From her extensive background in theater as both an actor and award-winning playwright, Maria Kolovou understands that the capacity for learning is heightened through experiences that engage not just the mind but also the body’s senses.
So, in the “Use of AI in College Education,” one of several workshop series Kolovou facilitates each semester as a senior instructional designer with the Platform for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (PETAL) at the University of Miami, she offers exercises that invite faculty participants to explore the distinction between what AI can generate and what humans can experience, highlighting dimensions of learning rooted in embodiment, connection, emotion and meaning-making.
“The purpose is not only to give them AI-assisted pedagogical tools for their work and as a way to help with students’ actual learning but also to highlight what is missing,” said Kolovou. “AI can help us and support us in many ways, but we also need to see what is deeply human that AI cannot offer.”
Kolovou designs and facilitates Faculty Learning Community (FLC), offered in seven sessions over the course of the semester to an interdisciplinary faculty cohort that is convened through a selection process. The FLCs differ thematically, and she’s offering a second this semester on collaborative learning.
The FLC on the use of AI highlights human capacities of connection, relatedness, emotional intelligence, creativity and lived experience. Kolovou noted that, ironically, AI-related education to date has focused largely on skills and traits that AI already does well.
“If we focus on sharing our experience and how we experience something with all our senses—that’s something AI can’t do. It can describe, but it cannot experience,” she said.
“It cannot live an experience. We need to use our whole bodies when we’re learning,” she added. “And it’s important that we share in our teaching all the things that make us human.”
Originally from Athens, Greece, Kolovou earned an undergraduate degree in biology and began her professional career teaching science in her native country. She later earned a master’s degree in applied genetics and biotechnology and another in drama and education at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
“That’s when I started using theater approaches in the classroom to teach, and that led me to come to the University to further research the subject and complete my Ph.D.,” she noted.
After earning her degree in 2023, Kolovou began working with PETAL, where she continues along with teaching the online education course “Applied Learning Science” as an adjunct professor through the School of Education and Human Development.
Last fall she taught an “Experiential Storytelling” FLC workshop that explored ways to teach courses through storytelling—a core component of theater that involves creating immersive worlds through plot, character, setting, perspective and experience.
“It wasn’t just how we use stories to teach our subjects, but more so, how do we immerse students into this world that was relevant to my work in drama and education,” Kolovou explained.
The workshop focused on helping faculty find a thread for their course that connected everything in their curriculum by either creating a story or finding one that allowed for new concepts to become part of the story.
One faculty member intent on teaching about water pollution landed on the real-life example of John Snow, a doctor in 1820 England who sought to find the reasons for the spread of cholera when little was known of the disease or how it was spread.
Students were invited to act as investigators. They viewed maps of the city and plotted dots for the locations of every death. They scoured articles of the era to understand how people were reacting to the spread. They were given roles as people of the time and interviewed each other—and finally realized that a single water pump was the source of the outbreak.
Kolovou donned different hats and outfits—a theater convention that allowed her to shift between her teacher role and that of John Snow himself investigating the crisis.
“We used conventions that theater uses—setting, pictures, dialogue and prompts—and immersed the students into this world so that they could make the discoveries that scientists make,” she said. “They needed to say in their own words why it was important to remove the handle from the pump to stem the crisis, and that’s part of the theater.”
Kolovou addresses a variety of topics for the FLCs that she teaches, but in all, she remains an advocate for using story-based experiential teaching and theater techniques that deepen connections between students and enhance learning.
She has written articles and is developing a handbook to encapsulate her approaches and methodologies, and she and colleague Dina Moulioukova, a senior lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences, presented some of their findings this summer to the American Educational Research Association conference.
“In some of the other FLCs, I do not use these embodied techniques as much, but I do and take a specific angle for the AI workshop,” she said.
“AI cannot substitute for the human experience. It offers us an opportunity to recognize the value of connection, interaction and shared experience, and to bring those dimensions more intentionally into our teaching,” Kolovou added.
