exams and self-contained class assignments make possible?
I sought to cultivate a space of empathy and investment, meeting students where they are and structuring multiple points of entry into course material. I focused on differentiated assessment, integrating written, aural, and visual components. I expanded the course’s lens through comparative analysis to encourage critical reflection on long-held assumptions about Canada. Within and Without the Nation, edited by Dubinsky, Perry, and Yu, allowed us to debate Canada’s transnational and transcolonial entanglements. Leading the first few classes, I provided a model for student-led seminar days in the second half of the course, which brought open dialogue and collegial responsibility into the centre of the classroom. That training fed into a scaffolded independent research assignment aligned with student interests, culminating in a full-day undergraduate research conference to refine papers for a final class open-access e-book publication. I removed the final exam. From experience, testing had little effect on attendance or engagement, and as e-readers increasingly integrate AI assistants, students more easily drift toward outsourcing learning and short-term memorization rather than sustained understanding. I redirected that effort toward incremental professional development and deeper learning.
Throughout the term, students hunted for sources across digital repositories and local collections as they prepared a pitch presentation instead of a written proposal and had to ‘sell’ their research plan to the class as if requesting funding from a committee. They arranged to visit office hours regularly, testing claims about Canada as a refuge, revisiting assumptions about the soldier’s experience at war, and confronting silences around the legacy of slavery in the historical record. They emailed professors across campus and elsewhere whom I suggested, seeking their expertise. One student connected with archivists at the United Nations because the project involved their family history of postwar resettlement in Canada. Students grew into the work from different starting points while remaining accountable to a shared intellectual process. This was the clearest answer to AI I have seen: not a forced prohibition by the instructor or uncritical adoption by the student, but a learning environment in which the central intellectual labour is embodied and relational. Their arguments grew more precise and grounded as the conference approached.
Students were excited and became active participants in the discipline of history. Their research throughout the term was purposeful, oriented toward crafting a paper to be presented, questioned, defended, and refined for publication. Each brought a draft to a peer-editing session in class, where I distributed an editing checklist to guide their reading of work in progress. The structure itself changed the meaning of the labour. A student who writes alone on their laptop can easily miss the rewards, but in conversation, their ideas require active, critical work as they speak about their learning in real time. I was privileged to witness students responding to questions, clarifying evidence, and adjusting arguments they had become deeply invested in.
That carried forward on the day of the conference, where twelve students presented original research in thematic panels, fielded questions from faculty and peers, and participated in a shared scholarly conversation that lasted the entire day. The conference served as a showcase of their dedicated effort across the term. It mirrored our own scholarly practice of workshopping papers, often half-baked and quite ambitious, to test arguments and sharpen interpretation. In that process, the craft of historical thinking matters and cannot be outsourced. Writing is a mode of thinking, and, as Penner and Dunsworth remind us, the struggle through drafts, false starts, and revisions is the intellectual labour that defines our discipline.
As the students took turns presenting and responding to questions, I had a surreal experience watching colleagues press them on interpretation, chronology, or evidence. The level of engagement was comparable to early graduate seminars. Every student remained, listening across panels and reflecting on their own presentations. Nothing about this model resembled the “shortcut” logic that makes AI so appealing. There was no rush to flatten complexity, no deluge of information that resists nuance or questioning. The conversations challenged their framing and argumentation and pushed them to refine their drafts for the class publication.
I say we bring that doing of history into the course design. We often separate our research activities and personal passions from classroom teaching. Why not adopt a pedagogical framework that integrates learning about history and doing history? That question matters not only because of AI, but because good teaching has always required attention to how students enter a course, where they struggle, what excites them, and what allows them to grow. When students write and submit essays to a single reader, the research process occurs in relative isolation, making it far too easy to disengage and outsource. Rather than policing use with “AI-proof” tests and assignments, we can create an investment that guides work with purpose and sharpens critical thinking. AI does not disappear in these spaces, but its use is structurally disincentivized. Students also gain lines on their CVs to carry into a saturated job market where the tangible benefits of a history degree must be made evident to future employers.
I am grateful for AI and the debates it has inspired for clarifying the stakes of our teaching practice, but the pedagogical questions at issue are larger and longer-standing than the technology itself. A history education grounded in public-facing, experiential, collaborative scholarship brings the classroom to life through guided interpretation and in community. The undergraduate research conference is not the only model, and it is geared toward smaller upper-level seminars. Larger courses with TA support to manage the labour involved may be able to scale up the conference and remove the publication component. Lacking TA support, instructors can shift the final deliverable to a public history poster or podcast, as I have for several courses recently, while still maintaining the focus on incremental learning and sustained engagement to begin doing history with our students and ensure that the core intellectual labour of the historian occurs with the excitement of shared discovery.
History has been my passion since high school, and it is at its best when students experience what it means to distill meaning from evidence, engage with others, and contribute to an ongoing conversation among a scholarly community that cares about the past in order to better understand the present. That work remains profoundly human and worth protecting, not only through statements of principle but through the structures of our classrooms.
Dr. Michael Akladios
History, Mount Allison University