Humans First: Adolescent Education in the Age of AI Conference

Marist Podcasting
  • 4.7 (3)
  • Education
  • Updated Weekly

As artificial intelligence reshapes classrooms, social relationships, and daily life, what can educators do to guide students through their mental and emotional development by putting humans first? Using audio recorded from the panels, speakers, and participants, this podcast uses audio collected at the Humans First: Adolescent Education in the Age of AI Conference held at Marist School in Atlanta. Drawing on conversations with leading voices in education, ethics, and technology (including scholars like Audrey Watters, Marc Watkins, and John Slattery, alongside veteran classroom teachers and

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    Critical AI Literacy: What Teachers and Students Deserve to Know

    Katie Conrad and Sean Kamperman, professors at the University of Kansas and co-directors of the AI and Digital Literacy Institute (ADL), deliver the opening keynote of the Humans First conference, making the case for critical AI literacy — an approach that treats AI adoption as a choice rather than an inevitability. Drawing on three years of ADL institutes, Conrad and Kamperman walk through how generative AI actually works (and what it doesn't do — think, reason, or know), then dig into the harms educators need to reckon with before bringing these tools into the classroom: baked-in bias in text and image generation, persistent and often undetectable hallucination, data privacy risks, labor exploitation behind the scenes, environmental costs, and the cognitive effects of offloading thinking onto a chatbot. Along the way they share classroom-ready lesson plans and resources built by ADL participants — on bias detection, hallucination hunting, environmental justice mapping, and AI licensing systems for student use — all designed to give students and teachers the tools to make informed, sometimes skeptical, choices about when and whether to use AI at all. The conversation closes with audience Q&A on teaching AI's risks hands-on and on the limits of the "AI is just like a calculator" analogy. Recorded live at the Humans First conference, Marist School, July 2026. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. This podcast series is created with support from ⁠DELTA⁠ at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI. The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

  2. Sep 3

    Student Voices: What Humans First Means to Us

    To open the Humans First conference, Mike Burns hands the mic to three Marist students — Bethel Abera, Max Linenberg, and Evan Stallings — for an unscripted conversation about what "humans first" means to them and how they actually experience AI in their daily lives, with no agenda set in advance. Bethel reflects on empathy, uncertainty, and resisting a life reduced to grades and resumes, then speaks candidly about losing her love of writing after becoming reliant on AI in eighth and ninth grade — and regaining her confidence since stepping back from it. Max, a self-taught AI power user with a growing YouTube presence, argues AI has expanded rather than limited his creativity — from building a swim-times tracking website to producing a professional ad for a marketing class — while admitting he's not immune to overdependence himself, and challenges teachers to bring AI into the classroom as a creative tool rather than treating it purely as a cheating risk. Evan brings the conversation back to consequences beyond the classroom, citing the water and environmental costs of AI data centers and warning that passive AI use is eroding critical thinking, using AP exam review sessions as an example. The three find common ground on the same worry: that leaning on AI to skip the hard parts of learning risks producing a generation without the skills — in writing, thinking, and problem-solving — that the world will still need from them. Recorded live at the Humans First conference, Marist School, July 2026. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. This podcast series is created with support from ⁠DELTA⁠ at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI. The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

  3. Aug 26

    Welcome to the Humans First: Adolescent Education in the Age of AI Conference

    In this opening episode, we take you inside the origins of the Humans First conference, hosted at Marist School in July 2026. English teacher Mike Burns and Principal Kevin Mullally trace how a three-day-old ChatGPT and one urgent email from a colleague ("It will change everything soon") set off Marist's exploration of artificial intelligence in education — one balancing curiosity about the technology with caution about what it means for human formation and relational learning. Burns and Mullally explain the philosophy behind the conference: no corporate sponsors, no product endorsements, just honest conversation among educators grappling with what AI means for schools and for students. Structured around the framework of "selves, schools, and systems," the two-day gathering brought together over 100 attendees from across the country for keynotes, panel discussions, and small-group "homeroom" conversations designed to build a lasting network rather than deliver easy answers. This episode sets the stage for the full podcast series recorded live at the conference. This podcast series is created with support from DELTA at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. Series organized by Mike Burns, Kevin Mullally, and Alex Thackston. The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

  • 3 Episodes

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About

As artificial intelligence reshapes classrooms, social relationships, and daily life, what can educators do to guide students through their mental and emotional development by putting humans first? Using audio recorded from the panels, speakers, and participants, this podcast uses audio collected at the Humans First: Adolescent Education in the Age of AI Conference held at Marist School in Atlanta. Drawing on conversations with leading voices in education, ethics, and technology (including scholars like Audrey Watters, Marc Watkins, and John Slattery, alongside veteran classroom teachers and

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