Making Space to Think in the Age of AI
Lead image by Jacob Wackerhausen / iStock
By Ahmed Minhas
In the spring of 2025, Shawna Dolansky found herself questioning the future of higher education.
For years, the Carleton University professor in the College of the Humanities had watched students wrestle with history’s greatest texts and develop their own interpretations. Increasingly, however, they arrived at one-on-one meetings with polished, formulaic essay outlines they struggled to explain.
The work looked finished, but the thinking behind it was missing. For Dolansky, the concern was that AI allowed students to bypass the crucial process her courses were designed to teach — reading thoughtfully, sitting with uncertainty, making connections and developing their own ideas.
“They seemed to think that the point of everything we’d learned that year was to hand in a perfect paper,” says Dolansky.
“I don’t want your perfect paper. I want your messy thoughts. I want your ideas,” she told them.
“I want you to be able to turn that mess into something compelling.”
The change pushed Dolansky to rethink how she taught. Her solution was deliberately old school.
Putting Technology-Free Learning into Practice
In a Maclean’s opinion piece that summer, Dolansky announced her classroom would become technology-free in the fall. Laptops and phones would stay in backpacks, students would read physical books, take handwritten notes and discuss texts together.
Students accustomed to taking notes on their laptops were worried they wouldn’t be able to keep up. Dolansky used that discomfort to teach another vital skill: taking notes means deciding what is worth remembering, not recording every word.
As the academic year went on, she noticed a change. One student told her he enjoyed being able to focus without wondering what was happening on social media, which Dolansky described as having his “full brain in the classroom.”
“The culture has really changed for the better,” she explains.
“People are really in the room. They’re present.”
Although removing technology improved student engagement, it also forced Dolansky to rethink take-home assignments, where AI remained readily available.
Over the past year, she experimented with ways to preserve the reflection, revision and deeper thinking those assignments fostered. After finding that surprise in-class writing created anxiety, she shifted to giving students prompts in advance, allowing them time to develop their ideas before writing their essays in class.
It’s an evolving approach, she says, and one she plans to keep refining despite the added time and effort it requires.
Dolansky is clear — she isn’t opposed to AI. She sees its value as a research tool but wants students to develop the ability to judge its output rather than substituting it for their own thinking.
“Yes, they’ll have AI for the rest of their lives,” says Dolansky.
“But they’ll also have their brains for the rest of their lives. And that is what they’ll need to rely on.”
Protecting Critical Thinking in Higher Education
For fellow Carleton humanities professor, Timothy Pettipiece, his suggestion is also not to reject technology outright, but to make intentional room without it.
“We need to think about slowing down the learning process and making it more reflective,” says Pettipiece, who argued for technology-free learning spaces in a University Affairs op-ed.
For Pettipiece, the value of reading a book can’t be reduced to the information it contains. Learning also comes from taking the time to engage with its arguments and perspectives.
“Yes, you could go to ChatGPT and ask for a summary of Plato’s Republic,” he explains.
“But the experience of taking the time to work through, wrestle with and consider these ideas is part of the point. The process is as important as the destination.”
Pettipiece calls this “cognitive autonomy”; the capacity to think critically, weigh differing perspectives and make up one’s own mind. AI has valuable uses, but students need the ability to judge when it helps learning and when it replaces it.
“Both can coexist. We don’t have to choose one or the other,” he says.
“It takes cognitively autonomous people to have the wisdom to understand how these tools should or shouldn’t be used.”
Technology-free learning spaces are not attempts to recreate a world before AI, but an investment in students navigating the world AI is creating.
At Carleton, both professors are investing time and effort in what they see as a fundamental purpose of higher education — giving students space to read critically, ask questions confidently and think independently. As AI becomes more capable, they believe those skills will help students use it with judgment rather than allow it to do the thinking for them.
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