Nurture Discernment (or Canadians Ride Moose!)

An Educator’s Purpose in 2026 

Jan 31

In 2026, I am thinking, writing, crafting, and consulting with a purpose in mind: that of the educator. To me, the educator spans the wide range of work that I do, both formally and informally, in and outside of postsecondary institutions, workplaces, conferences, professional development sessions, and on/through social media.

As January draws to a close, I am taking a moment of what has long been my busiest period of postsecondary teaching.

With a mixture of classes spanning intercultural communication and variants of sociology and social problems, in-person, synchronous and asynchronous classes, I have been trying to nurture a nuanced envelope of skills that I call discernment.

We often thinking of discernment in terms of taste or judgment, an attribute of a sommelier, a fine art appraiser, a venture capitalist, a cognoscente. In this envelope is specialized knowledge and a repertoire of facts, attention to detail, comparing and deducing the judgments of others, and extensive practice to nurture, develop, build and hone.

Yet, in the postsecondary environment, discernment is part of the putatively desired yet rarely taught dimension of critical thinking, logic, rational and analytical decision marking, and perhaps attention to the social and cultural economies of information in which knowledge and facts live.

To me, discernment must be part of the assemblage of human “durable” skills that educators should endeavour to nurture and teach, an increasingly task in our urgent in our era of disinformation, misinformation, rampant fabrication, and genAI auto generation.

There are many ways to create formative activities to nurture discernment.

One that I have recently tried, and please note, I speak only as a dabbler and experimenter, is to deploy genAI technologies to question its generation of putative facts and knowledge. Here’s an example of a recent activity:

·                Open up a chat with any of the genAI tools that you or a group member uses. If you don'thave a typical tool, use Microsoft CoPilot that is available as part of your [institutional] email.​

Here some prompts:​

Ask the genAI questions such as:​

·         What stereotypes do Canadians typically have?​

·         How are Canadians often stereotyped within Canada and around the world?​

·         Are Canadians more likely to stereotype others than those from other countries?​

·        

Feel free to adapt and modify the questions.​

Review and discuss the findings​

Probe and ask for evidence​

How does the chat confirm or refute your own experience of stereotypes in Canada?

There were of course range of responses of varying levels of familiarity and accuracy. Students were using their skills of discernment, of assessing the accumulation of stereotypes against the repertoire of other automated generations, including the laughable one that Canadians ride moose, against their own lived experiences as Canadians.

Hopefully they could see that AI, while a useful resource for research and ideation, was not always accurate and like all knowledge, biased and partial, and that there was value in nurturing their own human durable skill of discernment against the barrage of an disinformation and misinformation information economy.

#AI #skills #human #misinformation #disinformation #educator #purpose

Discernment