Penny Bishop, dean of BU’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, moderated a panel discussion with faculty at the 2026 BU Wheelock Forum, which addressed AI and the future of education March 25. Faculty participants: Naomi Caselli, associate professor of Deaf education (from left); Michael Alan Chang, Margaret McGuire Earl Career Development Professor, assistant professor, and a BU Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences faculty fellow; Nermeen Dashoush, clinical associate professor; and TJ McKenna, clinical assistant professor in science education.

Artificial Intelligence

BU Wheelock Forum Explores AI in Education

Faculty urge caution and a need for equity in integrating artificial intelligence in schools

In just the past few years, artificial intelligence has infiltrated nearly every sector and industry, is accessed daily on billions of smart phones, and now seems poised to transform the way children learn in school. Teachers say they’re caught in the middle, exasperated by the ubiquity of chat bots and large language models—and the temptation students have to use them as a crutch—but fearful of being left behind in the AI race. A question many teachers, parents, and administrators are asking: What do teaching and learning mean in an AI world? 

This question was at the center of the 2026 BU Wheelock Forum AI and the Future of Education, hosted by the Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development on March 25. Approximately 250 people—including educators, administrators, and scholars—attended the event, which featured a keynote from Aaron Rasmussen (COM’06, CAS’06), cofounder of online education platforms Outlier.org and MasterClass; a faculty panel discussion moderated by Wheelock Dean Penny Bishop; and a modern dance performance using Random Actor, a technology developed by James Grady, a College of Fine Arts assistant professor of art, graphic design, and Clay Hopper, a CFA senior lecturer, directing, that harnesses AI to extend the visual expression of human movement. 

Rasmussen’s talk centered on the rapid advancements in AI and their impact on education, emphasizing the need for educators to adapt quickly. According to him, AI is changing the way information is transferred between teachers and students, with students learning on their own and discussing innovations. 

“If people remember evolution, it’s not that it forces an organism to adapt. It’s that it culls the ones that don’t adapt. In fact, it culls the ones that don’t already have the adaptation,” Rasmussen said. “So we are up against a time horizon here where the culling, for lack of a better word, has begun in many industries, and education is one of them.”

Realizing the potential for AI to improve education equitably, he told the audience, may come down to educators being at the table in how AI is developed and utilized. “When we think about the way AI is changing education, we need to think about who is going to guide AI to make education better,” Rasmussen said. “And it seems to me that educators would be the best people to do that.”

The faculty panel that followed, moderated by Bishop, built on the role educators and researchers play in whether and how AI will be used equitably in our K-12 classrooms. Panelists included Naomi Caselli, a Wheelock associate professor of Deaf education; Michael Alan Chang, Margaret McGuire Earl Career Development Professor, a Wheelock assistant professor, and a faculty fellow in BU’s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences; Nermeen Dashoush, a Wheelock clinical associate professor; and TJ McKenna, a Wheelock clinical assistant professor in science education. 

Caselli directs BU’s AI in Education Initiative and approaches it with a particular focus on its opportunities and challenges for the Deaf community.

“In my corner of the world, I’m thinking about language,” she said. “With [large language models], most of that technology is expecting users to know either written or spoken language, which means that people who use sign languages are discarded, they’re left out, they’re marginalized. So I have to think about how we make that technology available and accessible by Deaf people.”

As well as her concern about AI bias involving the Deaf community, Caselli said she is worried about AI’s involvement in military conflicts and surveillance, the environmental cost of ever-expanding access to AI, and questions about who’s profiting from the technology’s expansion. “We have to be wise and compassionate in foreseeing those risks,” she added, “and try to protect one another, to create the world that we want and hope for.” 

Chang, a computer scientist by training, whose education research explores ethical, participatory approaches to AI-supported teaching and learning, said there’s a lot of excitement about harnessing AI to make learning faster and more efficient. He urged, however, that there be a collective pause when it comes to thoughtlessly saturating our classrooms with AI.

“Oftentimes pausing is seen as a fearful reaction,” Chang said. “In another framing, it can totally be about courage. It’s the courage to resist this urge to just chug forward. We’re in the space of computer science. There’s often this thing of making things really fast, and then breaking them—which can work in a lot of contexts. But in social contexts like education, it doesn’t often work out that way.”

McKenna directs BU Wheelock’s new AI & Education Master’s and certificate programs. Much of his research and school-based work deals with how children figure out and understand the scientific world, which he calls sensemaking. He said, for example, in seeking to understand how clouds can be so heavy but can float in the sky, someone could ask Google or a chat bot, “but you don’t get that moment of, ‘I figured that out.’ A brilliant educator scaffolded me through thinking through those things and got me to wonder and pushed me to the edge of what I was thinking about.” 

He pointed to a new study where students were given an AI system to use on an assignment, and it improved their performance by 48 percent. When researchers took the AI away and retested them, those same students performed 17 percent worse than the control group that never had access to AI. 

“Once you start leaning on those crutches, it becomes really hard,” said McKenna, whose work includes connecting AI to high-quality science instructional materials for more accurate responses.

That’s where AI literacy, starting before children enter school and continuing in the earliest grades, is crucial, Dashoush said. “My role is to make sure that they have the skills to wherever the tool goes, they’re able to kind of dissect it.” Her work includes exploring ways that children’s programming can impart educational and life lessons. “If I’m going to design something, I want to make sure that all children have access to it,” Dashoush said, “and that means also making sure that I’m meeting them where they are.”