From Imagination to Image: Using AI Art with Special Education Students.

As a school director, it’s essential for me to carve out time in my schedule to work directly with students. In my dissertation, I wrote about using AI with students who have high-incidence disabilities. The primary disability I work with is emotional disability, and this past week during our student art school, I decided to have some of my students generate AI art.

Here is the process I followed: First, I gave students a worksheet asking them to describe what they wanted to create. After they turned in their worksheets, I scanned them, uploaded them into Claude, and had Claude generate detailed prompts. Then I put those prompts into ChatGPT’s image generator, and out came the images.

When the students saw the images, they were excited—genuinely excited to see their work brought to life through their own imagination.

Culture has always used technology to bring imagination to life. Steamboat Willie came out in 1928, and Walt Disney wasn’t using a live mouse at the helm of a boat. Technology was a helper to one person’s imagination. So instead of seeing AI as some sort of threat, perhaps we should reframe it as a tool to assist our learners in finding ways to bring their ideas to life. You can see the images on my site.

Question for readers:How might you use AI as a bridge between your students’ imagination and creative expression, especially for learners who face barriers to traditional art-making?