In his criminally underread 1978 book The Grasshopper, the philosopher Bernard Suits takes seriously the science-fiction commonplace that, once robots are doing everything for us, humans will have to find something else to do.
His response is that we’d play, living lives of leisure, like Aesop’s grasshopper, and engaging in activities with a lusory attitude: living playfully, engaging in activities not because we have to, but because we want to. Fully-automated luxury play! As much as I could easily play videogames all day, work isn’t going anywhere any time soon. But the rise of AI in education has prompted me to revisit this topic.
Universities are, quite rightly, thinking very carefully about what their staff and students do with AI, emphasising the ways in which it can enhance, and perhaps even replace, aspects of our work. But there are separate, parallel questions: what can’t AI do for us, and what shouldn’t it do? And what are we going to do with all the time it saves us?
Doing and being seen to have done
Human lives are full of experiences, and there’s a danger with the rise of AI that we weaken our connection with the actual doing of things. AI might help us to plan a holiday itinerary, book a hotel or draft a jealousy-inducing social media post (or even deepfake pics from a holiday that didn’t happen), but it can’t go on holiday for us. And similarly, in learning environments, whilst it can enhance learning, overreliance on AI runs the risk of hollowing out the experiential core of learning and leaving students not having actually done anything.
A real challenge for educators is to know how to get students to understand the value of experience in a world that incentivises taking shortcuts. I lead Rise at Manchester Met: a co-curricular programme that is designed to draw together all the things that students do that aren’t their degree, and our team works hard to help students to understand that they are more than their degree subject.
The traditional catch-all term for this is “extra-curricular” – it’s the things that students do in addition to the curricula they are following. But in practice “co-curricular” is a more accurate term. “Co” indicates that activity happens alongside and with the curriculum. There is a crossover in the experiences that students are having. Picture the curriculum and co-curricular activities as two streams that are sometimes totally divergent, sometimes parallel, and often overlapping in productive ways.
Identity shapes participation
Students don’t stop being students when they engage in co-curricular activities, but similarly they don’t stop being a community organiser, or a hockey player, or a freelance arts journalist, when they’re in the classroom. My doctoral thesis argued that half of the “game” of higher education is students understanding how they can bring their own identities to transform their participation, and “position-switch” between roles. The co-curricular is at its most powerful when these distinct identities and experiences begin to transform and enhance each other.
Moving from “extra” to “co” also challenges the primacy of the core curriculum as the foundation of student experience, and acknowledges that, for many of our students, “student” might not be their primary identity. We must accept that, for some students, their co-curricular activity might be more engaging, more relevant and more career-focused than their core degree programme. For others, the stuff they are doing outside their degree programme might be necessary and unavoidable, and will often pre-date their involvement at university; paid-work and caring responsibilities tend to take precedence over lectures, and there may be ways to make this count too.
However, when you type “co-curricular” into your search engine of choice, you won’t really see university websites. It’s a term that, at present, seems to be owned by the upper-end of British private boarding schools. In a sense this stands to reason; pupils essentially live in these schools during term time, and activities take place as part of their wider life at school. Here “co-curricular” is an expectation, and provides the social and cultural capital building for which British private schools are famous.
This conceptual dominance raises an issue of social justice, though. There is a sense that all of the “extra” stuff, at both schools and universities, is the domain of students who are privileged enough to take part, and who have the time and resources to make it happen. Working outside the curriculum is too often seen as a privilege for the privileged, and effectively becomes self-fulfilling as students with the free time to volunteer reap the developmental benefits of volunteering their time. Other students are already on the back foot when it comes to claiming their share of experience.
Embarrassment of riches
Rise was set up to challenge this narrative, by giving students time and resource to develop their social capital in flexible ways, and to recognise developmental activities that might not have traditionally been included under the extra-curricular umbrella. There’s a broader conversation to be had in the sector, not about how we encourage already busy students to do more, but about how we encourage students to recognise their learning beyond the curriculum.
In Manchester and beyond, the skills pendulum seems to swinging once more away from digital skills and towards “soft skills” – again, reflecting AI’s dominance of education conversations. Co-curricular space has a valuable contribution to make to developing empathy, critical thinking and interacting with other human beings. It is, ultimately, about sharing experiences, and the more we can expand this, the more everyone will benefit.
Students will have experiences outside of their degree programmes whether we design for it or not, but a renewed emphasis on co-curricular activity would allow them (and us) to understand that formal education settings don’t have a monopoly on learning and development. We worry so much about students being “time-poor”; what happens if we understand this as “experience-rich” instead, and recognise their learning accordingly?
In an AI-dominated dystopia, the co-curricular might be where we find the last vestiges of human experience in higher education. Being more optimistic, in a Grasshopper-influenced utopia, we’d all have the time to luxuriate in human experience. Co-curricular space provides insight into what this might look like, and gives students ways to develop away from the curriculum that might speak to future possibilities.
Interested in thinking more about co-curricular experience? At Manchester Met we’re pulling together a cross-sector group of HE professionals working in co-curricular space, and we’d love your input. Click here to sign up for updates.
