Gen Z – Jill Szoo Wilson

Today’s Students Want to Be in the Room

By Jill Szoo Wilson

When I first began teaching, I was greatly concerned with following the rules. The structure. I wanted to be excellent at classroom management, precise in my instruction, and certain that I was building lessons in keeping with the professional writing on schema and constructivist philosophy. In those early years, my focus was largely on myself as a teacher. I cared deeply about my students and always understood teaching as an act of service. I simply did not yet know where I could soften the scaffolding of instruction. A great deal has changed since then.

Over the last several years, I have begun to understand listening less as a technique and more as a pedagogical stance. It has moved from the periphery of my classroom practice to its organizing principle. The shift did not originate in theory alone, though constructivist philosophy prepared the ground. It emerged in response to the students themselves.

The students I have this year feel different from the cohort that came immediately before them, and in some ways, more familiar to me. They remind me of the people I went to college with. There is the same restless energy that marks young adulthood, though it no longer carries quite the same sharpened edge of constant self-performance. The previous group often felt harder to reach, their attention shaped by the pressure of perpetual visibility. This year’s students carry that pressure as well, yet they seem fatigued by it. Many are attempting to return to the room, to inhabit the present rather than curate it.

Their uncertainty does not read as performance. It feels like an honest hesitation about what it means to be seen in a world where exposure easily becomes spectacle. Distinctiveness may generate engagement on TikTok and offer a fleeting sense of identity, yet it does little to cultivate the steadiness required to share presence with another human being.

As I have written elsewhere, the animating question of my generation was, “What is the meaning of all this?” The question I hear now has shifted: “In all this meaning, what is the truth?” My Fall 2025 Introduction to Theatre class coined the term “Meta-Absurdism” to describe this condition. They were searching for language to articulate the experience of living inside interpretive saturation, where every moment arrives pre-framed, pre-commented upon, and already circulating before one has had time to encounter it directly. The struggle, as they described it, is not a deficit of meaning but an overabundance. The difficulty lies in its density.

That conversation lingered with me through winter break. Their description of being submerged in unending interpretation suggested something deeper than cultural noise. Beneath the compression of commentary and analysis, I sensed a more elemental need, one that had not yet found adequate expression.

To serve them well, we must respond at that level. The most powerful thing we can offer is not more framing, not sharper analysis, not quicker interpretation. It is attention. It is listening.

Listening is often described as a supporting skill in theatre training, yet its function is far more elemental. It is the ground beneath technique, the stabilizing force that allows every other aspect of the craft to take shape. Without it, even the most refined method hardens into display. Long before the modern acting classroom adopted the language of “listening,” Stanislavski articulated its essence. His writings on communion describe a disciplined form of attention in which the performer redirects focus away from the monitored performance of the self and toward the living reality of the partner. Communion exceeds mere awareness. It is reciprocal attention, the willingness to allow the other person’s truth to sculpt the moment.

By “truth,” we do not mean biographical fact or private confession. We mean the actor’s lived behavior in the present: the modulation of the voice, the shift of weight, the breath that precedes thought, the emotional temperature that forms without effort. These observable adjustments cannot be manufactured or predicted. They emerge as the natural consequence of attention. When an actor listens, they permit the real impulses of their partner to shape both internal and external response. The partner’s truth becomes the sculpting force that continually reshapes the unfolding moment.

To allow another actor’s truth to shape the moment requires the relinquishment of control. The performer sets aside the illusion of executing a predetermined design—how the line will sound, where the gesture will land, which emotion will dominate—and permits their choices to be redirected by what they receive. A hesitation, a quickened pace, a softening in the partner’s voice becomes an artistic pressure that alters the next impulse. The scene remains alive because it is formed not through private invention but through the tension of two attentions meeting in real time.

This shift carries profound pedagogical implications. Many beginning actors assume their task is to express: to display an emotion, clarify an intention, or demonstrate understanding. Listening reorders that hierarchy. Expression follows reception. The actor does not begin with what they intend to project but with what they are prepared to receive. Meaning takes shape inside relationship, where something shared begins to move between people.

This is the heart of communion: the recognition that authenticity onstage is revealed through relationship. When actors allow their partners’ impulses to shape their own, they enter the shared field where theatre actually happens, a field in which presence is not displayed but exchanged.

Stanislavski did not use the contemporary vocabulary of “listening,” yet the discipline he describes aligns closely with what modern pedagogy identifies as the actor’s most fundamental skill: the capacity to let awareness travel outward (Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares; Building a Character). His system makes clear that technique succeeds only insofar as the actor relinquishes the self-protective habit of monitoring and enters the dynamic exchange of communion. What emerges from that shift is not performance but encounter; the moment when the life of the partner becomes the organizing force of the scene, and the actor responds from connection rather than construction (Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares).

Stanislavski helps us see what listening makes possible onstage, yet the reason it matters so deeply in the classroom extends beyond performance. Many of our students move through the world feeling unanchored, flooded by information yet starved for genuine reception. They are bright and capable, but often unsure where their own voices begin beneath the noise that surrounds them. Theatre pedagogy, when rooted in listening, becomes a place where they can be gathered rather than scattered. Listening allows us to meet them where they are, to steady their attention, and to let them experience the quiet dignity of being heard without having to perform for it. In that moment, psychology and craft meet. We are not simply teaching acting; we are helping students locate themselves again. Listening becomes an affirmation that their inner life carries weight, that their presence matters, and that their voice can emerge within relationship rather than in isolation.

Meisner and the Practice of Being Changed

Meisner’s repetition work leads students into the same territory Stanislavski describes, though he arrives there through a form that is striking in its simplicity (Meisner and Longwell). Two students sit across from each other. One makes a concrete observation, such as “You look nervous” or “You’re smiling,” and the other repeats it. The language remains plain, free of interpretation or embellishment. At first, the students feel awkward and self-conscious, as though they are performing a meaningless task. Yet the structure is doing something essential. It is clearing mental space.

Repetition removes the usual distractions that pull young actors away from the present moment. They are not asked to invent emotion, craft a backstory, or plan a choice. They are asked to observe. The exercise strips away the impulse to be interesting and replaces it with the discipline of noticing what is directly in front of them. Gradually, repetition loosens the mental habits that have shaped them for years. They begin to release the tendency to plan ahead, curate themselves, or manage perception. With each exchange, attention shifts away from the internal monologue that governs much of daily life and toward the partner encountered in real time.

This is the heart of the exercise. Repetition invites the actor to enter the moment without agenda and to let attention settle on the lived behavior emerging between them. As they echo what they observe, they begin to feel how a partner’s smallest shifts can alter the emotional temperature of the exchange. The work becomes less about producing responses and more about allowing responses to arise. Over time, the exercise cultivates a quiet confidence in the actor’s capacity to be shaped by another person’s behavior. They stop reaching for significance and begin to recognize that the scene is already forming within shared attention.

This shift is transformative. Many students, especially those formed within digital culture, are accustomed to managing their image. They monitor gesture, expression, and tone with the precision of editors shaping content. Repetition interrupts that pattern. It grants permission to stop curating and begin responding. It creates a protected space in which feeling does not need to be immediately converted into display.

For students who spend much of their lives being watched yet rarely received, this work becomes more than a technique. It becomes a rehearsal for presence. It teaches them how to be affected without losing themselves, how to be changed by another person in ways that feel grounded and authentic. In this sense, repetition offers not only a method for acting but a means of reclaiming voice. That reclamation occurs not through outward projection but through the experience of being heard in the presence of another human being.

The Lineage of Listening

Listening in the art of acting has a lineage. Throughout the twentieth century, major practitioners approached it from different angles, yet each returned to a shared conviction: actors learn to act by learning to attend.

Spolin introduces listening through improvisation, giving students their first embodied experience of responding without preplanning (Improvisation for the Theater). Her games may appear playful, yet they place rigorous demands on attention. Students must register what is offered, adjust in real time, and remain available to change. The moment their focus drifts into planning, the scene loses its pulse. Spolin shows that spontaneity grows not from clever invention but from disciplined noticing. Listening steadies the uncertainty inherent in improvisation and gives it shape.

Grotowski deepens attention by removing what obstructs it (Towards a Poor Theatre). His training asks students to release muscular tension and the habitual defenses that dull perception. As those patterns fall away, sensitivity begins to widen. Students register shifts in breath, stance, and impulse. Listening moves beyond auditory awareness and becomes a full-bodied practice in which the entire field of behavior is taken in with clarity.

Brook widens this field still further to include space itself (The Empty Space). He teaches that theatre arises in the charged distance between people, not within any isolated individual. Students recognize this when shared focus alters the atmosphere of a room. Meaning forms within that space of mutual attention. Listening becomes a way of organizing experience rather than a technique applied to it.

Hagen returns attention to the texture of ordinary life (Respect for Acting). She treats observation as foundational rather than supplemental. Her exercises ask students to watch behavior as it unfolds: how a voice carries emotion before words surface, how physical stance shifts under pressure, how circumstance shapes response. Listening, in her view, develops through disciplined attention to the immediate world.

Taken together, these practitioners outline a quiet progression.
Spolin awakens attention.
Grotowski deepens it.
Brook widens it.
Hagen sustains it.

What holds their work in conversation is the understanding that listening forms the basis of connection. It steadies students who feel scattered. It slows perception so the moment can be met rather than managed. As students work within this lineage, they begin to experience incremental but unmistakable change: nervous systems settle, awareness sharpens, and the impulse to grip the moment loosens. Listening becomes less a performed skill and more a way of being that grounds them in the classroom, onstage, and within their own lives.

Theatre becomes a place where they learn to locate themselves again.

Teaching as Encounter

This understanding reshaped my teaching more deeply than any technique I once tried to master. Structure still supports the work, and craft still gives it shape, yet neither reaches a student until a relationship begins to form. Listening opened that threshold for me. It clarified the difference between the appearance of engagement and the experience of it. It reminded me that presence has weight, that a classroom gathers its meaning not through display but through the way people meet one another inside a moment.

Students arrive having spent years monitoring themselves. They know how to be visible. They know how to be evaluated. What they have practiced far less is the quiet reciprocity through which actual contact takes place. When the work turns toward listening, the atmosphere inside the room begins to shift. Responsibility for the moment no longer rests on a single pair of shoulders. Attention is shared. The room grows lighter. Conversation begins to feel less managed and more alive, shaped by what emerges rather than by what is performed.

Listening as Ethical Formation

For this reason, listening stands at the ethical center of theatre pedagogy. It requires humility and patience. It asks students to allow another person to matter in ways that influence the moment. Within a culture saturated with reaction and self-presentation, this demand is significant. Listening rehearses a different mode of being.

As the practice deepens, students develop steadier relationships with tension. They learn to remain present when meaning feels unsettled, to respond without tightening around outcome, and to sustain attention when perspectives diverge. These capacities grow gradually through repeated experiences of meeting another person with openness.

In time, theatre becomes more than performance training. It becomes a small version of shared life, something students can feel in the room before they name it. Students experience how attention is distributed across a room, how meaning forms between people, and how mutual awareness can hold both ease and difficulty. The ensemble ceases to be an abstraction and becomes a lived structure.

Listening prepares students for these relationships wherever they encounter them. It offers a way of moving through the world that is grounded, perceptive, and responsive to the lives unfolding around them.

Returning to the Beginning

When I first began teaching, I believed that if I prepared well enough, the room would respond. I trusted in structure almost instinctively. I built detailed lesson plans, mapped the arc of discussions in advance, designed assignments that felt coherent and defensible, and told myself that this was what seriousness looked like. In many ways, it was. Structure gave me confidence. It kept me from wasting their time. It allowed me to enter the classroom with a sense that I had done my part. But after enough years had passed, I began to notice that something essential could still be missing even when everything on paper was sound. A room could be organized and still feel unreachable. Students could complete every step of a well-designed exercise and remain strangely untouched by it. The work was happening, but it was not always connecting.

That realization did not arrive as a theory. It arrived as an observation. I began to notice when a student stopped bracing. I began to notice when a discussion shifted from performance into response. I began to notice how quickly the energy in a room changed once students sensed that they were not being watched for error. Their breathing slowed. Their speech lengthened. Their thoughts stopped fragmenting mid-sentence. The difference was not dramatic, and it did not produce applause. It produced attention. And attention, once it gathered, seemed to hold the work in a way no structure could accomplish on its own.

Students now come into the classroom already dispersed by the world they inhabit. Their attention has been pulled outward in so many directions before they ever sit down. There is commentary waiting for them, evaluation waiting for them, and visibility waiting for them. Listening cannot erase that atmosphere; it simply creates a different one inside the room. It makes it possible for students to experience a moment in which they are not curating themselves. Something shifts when they realize they are being met rather than measured. They begin to respond instead of adjusting.

Over time, I found that what I had once tried to secure through structure was actually emerging through attention. The lesson plan still mattered. The exercise still mattered. The craft still mattered. But they came alive only when they felt safe enough to inhabit the work itself. When listening became the ground of the work, the classroom no longer felt like a place where competence had to be demonstrated. It began to feel like a place where presence could be practiced.

That change is difficult to quantify, but it is unmistakable when it happens. Students begin to stay with one another a little longer. They hesitate before interrupting. They allow silence to do some of the work. They begin to experience themselves as part of something shared rather than as individuals managing their own projection. In those moments, they are not trying to locate themselves through output. They are locating themselves through relation. The rest follows from there.

Rethinking Career Paths

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Connecting Creative and Analytical Skills

“My dad has a totally different expectation for how my life should go,” one student reflected recently. “It sounds easy. He tells me to do one thing, and that that thing will lead to the next thing and the next and the next. But it’s not working that way.”

When asked to explain, he hesitated, then continued. “He told me to go to college, so I did. Two years in, I realized there weren’t enough jobs in my major, so I came back to community college to find a different path. I’m working two jobs and still live at home because I can’t afford to move out. When he tells me about his life, it all sounds easy. He went to college, got a job, bought a house, and got married. It sounds so easy.”

His words captured a generational tension I see often. Namely, the struggle to build a meaningful life in a world that no longer rewards linear scripts. The milestones that once defined adulthood — education, employment, marriage, ownership — rarely appear in sequence. The narrative has fractured, and with that fracture comes both loss and opportunity. Herminia Ibarra describes this shift clearly in Working Identity when she writes, “We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. We reinvent ourselves by doing, experimenting, and stepping into new roles.” It is a problem that calls for a new framework for understanding how work and identity evolve, one I have come to call talent clusters.

The days of the single income and the single career may well be behind us. The camera lens has widened, and with it, the way success is defined must widen too.

Students entering higher education today often inherit an outdated expectation that success depends on finding one right path and staying on it. But the modern economy no longer rewards singularity. It rewards synthesis. This is where talent clusters come in — the natural intersections of ability, curiosity, and experience that form the foundation for meaningful work. Rather than viewing careers as straight lines, these clusters invite students to see the web of connections already present in their interests and skills.

I began noticing this pattern in my own career before I had a name for it. In my life, theatre and communication have been that intersection. They didn’t compete. They conversed. Theatre taught me to listen for subtext, to inhabit perspective, and to read emotion in real time. Communication grounded me in theory and structure. It taught me how messages take shape, how persuasion works, and how to communicate ideas clearly and confidently. Together, they formed a foundation that prepared me not only to teach but also to write, to use language as both performance and connection.

When I began writing professionally, I realized I was drawing from both disciplines at once. The rhythm and tone I developed in the theatre informed my writing voice, while communication theory clarified audience, purpose, and persuasion. What looked like two paths became one integrated practice.

My experience reflects a broader truth. What seems like wandering is often a kind of weaving; the gradual merging of abilities that form something stronger than any single thread. The actor who learns to embody another person’s experience develops the empathy essential to leadership. The stage manager who coordinates complex productions gains logistical precision transferable to project management. The student who studies public speaking acquires the rhetorical awareness needed in advocacy, policy, or entrepreneurship. Each of these evolutions demonstrates the elasticity of transferable skills.

Workforce research supports this pattern. The nonprofit Jobs for the Future identifies communication, problem-solving, and creativity as “the most reliable predictors of long-term employability across industries.” The University of California, San Francisco, similarly defines portable skills as those that endure across shifting technologies and economies. Both findings affirm that artistic and professional fluency share the same core capacities: interpretation, adaptability, and disciplined imagination.

David Epstein, author of Range, writes, “The most effective people are not those who follow one path but those who explore multiple interests and connect them.” The humanities, long dismissed as soft or impractical, may therefore be among the most resilient fields of all. Theatre and communication cultivate habits of perception that remain deeply relevant: reading tone, decoding motive, and adjusting the message to the moment. They prepare students not merely to perform roles but to understand the systems in which those roles operate.

Jonathan Haidt situates this generational experience within an even wider lens. In The Anxious Generation, he notes that many young adults “feel unmoored from the stable institutions that once gave direction to their lives.” Yet that instability, while disorienting, also creates space for creative recombination. The disappearance of predetermined pathways invites a new kind of agency. It becomes the freedom to design lives that integrate multiple disciplines into meaningful coherence.

Many of my former students who began in theatre or communication now work in fields as diverse as consulting, user experience design (UX), public relations, real estate, and education. They have not abandoned their earlier training. They’ve simply translated it. The ability to connect meaning across disciplines has become a form of expertise.

Such an approach reframes the anxiety of choice. By seeking patterns, the recurring connections among their abilities and values, students can seek to define their own paths. A meaningful career, viewed through this lens, becomes a cumulative act of interpretation rather than a fixed destination. The result is not mastery of one discipline but the capacity to see how ideas speak to one another.

Translating Performance into Professional Presence

When I first began writing professionally as a content and copywriter, I noticed something familiar in the process of finding a client’s brand voice or a publication’s style. It felt like preparing a role. The work required listening for rhythm, motivation, and what I call character keys, the same instincts I practiced in the theatre for years. What I once used to understand a character, I now used to understand a brand. That connection not only helped me build continuity between theatre and writing but also gave me early confidence and, more importantly, measurable success. I knew I was on to something.

Theatre taught me that playing a character is rooted in playing action. Every moment on stage is driven by verbs: to lasso, to comfort, to resist, to reveal. Acting is not about emotion but about pursuing intention. Writing works the same way. Every effective sentence carries an action. Good copy does not describe. It moves. Whether the goal is to inform, inspire, or sell, the writer, like the actor, must choose verbs that propel intention forward. Both crafts rely on clarity of motive. The moment the action disappears, the scene or the sentence loses energy.

Theatrical training, often dismissed as niche, is an education in adaptability. It teaches how to read a room, sense emotional temperature, and adjust delivery to context. Those same instincts translate to the written page where attention and authenticity must be earned in every line. To communicate persuasively, whether on stage or in print, requires more than argument. It requires presence.

What ultimately connects these practices is the pursuit of resonance. Whether speaking to an audience or writing to a reader, the communicator’s task is to close the distance between self and other, to let recognition pass quietly between them. That moment of recognition, the shared understanding that this is true for me too, is where both art and communication do their deepest work. Acting teacher Sanford Meisner said (paraphrased), “There is something going on over there (in the other person). And something happening in here (the inner self) . . . truly paying attention is what connects the two.”

Adapting Across Roles and Redefining Success

I’ve had so many students and young people in my own life say things like, “I don’t know what my purpose is,” or “How can I learn what my purpose is supposed to be?” or even, “What is the point of all this?” Part of what they seem to be reacting to is the constant barrage of discouraging news across social media and other platforms. The other part is the same question every generation has asked, only they’re asking it in a new landscape shaped by volatility, comparison, and the pressure to define themselves early. This is where we need to pay close attention. Too often, adults respond with pity, but pity creates distance. Brené Brown says it clearly: “Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection.” If we feel sorry for young people, we project limitations onto them, and we can no longer help them. They don’t need pity. They need hope, presence, and leaders who will help them meet new challenges with other-focused attention.

When most students talk about “purpose,” they’re not usually describing a single calling. They are trying to articulate a desire for coherence in a life that feels connected rather than scattered. In a world of shifting roles and unstable markers of adulthood, purpose emerges from the ways students participate in their communities and apply their abilities to real situations. Jonathan Haidt captures this idea in The Happiness Hypothesis when he writes, “Happiness comes from between.” Meaning, in Haidt’s framing, grows out of the relationships between a person and the world they inhabit: their work, their commitments, and their connections. Purpose is built through engagement, not isolation.

Seen through this lens, transferable skills become essential. They allow students to discover purpose through participation. A graduate trained in theatre and communication may evolve into a writer, strategist, or educator while retaining the same internal architecture of strengths. Each role draws on the same foundation: the ability to interpret, translate, and adapt. Purpose takes shape as those skills meet real needs . . . for others and then for themselves.

For many students, this realization carries profound hope. It suggests that the search for meaning does not require narrowing the self to one direction. One discipline can open the door to another, and together they form a structure that feels cohesive, lived-in, and human.

Identifying Your Talent Clusters: A Reflective Guide

Every person carries a set of abilities that naturally intersect. Some begin as skills. Others begin as interests or instincts that, with attention and practice, develop into genuine strengths. Taken together, these patterns form the early architecture of a talent cluster. The questions below are meant to help you recognize the intersections already present in your work, interests, and habits of mind.

1. Trace your through-lines.

Which activities have consistently engaged your attention or energy across different seasons of life?
Example: Maybe you were the friend who organized school projects, planned events in college, and now color-codes work tasks. That through-line points toward a cluster involving coordination, structure, and leadership.

What themes or methods appear in everything you do, even when the contexts change?
Example: You might notice that wherever you are — school, work, or volunteering —you tend to bring people together. You create group chats, organize meetups, or help resolve tension. That pattern suggests a relationship-building cluster.

Which skills seem to travel with you from one role or discipline to another?
Example: If you have used clear communication in many settings — calming a customer, explaining a task to a teammate, or helping a friend make a decision — that mobility signals a communication cluster that strengthens almost every profession.

2. Name your complementary skills.

What comes naturally to you that others often notice or rely on?
Example: If people often come to you to translate confusing information, whether it’s a work memo, a form, or a family decision, that points toward a clarity and interpretation cluster rooted in communication.

Which strengths balance or enhance one another?
Example: If you love generating ideas but also enjoy organizing them into steps, that pairing suggests a creative-strategy cluster that is valuable in writing, design, planning, or entrepreneurship.

Are there pairings of skills that make you unusually effective or fulfilled when used together?
Example: If you listen deeply but also know how to offer direct solutions, that blend indicates a strategic empathy cluster that is powerful in leadership, counseling, coaching, and team development.

3. Observe your patterns of satisfaction.

When do you feel most alive, focused, or capable?
Example: If you feel most energized when learning something new and then immediately teaching it to someone else, that signals a learning-to-teaching cluster common to educators, trainers, and communicators.

What kinds of tasks give you a sense of both challenge and clarity?
Example: If you love tasks where you get to make something make sense, like editing, organizing, or redesigning, that aligns with a problem-solving and systems cluster.

In which environments do you feel your perspective adds value?
Example: If people often say, I did not see it that way until you explained it, you may have a perspective-shifting cluster that is useful in storytelling, analysis, user experience, and leadership.

4. Reframe your so-called detours.

Look back at past jobs, studies, or interests that seemed disconnected at the time. What common learning thread ties them together now?
Example: If working in childcare taught you patience, retail taught you communication, and volunteer work taught you compassion, the thread points toward a people-centered service cluster.

What did those experiences teach you about how you think, solve problems, or relate to others?
Example: If you notice you always jumped in to calm conflict or clarify misunderstandings, your experiences reveal a mediation and understanding cluster.

Which past experiences might not be mistakes, but the raw material of synthesis?
Example: If a past interest in photography sharpened your eye for visual detail, that experience enriches a visual communication cluster even if you no longer pursue photography itself.

5. Articulate your emerging cluster.

If you had to name the intersection of your skills and passions in one phrase, what would it be, such as creative communication, strategic empathy, or analytical storytelling?

How might this cluster of strengths apply across different fields or industries?

What kinds of work would allow all parts of this cluster to grow together rather than compete?

Get Curious!

Talent clusters are not fixed identities. They’re living relationships among your skills. They reveal what you can do and how your ways of thinking and creating naturally connect. When you recognize those patterns, your career path shifts from feeling like a maze to functioning as a map.

Teaching Gen Z in the Age of AI

For as much as my university colleagues are talking about how AI affects students, and how it’s either sharpening or dulling their cognitive tools for research, I find it curious how little the students themselves are actually using AI or even talking about it. When I brought the topic up with my freshmen, one of them said, “When you say AI, do you mean TikTok?”

That response startled me, but it didn’t entirely surprise me. I work with students ranging from middle school to college: teens and young adults who are bright, creative, curious, and digitally native. They live online. They edit videos, write fanfiction, build memes, and scroll endlessly. They’ve never known a world without the internet. So I assumed, perhaps naively, that when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene, they’d have thoughts, opinions, even fears.

What I’ve seen instead is something more slippery; a kind of casual indifference. AI is in their world, sure, but it doesn’t seem to register as world-changing, at least not in a way they can name.

Surface-Level Familiarity

Most of the students I work with know about AI in the same way they know about autocorrect or Spotify recommendations: it’s background noise. They joke about using ChatGPT to write essays. They’ve seen their favorite YouTubers feed prompts into image generators. They might even follow meme pages that poke fun at AI’s awkwardness.

When I ask how they feel about it—what it means for their future, for creativity, for work—I get blank stares, or shrugs, or “I don’t know, I guess it’s just part of life now.”

This isn’t ignorance. It’s ambient awareness without urgency. Which, ironically, might be even more dangerous.

Apathy or Adaptation?

There’s a fine line between not caring and not questioning because something feels inevitable.

What I’ve come to believe is that many young people are already adapting to AI, but without the language or guidance to examine what that adaptation means. They are, in a sense, growing up alongside the machine and assuming this is simply how things are. As tech philosopher Douglas Rushkoff puts it, “We are living in a world that is no longer about us. We are living in a world designed for technology” (Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed, 2010).

To them, AI isn’t a disruption. It’s just Tuesday.

What Schools Aren’t Teaching

One college student told me, “We never really talk about AI in class unless it’s to say don’t cheat with it.” This reflects a larger issue: many schools are still struggling to update their policies on AI use, and even more so when it comes to adapting their teaching methods. Instead of exploring AI as a tool for learning, the focus tends to be on warning students about using it dishonestly.

While some educators are doing meaningful work to incorporate tech conversations, many schools, especially in the humanities and arts, haven’t integrated AI into their curricula at all. When AI is addressed, it’s often treated as a threat: “Don’t use this to plagiarize.” But that’s not education; it’s a warning label.

Topics like algorithmic bias, the ethics of automation, surveillance capitalism, copyright confusion, and the commodification of creativity are rarely discussed, yet these are exactly the areas that today’s students will inherit. The limited discourse tends to be reactive rather than proactive. In many cases, teachers themselves (me included!) are still figuring out what these tools mean.

And there’s a gap here that’s worth naming: students are increasingly using AI informally (for brainstorming, summarizing, solving equations), but they’re not being taught how to assess its limitations, how it was trained, or what implications it carries. Without structured critical thinking exercises or media literacy units built around AI, students are left to sort fact from fiction on their own. Unsurprisingly, many disengage altogether.

Even though organizations like Common Sense Media and UNESCO have called for AI literacy education (UNESCO, Guidance for Generative AI in Education and Research, 2023), most students are still being handed tools without blueprints. They’re digital natives, but that doesn’t mean they’re digitally literate.

In a discussion with my college freshmen about potential dangers in using AI, one of the students astutely said, “I don’t fear being repetitive, I fear never being able to say something unique because everything has already been said.” Philosophically, I empathized with her statement. I think in some ways we all feel this. But what struck me was that I wondered if she was right.

One of my high school students told me that his father works with AI software and let him use it to write an essay for school—not one he actually turned in, but as a means to demonstrate how AI generation works. The student’s final analysis was that it caused him anxiety. He said, “How can I ever write anything that will be truly helpful to the world? I feel like my brain would have to speed up and get to the point more quickly than AI, and I don’t think that’s possible.” Another student responded, “Calm down, bruh. Just keep playing The Last of Us.” The class laughed. I laughed too. But I also felt a sense of foreboding that I didn’t want to introduce into these fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds.

A Creative Way In

What’s worked best in my world isn’t lecturing about AI ethics; it’s storytelling. And more specifically, asking “what if” questions that make the abstract personal.

For example:

“What if an AI wrote your favorite show, and it was good enough that you didn’t notice?”
“What if your voice was cloned and used in a YouTube ad you never recorded?”
“What if your college application essay was flagged because someone assumed AI wrote it?”
“What if AI generated a fake video of you doing something you didn’t do?”

These questions shift the conversation from distant tech talk to immediate personal stakes. I’ve watched students, middle schoolers even, go from smirking to stunned in a matter of seconds when shown a real deepfake. It’s not just about explaining what generative AI is; it’s about helping them feel the implications of it.

Creative expression helps unlock that shift.

In one class, I asked students to write short monologues from the perspective of someone living in a world where human art is outlawed because AI does it faster. The results were moving. Several wrote about grief. Some wrote about rage. One student wrote about forgetting what real creativity feels like: “I lifted my hand to paint a flower, and the petals reminded me of a flower I saw online. I stopped seeing the real flower and tried to paint the one I remembered instead.”

I don’t know about you, but that still gives me goosebumps.

This kind of imaginative work invites empathy, agency, and reflection—all of which are in short supply when the conversation stays stuck at “AI is just a tool.”

Art-based learning has always been a mirror to society. When we let students look into that mirror through theatre, creative writing, or design, they begin to see their own digital landscape more clearly.

The Urgency of AI Awareness

Middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college students are not just future workers in an AI-saturated economy. They are future parents, pastors, teachers, lawmakers, and ethicists. If they are passive now, the consequences will be exponential later.

And here’s the thing: they don’t need to become experts. They don’t even need to have polished positions. But they do need space to ask questions, and adults who are willing to ask those questions with them.

The rise of AI in their lives is not a looming threat on the horizon. It’s already here, shaping how they search, think, interact, and create. If we want them to be active participants in this moment rather than silent subjects of it, we would serve them well to begin where they are: with curiosity, with context, and with imagination.

The future of AI won’t be written by algorithms. It will be written by the choices we make and by whether we prepare students to shape what comes next.

Tag: Gen Z