A Faculty AI Narrative: Reimagining Pedagogical Capacity in the Age of Generative AI

ABSTRACT

This article examines the integration of generative artificial intelligence into College and Career Success 1001, a first‐year experience course at a large community college in Connecticut, through a combined literature review and reflective narrative methodology grounded in traditions of autoethnography, scholarly personal narrative, and reflective practitioner inquiry. National research indicates that community college faculty are adopting AI primarily to streamline instructional tasks, enhance accessibility, and support course design, while expressing ongoing concerns about assessment integrity, student agency, privacy, and ethical implementation. Against this backdrop, I documented a year‐long exploration of AI as a pedagogical partner, using tools such as Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, NotebookLM, and Poe to refine communication, redesign course materials, generate multimodal assignment supports, and analyze patterns in student work. The narrative highlights both the promise and limitations of AI, including challenges related to platform compatibility, variability across AI versions, and the ethical risks posed by student‐facing chatbots without guardrails. I argue that effective AI integration requires intentional boundaries, human oversight, and a commitment to preserving authentic learning. Rather than replacing the relational and reflective dimensions of teaching, AI expanded my capacity to maintain instructional presence during a period of institutional transition. The article concludes that AI, when used ethically and thoughtfully, can enhance—but not supplant—the human work at the heart of community college education. This article emerged from an extended, iterative exchange between me and generative AI tools, reflecting the collaborative and exploratory nature of the practices it examines .