Conference Program

This paper documents an intensive Formazione Scuola Lavoro (FSL) module carried out in January 2026 with a fourth-year class (16 students) at a liceo linguistico in northern Italy. The module was jointly designed and delivered by a secondary school teacher of English language and literature and a pedagogy graduate researcher working as FSL tutor for an educational technology company. Both contributors brought distinct but genuinely pedagogical frameworks to the design: the former rooted in narrative and literary-disciplinary practice, the latter in competency-based education and FSL assessment: producing a collaborative authorship that shaped both the project's architecture and the interpretation of its outcomes. The project work took podcast production as its central device: a format requiring students to move through a complete cycle of competencies (critical analysis of AI systems, collaborative negotiation of topic and format, editorial co-design with an AI tutor, and performative audio production). This cycle was deliberately structured as a progression, with each phase requiring a greater degree of initiative and autonomous decision-making than the previous one. An encounter with professional podcasters mid-process introduced an external standard of communicative quality, shifting students' self-perception from task-completers toward communicative authors accountable to a real audience.

Three Black Mirror episodes were used as the analytical entry point, mediated through DOK-structured scaffolding across four cognitive levels. The AI tutor askLea was introduced only after a phase of peer negotiation, designed to function as a critical interlocutor. Conversation logs document patterns of interaction ranging from passive, delegating acceptance of AI output to increasingly directive and evaluative prompting. The conditions that appeared to shift students from one posture to the other constitute the central analytical focus of this contribution.

The paper's primary research question is not whether the module "worked", but under what conditions critical agency with AI tools emerged or failed to emerge. To address this question, the paper will draw on triangulation across three data sources (askLea conversation logs, direct observation records from the sessions, and a final Likert-scale questionnaire on perceived competency development, with particular attention to the tensions between self-reported autonomy and observed interaction behaviour. Where these sources diverge, the divergence itself will be treated as pedagogically significant data, pointing to the gap between perceived and enacted competency.

The experience is presented with deliberate transparency about its unevenness: fragmented group dynamics, intermittent engagement, and products of variable quality. In an FSL framework, this unevenness maps precisely where transversal competencies require further pedagogical attention, and it is from that mapping that the contribution's practical implications are drawn.