Humans First: Adolescent Education in the Age of AI Conference

Sam Collins (public school, Massachusetts) and Matt Hicks (Catholic school, Kansas) offer two complementary visions of what it means to design classrooms around human formation rather than technology adoption, drawing on very different school contexts to arrive at strikingly similar conclusions.

Collins reframes the AI question entirely: rather than asking how to prepare students to use AI, she asks what conditions of learning — sustained attention, discussion, struggle — are worth protecting regardless of the tool. She shares how a simple daily reading routine transformed her ninth-grade classroom, and how she turned AI itself into an object of study rather than a tool, having students examine how large language models work alongside texts like Nicholas Carr's "The Myth of Automated Learning" and the film WALL-E. Her students' handwritten letters — reflecting on what they want from their education — become the emotional center of her talk.

Hicks builds on this with an extended meditation drawn from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Gordon MacKenzie's Orbiting the Giant Hairball, and the Harkness discussion method, describing a "mark, remark, hallmark" framework for making student thinking and growth visible over the course of a unit. Anchored in his school's Teresian motto — "In this house all must be friends, all must be loved, all must be held dear, all must be helped" — he lands on discernment and empathy as the two capacities he's most trying to cultivate, and argues that relocating "productive friction" back into the classroom, rather than sending struggle home alone with a student and a screen, is what teaches kids to turn to humans first.

Recorded live at the Humans First conference, Marist School, July 2026. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. This podcast series is created with support from ⁠DELTA⁠ at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI.

The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Host Mike Burns puts a panel of educators through a Jeopardy-style wildcard game, where each panelist picks a number and fields a question pulled straight from the questions they submitted to each other — with the freedom to "phone a friend" when they want backup. The format models exactly what the conference is built around: no one has all the answers, and the best response is often a conversation.

The questions range widely and get real fast. What do you say to a student who claims AI understands them better than the adults in their life — and how does the concept of AI sycophancy make that dangerous? How does generative AI change the case for homework? What's the right response to a parent who uses AI at work and sees no issue with their kid using it for school? Should schools even attempt AI wearables policy, given how fast the technology is moving? Can a school genuinely claim to be "green" while using AI? And what would it actually mean for a school to take Pope Leo's encyclical on education in the digital age seriously — not as a statement, but as a funding and staffing strategy?

Panelists share candid personal stories along the way, including one educator's own experience getting pulled into AI sycophancy while drafting an essay about AI in warfare, and swap notes on grading reform, wearable tech privacy, environmental costs of AI adoption, and global disparities in how AI's impact gets weighed. The episode closes on a lighter note with panelists sharing recent human-centered, feel-good moments from their own classrooms and lives.

Recorded live at the Humans First conference, Marist School, July 2026. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. This podcast series is created with support from ⁠DELTA⁠ at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI.

The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Moderated by Sam Collins (Lexington High School, MA), this panel brings together five classroom educators from across the K–college spectrum — Cassie Owens Moore (middle school librarian, SC), Mark (online college writing instructor, University of Mississippi), Matt Hicks (AP Literature, St. Teresa's Academy, Kansas City), Scott Tuffiash (AI ethics and human flourishing courses, public school), and Sean Kamperman (University of Kansas) — for a wide-ranging, personal conversation about what schools are for in an age increasingly shaped by AI.

Starting with a lightning-round on what schools need more of, the panel moves into deeper territory: the purpose of education beyond credentialing, the tension between analog and digital teaching methods, and the labor realities that quietly push teachers toward more tech-dependent classrooms. Cassie shares how a library reading initiative grew from 41% to 99% student engagement through human connection rather than tracking software. Matt reflects on rebuilding classroom culture around eye contact and conversation instead of screens. Scott discusses sequencing an AI ethics course before a human flourishing course, and why that order matters. Throughout, the panelists return to a common thread — that in a moment saturated with digital tools, students and teachers alike are hungry for genuine human interaction, and that the answer isn't choosing analog over digital, but being intentional about both.

Recorded live at the Humans First conference, Marist School, July 2026. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. This podcast series is created with support from ⁠DELTA⁠ at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI.

The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Katie Conrad and Sean Kamperman, professors at the University of Kansas and co-directors of the AI and Digital Literacy Institute (ADL), deliver the opening keynote of the Humans First conference, making the case for critical AI literacy — an approach that treats AI adoption as a choice rather than an inevitability.

Drawing on three years of ADL institutes, Conrad and Kamperman walk through how generative AI actually works (and what it doesn't do — think, reason, or know), then dig into the harms educators need to reckon with before bringing these tools into the classroom: baked-in bias in text and image generation, persistent and often undetectable hallucination, data privacy risks, labor exploitation behind the scenes, environmental costs, and the cognitive effects of offloading thinking onto a chatbot. Along the way they share classroom-ready lesson plans and resources built by ADL participants — on bias detection, hallucination hunting, environmental justice mapping, and AI licensing systems for student use — all designed to give students and teachers the tools to make informed, sometimes skeptical, choices about when and whether to use AI at all.

The conversation closes with audience Q&A on teaching AI's risks hands-on and on the limits of the "AI is just like a calculator" analogy.

Recorded live at the Humans First conference, Marist School, July 2026. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. This podcast series is created with support from ⁠DELTA⁠ at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI.

The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

To open the Humans First conference, Mike Burns hands the mic to three Marist students — Bethel Abera, Max Linenberg, and Evan Stallings — for an unscripted conversation about what "humans first" means to them and how they actually experience AI in their daily lives, with no agenda set in advance.

Bethel reflects on empathy, uncertainty, and resisting a life reduced to grades and resumes, then speaks candidly about losing her love of writing after becoming reliant on AI in eighth and ninth grade — and regaining her confidence since stepping back from it. Max, a self-taught AI power user with a growing YouTube presence, argues AI has expanded rather than limited his creativity — from building a swim-times tracking website to producing a professional ad for a marketing class — while admitting he's not immune to overdependence himself, and challenges teachers to bring AI into the classroom as a creative tool rather than treating it purely as a cheating risk. Evan brings the conversation back to consequences beyond the classroom, citing the water and environmental costs of AI data centers and warning that passive AI use is eroding critical thinking, using AP exam review sessions as an example.

The three find common ground on the same worry: that leaning on AI to skip the hard parts of learning risks producing a generation without the skills — in writing, thinking, and problem-solving — that the world will still need from them.

Recorded live at the Humans First conference, Marist School, July 2026. Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. This podcast series is created with support from ⁠DELTA⁠ at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI.

The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

In this opening episode, we take you inside the origins of the Humans First conference, hosted at Marist School in July 2026. English teacher Mike Burns and Principal Kevin Mullally trace how a three-day-old ChatGPT and one urgent email from a colleague ("It will change everything soon") set off Marist's exploration of artificial intelligence in education — one balancing curiosity about the technology with caution about what it means for human formation and relational learning.

Burns and Mullally explain the philosophy behind the conference: no corporate sponsors, no product endorsements, just honest conversation among educators grappling with what AI means for schools and for students. Structured around the framework of "selves, schools, and systems," the two-day gathering brought together over 100 attendees from across the country for keynotes, panel discussions, and small-group "homeroom" conversations designed to build a lasting network rather than deliver easy answers.

This episode sets the stage for the full podcast series recorded live at the conference. This podcast series is created with support from DELTA at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, focused on human formation in the age of AI.

Produced by Nic Hoffmann for Marist Podcasting. Series organized by Mike Burns, Kevin Mullally, and Alex Thackston.

The theme is "Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/