Teaching with and About Artificial Intelligence: An Interdisciplinary Convergence–Divergence Framework for AI Literacy in Higher Education

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is a rapidly evolving technology whose capabilities are expanding quickly, leaving instructors across higher education to determine how to integrate it into teaching with little shared guidance. This paper reports on a Faculty Learning Community comprising seven faculty members from computer science, management information systems, systems engineering, economics, development studies, political science, and geography at a technological university in the northeastern United States. Through collaborative autoethnography, the group developed a convergence–divergence framework for AI-integrated pedagogy, visualized as a daisy: a shared core of AI literacy, ethical and risk awareness, and governance frameworks, surrounded by discipline-specific petals reflecting each field’s distinct conceptualization and application of AI. Seven disciplinary vignettes illustrate the framework in practice, revealing a common pattern across disciplines: AI tools offer possibilities and efficiencies while simultaneously obscuring risks and reproducing biases that require deliberate human attention. Drawing on ecological systems theory, the framework offers faculty a multi-level structure for designing AI-integrated courses that honor both shared foundations and disciplinary authenticity.