This spring, GFA welcomed History & Global Studies Visiting Scholar Kevin Guthrie, Founding President of ITHAKA and JSTOR, for a day of conversation with students and faculty. Guthrie was joined by Michael Vath, Senior Vice President of Product at ITHAKA. Together, they explored questions that many schools are now grappling with as artificial intelligence becomes part of the research process.
The visit built on work already underway in GFA’s History & Global Studies classrooms. Earlier in the year, students in Historical Research & Methods traveled to the Pequot Library’s archives, where they engaged directly with primary sources and experienced firsthand how historians construct knowledge from original documents. Meanwhile, students across Inquiry and Advanced Inquiry courses used JSTOR consistently as they built independent research projects. Members of GFA’s STAIR task force also had the opportunity to meet with JSTOR/ITHAKA's Jonathan Glick during an in-school field trip focused on trust and scholarly norms.
Because students had already been thinking deeply about research and inquiry, the conversation with Guthrie and Vath moved quickly beyond surface-level reactions to AI. Instead, students engaged with more in-depth questions: How should they approach AI once they get to college? What does responsible use look like in an academic setting? How can these tools support, rather than replace, meaningful thinking?
Guthrie and Vath encouraged students to think of AI as a tool for extending their inquiry. Rather than asking for answers, students might use AI to ask them questions, to sharpen their research focus or prompt them to consider new perspectives. They also suggested that students test AI in areas where they already have knowledge. Doing so, they explained, helps reveal the system’s limitations, gaps, inaccuracies, and quirks, and gives a better understanding of when and how AI can be used effectively.
Students were also curious about how JSTOR is approaching AI on its platform. At a moment when many AI tools promise increasingly “frictionless” access to information, the JSTOR team shared how they have been developing AI-assisted search features designed to help students move through the discovery phase of research more efficiently, without doing the substantive work of analysis and interpretation on their behalf. Unlike general-purpose AI tools that generate answers for users, JSTOR’s search tool works within selected scholarly texts and helps students identify which sources may be most relevant to their research. The goal, as the team described it, is to save time in the search process without removing the intellectual work that meaningful research requires.
That distinction between saving time in the search process and outsourcing the work of thinking resonated strongly with conversations already taking place at GFA. As the school continues to consider the role of AI in education, there has been a renewed emphasis on what Head of School Bob Whelan has called “durable human skills”: skills like close reading, independent thinking, and building the ability to work through complexity without immediately outsourcing the process.
As AI becomes more integrated into education, conversations like these are increasingly important. At GFA, the goal is not simply to adopt new technologies, but to help students use them thoughtfully, remaining curious, engaged, and fully invested in the learning process.