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Overview

This seminar explores how working, part-time students make sense of the differing approaches to Generative AI (“AI”) use between their workplaces and their studies in UK business schools. Whilst AI has captured the zeitgeist, students’ use of it in HE has been positioned as plagiarism, a form of cheating which has labelled it a taboo topic. This has suppressed student voice, hampered business schools’ AI usage guideline development and the sensemaking of students, educators, and education-related staff. It has also resulted in a proliferation of research into students cheating with AI, further confirming the taboo. Such research offers relatively limited contributions to our understanding as it often lacks the delicate and empathetic approach required to research taboos. 

In this seminar, the speakers will share a qualitative study led by the first author, a working, part-time student researcher, who conducted interviews with 10 working, part-time UK business school students who use AI in both professional and academic study settings. Central to the abductive qualitative approach, an ethics of care was established in the interviews, with self-disclosure by the first author that nurtured participant trust and enabled student voice to be heard and valued. The interview data provided high information power (Malterud et al.,2016) following abductive qualitative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022), highlighting three themes: 1) inevitability, 2) justifiable ethical lines, and 3) exercise of agency. 

This research challenges and contests the application of ‘cheating’ as a concept to understand HE students’ usage of AI. It proposes instead that AI use by students is repositioned in a frame of appropriateness with two recommendations for business schools and more broadly for HE. First, HE institutions should facilitate safe and open environments for dialogue with and between students and staff to foster and develop contextually sympathetic guidelines. Second, HE institutions should neither mandate nor prohibit use of AI in curricula, thus enabling the critical agency of students, educators, and education-related staff to develop and nurture ongoing dialogue to accommodate changing contexts and positionalities. By querying how HE students who also work make sense of the differing approaches to Generative AI usage for their studies and for their workplaces, the nature of this work crosses disciplinary boundaries and offers implications beyond specific subject disciplines. It aims to contribute to the fluid understanding of academic practice as mutually constitutive, bounded by interpretations and actions of multiple actors, including students as core and active agents within HE.

Speaker bios

Daniel Lloyd is a part-time independent researcher. His current research introduces student voice into the discussion around student use of GenAI in business school education – recently presented to a closed session of Birkbeck Business School teaching staff. Following what he describes as a "life changing" Selection and Assessment module, as part of his Organisational Psychology MSc, Daniel developed an interest in the problematisation of mainstream practices that perpetuate social inequalities. He often takes the opportunity to be the dissenter in the room and speaks up for those not present, and those without a voice. Daniel has been working in finance since the mid 1990s, and a 4 year stint running his own artisanal picture-framing business until 2020. Having returned to finance he specialises in renewable energy fund management. Daniel holds a Non-Executive Director certificate from the ICAEW, and completed his MSc in Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London in 2025. 

Dr Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya is Reader in Work and Organization at Birkbeck Business School, Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She is an interdisciplinary equality and diversity scholar with two decades of teaching and research experience in organizational psychology, organizational behaviour, and human resource management. Her overall research programme focuses on diverse and unequal working lives and how they intersect with social and structural inequalities. As an educator, Uracha holds a deep commitment to social justice through her curriculum, which underpins her critical pedagogical practice.