Conference Program

The global AI debate reveals, at the geopolitical level, what Ivan Illich (1973) would recognize as the emergence of a radical monopoly: the control of artificial intelligence is explicitly and directly tied to the struggle for world leadership, among nations with sharply divergent values, visions, and practices (Aresu 2024). When a technology reaches this threshold, it no longer merely supports human activity but begins to reorganize social and educational experience around efficiency, predictability, and control. Against this backdrop, the relationships between Artificial Intelligence (AI), democratic education, and citizenship formation become not merely relevant but urgent.

Educational technologies are never neutral. The concept of affordance reminds us that tools push toward specific uses while remaining open to different pedagogical orientations: the same instrument can serve transmission-based or constructivist approaches. In Freirean terms, this distinction maps onto the difference between education that reproduces dependency and education that cultivates critical agency (Freire 2014).

This tension becomes particularly acute with AI. Drawing on Ranieri, Biagini and Cuomo's distinction (2023) between educating with and educating about AI - and in dialogue with UNESCO (Miao & Shiohira 2024, Cukurova & Miao 2024) frameworks on AI competencies - we argue that convivial pedagogy requires both dimensions simultaneously: using AI as a dialogical partner while developing the critical literacy to examine its computational logics, biases, and epistemic effects.

A critical pedagogy of AI must begin from where learners actually are. AI is not new to users' experience: long before conscious engagement with tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, it has shaped daily life through recommendation systems operating largely below the threshold of awareness. Levels of AI literacy are highly differentiated and mapping them is not merely a diagnostic exercise - it is itself a pedagogical act. Surfacing implicit perceptions reveals what we might call personal philosophies of AI: tacit assumptions about agency, trust, and knowledge that risk fostering exactly the epistemic dependency and homogenization that convivial pedagogy seeks to counter. Empirical investigation of perceptions and practices thus provides both a necessary starting point for educational design and a means of motivating learners toward more conscious, critical engagement (Bruni & Murgia 2024).

Recent data reveal both the scale and the stakes of this challenge. According to EU Kids Online (Mascheroni, Rosichini & Cino 2026), 89% of Italian children and adolescents used generative AI in the past month - rising to 98% among 15-16-year-olds - primarily as a learning support tool, with ChatGPT described as «a teacher always available». Yet adolescents themselves identify dependency as the dominant risk: AI, they fear, will make them «lazier and less capable». This self-awareness is a pedagogical resource. Drawing on a survey conducted with high school students in Milan, the study maps AI perceptions and practices as a first step toward designing convivial educational environments that harness these tools without surrendering critical agency to them. The findings suggest that a Freirean pedagogy for the AI era must begin precisely here - transforming adolescents' tacit concerns into conscious dialectical inquiry, and their habitual use into reflective, autonomous action.