group’s expansion. This describes exactly how AI feels in higher education: we are pushed and forced 
(by the students, the institution, and machines) to integrate our pedagogical styles, frameworks, and 
philosophies into a technology we did not choose. This is not a new phenomenon; for years, faculty 
have had to adapt their teaching to e-learning platforms. As a faculty member who teaches fully 
online, I know that my assignments are often limited by the features of the platform. I can only do 
as much as the interface allows. In the AI Global Art Classroom, this dependency is amplified. We 
rely on infrastructure controlled by multinational corporations and are excluded from the decision-
making processes of our institutions. We operate within a black box of institutional governance where 
our pedagogical discoveries are extracted to fuel corporate innovation, effectively transforming our 
refined classroom methods into free training data for proprietary systems that absorb our labor 
without acknowledgement or compensation.
This structural dependency requires a critical shift in how we perceive the act of learning itself. In 
my art appreciation course, I discuss how frescoes were the technology used in the Middle Ages to 
enhance the sacred message of the Roman Catholic Church inside cathedrals, just as oil painting 
was the specific technology used in the seventeenth century to allow the wealthy to depict and 
possess their world. I use Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing to bridge these historical technologies 
with our current electric age, and I bring in McLuhan (1964) to help build that connection. Both 
Berger and McLuhan are scholars who smartly blend the analysis of the visual world with a deep 
understanding of how culture is shaped. Following this tradition, I introduce McLuhan’s (1964) 
famous quote that “the medium is the message” to argue that one of the messages of AI, at least 
for this class, is that seeing has become a literal linguistic act. Art appreciation is the acquisition of 
the vocabulary—the mediums, techniques, principles, themes, and histories—required to describe, 
and therefore see the work. The Visual Prompt Studio, which is the assignment I will discuss in 
this article, makes the metaphor of knowing as seeing materialistic. Words literally build outcomes. 
When a student prompts Copilot, they are experiencing the McLuhan-esque revelation: our words 
are the tools through which we appreciate and construct our reality.
This transition from seeing to speaking to creation signals a broader shift in the purpose of the 
modern classroom. In 1967, Marshall McLuhan observed that the classroom was “getting in the 
way of learning,” as students were finding more information outside the classroom than inside of it, 
therefore the classroom must turn into a space for discovery and involvement. In following McLuhan’s 
(1967) ideas on education in the electronic age and this AI moment, I believe we must shift from 
instruction into discovery. Today, AI has rendered the instructional classroom entirely outdated. My 
Visual Prompt Studio assignment aims to transform the classroom into a playground of discovery. 
Students are not just told what an Impressionist painting is, they are invited to discover how to speak 
it into existence. This involvement culminates in a final act of agency: a letter to AI. I tell my students 
that they are the architects of the next generation’s classroom. By writing these letters, they move 
from being dependent users to being involved participants in the future of art education.
“The professor and student relationship is 
something I resist letting go of in the AI 
era. The machine cannot take this away 
from me, and I will not let it.”
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TRENDS 2026 	
	
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