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Webinars

Approaching Critical AI Literacy for Students and Faculty with Compassion: Nurturing Agency, Recognizing and Mitigating Bias

Tuesday, January 20, 2026
11:00 am – 12:00 pm (Eastern Time)

AI is reshaping how students and faculty learn, teach and make decisions, raising urgent questions about bias, agency and equity in academic spaces. As these tools become embedded in everyday practice, educators need approaches that go beyond simple “how-to” skills and instead foster critical, compassionate engagement.

This webinar explores how to cultivate critical AI literacy in creative, accessible ways that support both student and faculty learning. Grounded in a compassionate learning design model, the session will examine how bias and harm can manifest in AI systems, and how we might thoughtfully respond and redress these impacts in our own contexts.

Participants will gain practical strategies to nurture human agency in the age of AI, make equity-centred decisions about when and how to use AI, and design learning experiences that invite reflection, care and ethical responsibility rather than fear or avoidance.

Key takeaways

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

  • Promote critical AI literacy in creative and engaging ways
  • Recognize potential harms arising from bias in AI and make informed decisions about how to redress them
  • Apply the compassionate learning design model to their own approaches to AI
  • Prioritize nurturing human agency in an AI-saturated educational landscape
  • Make decisions about their response to AI that explicitly centre equity in teaching and learning

Host:

Maha Bali photo
Maha Bali
Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching, American University in Cairo
Professor Bali has a PhD in Education from the University of Sheffield, UK. She is co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org, a grassroots movement that challenges academic gatekeeping at conferences. She is also co-facilitator of Equity Unbound, an equity-focused, open, connected intercultural learning curriculum that has branched into academic community activities Continuity with Care, Socially Just Academia, a collaboration with OneHE: Community-building Resources, and MYFest, an innovative three-month professional learning journey. She writes and speaks frequently about social justice, critical pedagogy, and open and online education. She also blogs regularly at https://blog.mahabali.me and tweets @bali_maha.