Workshop
Workshop: From Cognitive Skills to Epistemological Training
TBA, 22 October, 09:00-11:00Workshops and Study Visits
From Cognitive Skills to Epistemological Training: Teaching and Evaluating Writing with AI in Mass Higher Education
Generative AI is often addressed in higher education through the language of academic integrity, efficiency, or cognitive support. This workshop proposes a different perspective: the main challenge raised by AI is not only cognitive but epistemological. AI-generated texts combine heterogeneous forms of discourse while concealing the conditions under which knowledge is produced, validated, and situated within a discipline. They may therefore reinforce students’ difficulties in distinguishing academic knowledge from information, opinion, or general cultural discourse.
Drawing on research in the sociology of education and on a pedagogical experiment conducted with university teachers from different disciplines, the workshop will introduce a structural epistemological approach to AI-supported teaching and writing. Participants will experience the difference between a generic Socratic AI approach, which supports reasoning, and discipline-specific epistemological questioning, which makes explicit how knowledge is constructed and validated.
The workshop is intended for university lecturers, educational developers, researchers, and professionals involved in curriculum design, academic writing, assessment, or the pedagogical use of generative AI. Participants from all disciplinary backgrounds are welcome.
Mini-agenda
- Introduction and theoretical framing: AI, mass higher education, and the epistemological fragility of academic writing.
- Guided experimentation: working with a generic Socratic AI structure and identifying its limitations.
- Epistemological transformation: applying discipline-specific questions to the same reasoning process.
- Collaborative redesign: adapting a teaching activity, assignment, or assessment using the proposed framework.
- Collective discussion: transferability across disciplines, institutional constraints, and inequalities in students’ uses of AI.
- Participants are invited to bring one teaching activity or assignment that they would like to examine or redesign.
Presenters
