The promise of ‘labour-saving’ technology is rarely straightforward. While new technologies will often lead to different working conditions, whether or not these equate with better working conditions tends to contestable (especially if we ask the pointed question of ‘better for whom?’).

In the education sphere, the past few years have seen growing promises that generative AI technologies can take care of many dull, boring and repetitive tasks that clog up teachers’ working days – ‘freeing up’ teachers for more rewarding and impactful work with their students. This might involve using GenAI to produce lesson plans, classroom resources, to grade student assignments and provide written feedback, draft emails to parents, and so on.

It is certainly appealing to think that GenAI might save teachers time and reduce their mental burden. There are moments in every teacher’s day when they might not be feeling particularly inspired, imaginative or full of energy. At first glance, outsourcing tasks to GenAI makes good sense.

However, if we look back to the history of technology then there are good reasons to be not quite so optimistic. In particular, I am reminded of Ruth Schwartz Cowen’s groundbreaking work on the rise of domestic technologies in the home throughout the twentieth century and her account of the complex longer-term impacts that innovations such as the vacuum cleaning, refrigerator and electric iron had on women’s household labour.

Cowen shows how these technologies – rather than save women time and reduce the amount of work that had to be done – actually intensified expectations around household work. Expectations around cleanliness and productivity increased dramatically, leading to more frequent cleaning, cooking and other chores. 

Crucially, Cowen also argues that housekeeping became more of a solitary task, with labour-saving technologies leading to patriarchal expectations that a single wife/mother could now take care of all the daily tasks without any assistance from others in the house.  All told, regardless of the booming domestic technology market, women throughout the twentieth century were hardly set free from the burdens of domestic labour.

So, what might this suggest for the fate of teachers and GenAI? Expectations that teachers can now quickly churn out student feedback, emails, lesson resources and other text might well lead to intensified demands from school leaders and/or parents for how much of this work they should be doing. If teachers can create student feedback at the touch of a button then perhaps they should be providing feedback on multiple drafts of every piece of writing that a student produces?

At the same time, the formulaic nature of GenAI produced outputs might also lead to narrowed expectations of what ‘good’ work looks like – with anything not produced by GenAI somehow seen as a little bit off. GenAI might well also alter the dynamics of how teachers take on these tasks. Traditionally, many teachers have shared lesson resources or co-produced materials with colleagues. In contrast, producing resources with GenAI is a very individualised and solitary affair.

Above all, there is little reason to expect teachers to be spending reduced time on such tasks. Indeed, we are already seeing in our research how many teachers tend to make considerable efforts to assess, alter, amend and sometimes completely rework the outputs that GenAI tools provide them so that they better ‘fit’ with particular students, classrooms and school-settings. All told, while GenAI offers different ways for teachers to get their work done, the promise of less work (or less stressful and onerous work) seems dubious.

Reference

Cowen, R. (1983). More work for mother: the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave. Basic Books