The pilot study draws on critical infrastructure and future studies, as well as educational theory, to examine the visions for the future of education developed within AI Education (AIEd). AIEd is also an innovative field for applied Computing Science and engineering research. Education is regarded here as a socially significant ‘use case’ for developing and testing new AI technologies. These new technologies promise to become the central knowledge infrastructures of public education in the future; however, the rapidly expanding research field of AIEd encourages researchers to develop such systems without specialist pedagogical expertise. EdUC is compiling a focused corpus of recent AIEd publications in which no educational scientists were involved, and utilises methods from discourse analysis, digital social sciences and digital humanities to reconstruct (i) models of education and learning, (ii) pedagogical values and norms, and (iii) forms of subjectification contained within these texts. The project’s publications systematise these findings by examining which future prospects are opened up or closed off by the resulting AI technologies, and to what extent these potentially compete with the future prospects prioritised in educational theory. A particular focus of the analysis is on the potentially unequal impacts on learners.

Funded by: Northwest Advanced

Duration: 2026–2027