Book Review: José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (2nd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025, 400 pages.

Abstract

There are moments in the history of education when the ground does not merely shift, but is reconstituted. The second edition of Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning arrives at precisely such a moment. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has moved with unusual speed from novelty to necessity, from experimental curiosity to everyday academic presence. In that context, José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson offer a book that is at once practical, reflective, and deeply provocative. Their work does not ask whether artificial intelligence belongs in education. Instead, it starts from the recognition that AI is already present and asks the more important question: how should teachers, students, and institutions respond with intellectual seriousness? This is what makes the book particularly valuable. Many recent discussions of AI in education fall into one of two extremes. One treats AI as a revolutionary solution that will modernise teaching, personalise learning, and liberate educators from routine work. The other treats it primarily as a threat to originality, an engine of cheating, and a force that will weaken thought itself. Bowen and Watson avoid both simplifications. Their argument is more disciplined and more useful. They neither romanticise AI nor demonise it. Instead, they treat it as a structural challenge that requires educators to rethink teaching, assessment, and the meaning of learning in an age of machine-assisted cognition.