IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION B

Abstract

In higher education, learning conditions are continually reshaped by the accelerating pace of knowledge production, the shrinking half-life of taught skills, and the rapid evolution of technological tools. Technological waves arrive with strong promises and serious cautions, and their effects on learning are context-dependent and uneven. The core aims of education that Biesta identifies (qualification, socialization, and especially subjectification) still require that students develop into ‘grown-up’ subjects who can own and take responsibility for their responses to a world increasingly shaped by AI. Human learning is an ongoing reconstruction of experience, expressed in shifts in how the world is noticed, valued, and acted upon. We therefore use human attention as a lens for examining education’s current value to society and for reorienting it so that knowledge, skills, and technological know-how support human beings as active subjects rather than positioning them as mere vehicles for external aims. Current debates on AI in education foreground the promises, benefits, and risks of AI tools while disregarding how human capacities can be intentionally designed within human–AI learning ecologies. This conceptual paper proposes a set of design-oriented, course-level scenarios for life sciences education that (a) centre human attention as a normative anchor and propose a fourth domain of educational purpose and (b) articulate human–AI relationship narratives that keep educational purpose in view. Synthesising work on the historic functions of education, experience, and human capacities, together with a thematic review of the AI in education literature, we derive three narratives: human-only, human–AI, and progress-driven, and translate these into a narrative-to-design map using the Community of Inquiry framework. This map enables educators to choose deliberately human–AI stances and suggests directions for future empirical inquiry.