Collaborative sensemaking with generative AI

Educators are wrestling with the changes wrought by generative AI (GenAI), particularly the widespread adoption of ChatGPT. This paper introduces creative and collaborative sensemaking with GenAI as an alternative form of academic and professional development to spark reflection on the implications of this technology for educators and to increase GenAI literacy. By combining human and AI-generated text in iterative loops, we created a text and a creative process to collectively investigate the use of GenAI in education. Collaborative poetic inquiry, an arts-based research method, was used in tandem with generative experiments using AI tools, culminating in an ode to collaborative sensemaking. Drawing on the authors’ collective experience as a group of educational professionals and academics, we then critically analysed how GenAI may impact educators and augment creative practices to generate new insights. Further implications for practice from this sensemaking with GenAI in education are discussed.