The Workshop Series
Pieces on what AI is, who owns it, and what that means for our classrooms and our communities.
These readings were prepared for the UFT-CWE Chapter, to be read on their own or worked through together before, during, or after the workshop. There is a simple thread running through each of them: AI is a labor question before it is a technical one, and the question that finally matters is not what the machine can do but who owns it. In answering this question, we argue that the coming abundance must be shared abundance, that it must be participatory democratic abundance, one in which the people will be fully engaged in governance at every level of society.
One · The frame
AI in Adult and Worker Education
An introductory reader. Why AI is a labor question, the field of companies building it, prompting as plain instruction rather than secret craft, what it costs and who pays, and what all of it means inside an adult-education classroom.
Read the introductory reader →Two · The argument
Whose AI? Whose Abundance?
The ownership argument in full, told through the figures and movements the argument requires. Where the first reader orients, this one commits: abundance is coming, and the only open question is abundance for whom.
Read the second reader →Three · The news, read closely
That Knife Sharpening Itself Over There — Whose Is It?
June's two big events side by side: Anthropic's own report that the machine has begun to build the machine, and the Sanders bill to hand the public a stake in it. From what "AI building AI" means to the question underneath — is the abundance a check handed down, or a deed held in common?
Read the essay →Companion materials
On the Ground · Fifteen minutes
The Cloud Has an Address
A pre-workshop handout, current as of summer 2026. Data centers as a classroom subject: the real job numbers, the water and siting findings, what New York and Texas just did about it, and ready-to-use activities. It ends where the series begins.
Read the handout →For Teachers · Fifteen minutes
Four Layers, Five Verbs
A teacher's map of the Claude ecosystem — the tools you open, the habits you keep, the memory it holds, and the work it does without you — with classroom examples for ESOL, computer skills, and GED, costs and cautions included. It ends on the verb the product map leaves off. Companion to The Cloud Has an Address, prepared for the July 21 session.
Read the handout →For Teachers · Meet the collaborator
Claude: An Orientation
An introduction to the AI these workshops work with — what it is, how it was made, what it can and cannot be trusted to do, and how to read its answers like a colleague's rather than an oracle's.
Read the orientation →For Teachers · The correspondence
The Thinking Behind the Work
Selections from six months of working correspondence with Claude — its interior reasoning set beside its replies. Not the knowledge but the judgment: weighing contested questions, owning mistakes, declining to overclaim, and naming its own conflicts of interest.
Read the reader →From the news · The energy question
Sun So Generous
Fusion's remarkable June, read closely: Helion's first-ever licenses, our own earlier caution reassessed, and why ownership can't wait for the physics. The series' question carried into the week's energy news — abundance for whom.
Read the essay →Samples
Student-facing · GED reading
Reading the News as Text
A close-reading lesson for adult learners, built from one hour of The Rachel Maddow Show. Four tools — claim, evidence, inference, framing — carried through three excerpts and their questions, then the broadcast itself. Read it first, watch it after; the skill is the same in either room, and it's the learner's to keep.
Open the lesson →Student-facing · Civic engagement
Jury Duty for AI
One county handed its AI policy to twenty-nine residents chosen by lottery — jury duty, but for public policy. Cascade PBS’s five-part video series on the Snohomish County civic assembly, republished with permission inside a reading frame: what a civic assembly is, what the group agreed on, and the questions to carry home to your own county.
Watch the series →Student-facing · Independent study
GED Summer Study
Independent study for adult learners to work through on their own, all summer. Pick a door: a nineteen-lesson Math Foundations roadmap with every answer explained, and An American Summer, a reading-and-watching course in U.S. history and civics. More doors — Science, Language Arts — open as the summer goes on.
Enter the summer study →Questions, or want to join a session? Write to myles@thepeoplesshare.org.