Presentation at SRHE seminar series AI and Inclusive Education

Description of Activity

Abstract

The recent introduction of ChatGTP and other generative AI platforms has stimulated much debate and concerns (Grundy 2024; UN 2024). Much of which resonates with debates surrounding the introduction of social media platforms at the turn of the 21st century (Prensky 2000; Davies 2010; Kowalski, Limber, and Agatston 2012; DfE 2014).

In the field of secondary and higher education, concerns focus on notions of inclusion held in tension between celebrating the role of AI in extending human capabilities and activities and the dumbing down or replacing of existing skills deemed necessary for students’ social and academic development. Two key questions emerge; i. what kind of ethical subjects are we seeking to produce? and, ii. how do we train students to work in synergy with AI?

Taking the assertion that human beings and AI have the capacity to learn but, apart from AI, humans have the capacity to be taught and to receive teaching (Biesta 2016a; 2024), I consider these questions in the context of a coinciding education debate. Here, equality and inclusion are claimed impossible in the context of the modern European school as an institution of normalisation (Ball and Collet-Sabe 2021; 2022). Subsequently, calls to think differently apart from schools are made in favour of more ethical activities that explore the limits and a politics of the self by creating educational spaces that support self-formation and practices of collaboration. Specifically, meeting the needs of individuals, communities and the environment as a holistic project.

It is at the confluence point of these debates and with the context of collaboration in mind that I offer an informal education pedagogy as a conceptual framework to nurture discursive and more inclusive educational spaces within students’ homes, social and community sites. This, I argue, might support and extend their holistic development and learning in synergies with emergent AI platforms but not apart from being taught and receiving teaching within their broader relationships that nurture and sustain holistic (social and academic) self-formation.

Period	14 May 2025
Held at	Society for Research into Higher Education, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International