Plunging into the deep end of artificial intelligence is far from easy, especially when the outcomes could lean more dystopian than utopian. Which is why Jon Jaramillo, assistant teaching professor of Spanish, is offering students the chance to take the dive in the course, “Artificial Intelligence in Global Contexts.”
Jaramillo developed the interdisciplinary course on AI for the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages to grapple with the undeniable impacts of the technology in “every nook and cranny of the world.” GSL 210 is a core education course available to any student as an elective and centers around a conversation about values, power and meaning.
“In the class, we treat AI as a cultural mirror,” said Jaramillo. “We ask: Whose values are embedded here? Who benefits? Who pays the price?”
Theoretical foundations of course on AI
Jaramillo knew next to nothing about AI until attending a six-week seminar on AI in education in 2024. After that experience, he considered himself an “enthusiast” who connected with the “utopian" discourse of AI, excited about how it could positively transform education.
He even tried implementing some AI interaction in his courses. For his asynchronous Spanish courses, he created online tools to give students immediate writing feedback, specifically tailored to their prompt. While not obligatory, Jaramillo said many students found it useful.
But then he experienced resistance when he created a custom tool for his Spanish advanced writing course. Two students strongly resisted it. One sent him a message describing their moral position on AI, moving him to investigate the movement of generative AI refusal.
Jaramillo found he must embrace both sides.
“That's where this course was born,” he said. “In the fire between utopian and dystopian notions of artificial intelligence.”
Jaramillo’s initial education about the “body” of AI came from scholars who specialize in the social and economic implications of innovation like AI, such as Kate Crawford, Ruha Benjamin and Joy Buolamwini. He learned it is not just an amorphous idea but an apparatus that begins with the extraction of rare earth minerals, which requires labor exploitation and creates environmental contamination.
“There's a lot of beauty that we can get caught up in and become enamored with about AI,” said Jaramillo, “And it doesn't allow us to see beyond that screen.”
He also draws on scholar Adrienne Mayer’s work explaining how fears of automation and extra-human intelligence have been manifested in mythology worldwide, by the ancient Greeks, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese and more.
The course contends with this truth, pointing students to consider the important role of global history in AI today.
AI course content
Artificial Intelligence in Global Contexts “asks students to consider that we are at the threshold of a new world that is going to be algorithmically mediated,” said Jaramillo.
He believes the pressures to be fast, extractive and performative are such that education is creating conditions that pressure students and teachers to use AI. Jaramillo combats this by requiring students to be slow, relational and attentive. One way they do this is by recording weekly videos of themselves talking about class themes as homework assignments.
“Their human voices became the important way to overcome that issue of AI because once it's through their voice and through their mouth, it has to become part of them,” he said. “They can't just articulate it spontaneously.”
The outcome of the course, said Jaramillo, is for students to gain “a sense of protecting their own critical thinking and their human agency in the face of all this technology.”
Future directions for course on AI
Jaramillo said the course will be in continual evolution, just as the technology and its related components are. Further, he designed the course to be open so that he could train other faculty to teach it and bring their own points of view to it.
During the first iteration of the course, the students gave Jaramillo permission to quote them and use their information under Creative Commons licensing, so their course materials will become available in the forthcoming academic year on Threshold Journal, “a peer-published multimedia journal of student research on artificial intelligence in global contexts,” as well as a YouTube channel.
One student, Jake D., said, "I don't think this class made me anti-AI. If anything, it made me more cautious about accepting technology as neutral.”
Student Paulina M. said, “I still sometimes use AI to help me construct arguments, but now I can see [the systems] clearly. I want to continue paying attention to how the systems are being used, who benefits from them, who bears the costs and who has to be held accountable.”
With the help of UO Online, Jaramillo is creating another course that is an asynchronous introduction for freshmen. It will also be used as microcredentialling modules for high school students to earn UO credit before arriving. His hope is that it becomes a requirement for all UO students.
Artificial Intelligence in Global Contexts will be offered in winter term 2027.