Generative AI as a Teaching Assistant: An Analytical Study of Teacher Mediation in Higher-Secondary Urdu Literary Textbook Activities

Abstract

Generative AI is increasingly used in education, but its pedagogical value depends on how its outputs are evaluated and adapted by teachers. This study examines generative AI as a teaching assistant in four selected higher-secondary Urdu literary textbook activities from Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi’s essay Kafi, wit Former MS Education Student, National University of Modern Languages (NUML), Islamabadh particular attention to teacher mediation. A qualitative textual and pedagogical analysis was conducted using standardized prompts. The analytical framework combined the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy with critical-thinking indicators derived from Facione, while teacher mediation was examined from a sociocultural perspective. The findings show that generative AI can suggest useful pedagogical possibilities, including scaffolding, comparison, textual evidence, and reasoning, revision, and source evaluation. However, teacher judgement remained necessary to align these suggestions with the literary text, students’ level, curricular purpose, cultural context, and academic reliability. The analysis also showed that higher-order thinking and critical thinking should not be treated as equivalent. Four provisional dimensions of teacher mediation emerged: cognitive, interpretive and literary, creative, and epistemic mediation. The study does not claim improvement in students’ critical thinking, as no classroom intervention or learning outcomes were measured. Rather, it suggests that generative AI is more appropriately positioned as a source of pedagogical possibilities under teacher supervision than as a provider of ready-made answers. Further classroom-based research is needed to examine these dimensions across different Urdu literary texts and teaching contexts.

Keywords: Generative AI; Teacher Mediation; Critical Thinking; Literary Pedagogy; Urdu Language Education