Conference Agenda

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, is reshaping teaching and learning practices in higher education across Europe and internationally. Universities increasingly adopt AI-driven systems for assessment, feedback, tutoring, and content generation, often justified through discourses of efficiency, personalization, and innovation (Azhar et al., 2025; Vieira et al., 2025). Despite this rapid uptake, recent systematic reviews show that research on AI in higher education remains dominated by application oriented and technology-acceptance approaches, with limited attention to pedagogy, disciplinary knowledge practices, and epistemological implications (Bond et al., 2024; Yan et al., 2024). This PhD-in-progress addresses this gap by examining AI integration as a pedagogical and didactical issue rather than a purely technical one. The study is situated within a European higher education context, where AI adoption intersects with long-standing didactical traditions, disciplinary autonomy, and emerging debates on responsible and human-centered AI. It adopts the premise that higher education is not reducible to information transfer or skills acquisition but involves inducting students into disciplinary ways of knowing: how knowledge is constructed, validated, interpreted, and judged within academic fields. Teaching is therefore simultaneously pedagogical and epistemological, as instructional decisions embody assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge and understanding. Emerging research indicates that engagement with generative AI varies substantially across disciplines, reflecting differences in epistemological commitments and pedagogical traditions (Qu et al., 2024). In science-based and technical disciplines, AI use is often framed as supporting efficiency, optimization, and procedural correctness (Kotsis, 2025). Humanities, social sciences, and professional fields report stronger concerns regarding judgement, originality, and the epistemic status of AI-generated outputs. While some case-based studies suggest that generative AI can support higher-order thinking when embedded in carefully designed pedagogical strategies (Fan et al., 2025), other research highlights risk of overreliance, weakened pedagogical relationships, and diminished human judgement when AI substitutes rather than supports teaching and learning processes (Crawford et al., 2024). Recent conceptualizations of AI as a ‘collaborative co-agent’ in education (Katsenou et al., 2025) further intensify these concerns by challenging traditional notions of epistemic authority and responsibility. Similarly, studies of AI-supported relational learning point to alternative design logics that move beyond efficiency yet remain under-theorized from a didactical and epistemological perspective (Bornemann et al., 2025). Together, these developments underline the need for a discipline-sensitive investigation of how AI enters pedagogical relationships and reconfigures authority, validation, and participation in knowledge practices. Accordingly, the study addresses three research questions: 1. How does the adoption and integration of AI tools in higher education teaching practices shape disciplinary epistemologies and knowledge-making practices? 2. How are pedagogical relationships and epistemic authority reconfigured through human-machine interaction in teaching and learning contexts? 3. What ethical-epistemic principles can guide AI implementation while preserving pedagogical integrity, human agency, and disciplinary responsibility? The theoretical framework integrates socio-constructivist learning theory (Vygotsky & Cole, 1978) with classical didactics, particularly the didactic triangle (teacher-student-content), understood as an epistemic relationship through which students are initiated into disciplinary knowledge practices (Kansanen, 2009; Klafki, 2012). To analyze how educators negotiate AI integration across disciplines, the study also draws on the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework as an organizing lens (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). AI adoption is thus conceptualized as a process of pedagogical and epistemological reconfiguration rather than simple technological uptake.

Autistic students in higher education (HE) frequently demonstrate strengths that are highly valuable for academic success - deep focus, attention to detail, creativity, persistence, and strong technological skills (e.g. Anderson et al., 2017). Yet, they also face distinct challenges related amongst others to social interaction, executive functioning, sensory processing and time management. These challenges can translate into lower grades, delayed progress, and dropout risk (e.g. Duerksen et. al, 2017; Cai & Richdale, 2016). Simultaneously, autism diagnoses in adulthood are rising (O’Nions et al., 2023), while the number of autistic students in HE institutes has likewise increased internationally (Higher Education Statistics Agency – HESA, 2024; White et al., 2011). Universities worldwide must therefore be prepared to respond to more diverse learner needs with effective, research-informed supports.

Existing HE supports for autistic students predominantly emphasize individualized accommodations. While important, these do not fully address social participation, sense of belonging, or community integration - factors tightly coupled with student engagement and retention (Korhonen et al., 2024). Peer support is a promising but underexplored modality in HE for autistic students. Studies so far mostly report “peers” as neurotypical mentors, which can overlook the core peer-support principle of shared lived experience. Exploring, developing and suggesting solutions might be challenging, if the supporting peer has problems empathizing and understanding the autistic experience, often calling for divergent learning and coping strategies (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2019). Recent research furthermore indicates a communicative mismatch between autistic and non-autistic people (Milton, 2012; Crompton et al., 2020), which may lower efficiency of social interaction and weaken the experience of support. In contrast, autistic-to-autistic peer support may strengthen belonging, enable the exchange of experiential knowledge, and foster the development of autistic know-how and practices for learning.

This study forms one component of an exploratory qualitative PhD project investigating peer support groups for autistic students at Tampere University. It focuses on two key areas and asks: (1) what are autistic students’ experiences and perceptions of participating in these groups, and (2) in what ways has peer support influenced students’ overall engagement in their studies. The broader PhD project also includes two further studies, examining autistic social communication and interaction, as well as processes of knowledge and community building that emerge in peer support group settings. Together, the three parts provide a comprehensive account of the functioning of peer support groups for autistic students and of the outcomes and meanings they generate.

As this research will focus on group support in HE, a useful theoretical base for this study will consist of community of practice theory (Wenger, 1998), which emphasizes the meaning and importance of community and social involvement for learning. Developed from this theory is a model of student engagement in HE by Korhonen et al. (2024), tying together individual and collective level factors relevant for successful study progress and student wellbeing. Most autistic students’ challenges fall into the categories important for student engagement to happen, e.g. developing academic skills, finding and clarifying the meaning of their studies, participating safely in their peer communities and experiencing socially constructed practices for supporting them. This will evidently have an effect for their student identity and sense of belonging. This model will therefore offer a suitable framework for investigating the effects of peer support groups on autistic students’ engagement. The study furthermore follows an enactive approach to social cognition and interaction (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007).

Following contemporary recommendations, this research takes a neurodiversity affirming and non-pathologizing approach, as well as the viewpoint of the social model of disability, which highlights society’s responsibility in creating disabling barriers for people with different kinds of impairments.

The international circulation of higher education reforms such as the Bologna Process and the Licence–Master–Doctorate (LMD) structure is often framed as a process of harmonisation and modernisation. However, critical scholarship in comparative education has shown that these reforms are embedded in implicit power relations and hierarchical academic orders, where some countries define standards while others are expected to conform in order to gain access to funding, mobility, and symbolic recognition (Charlier & Croché, 2012; Cowen, 2009; Ravinet, 2009).

The Algerian case illustrates these tensions. Rapidly adopted in 2004, the LMD reform was intended to align the national system with European higher education frameworks and signal international integration. Yet its concrete appropriation within institutions remains uneven and contested.

Research question and theoretical framework

This study examines how internationally circulating higher education reforms are translated and enacted within national university systems. Focusing on the adoption of the Licence–Master–Doctorate (LMD) reform in Algeria, it asks: How do university actors construct, negotiate, and contest the legitimacy of internationally promoted reform models, and how does this legitimacy work shape what institutions are actually able to implement in practice? Rather than treating reform as a linear process of policy transfer, the study seeks to understand why alignment with global standards does not necessarily lead to substantive organisational or pedagogical change.

The theoretical framework combines three complementary perspectives. First, scholarship on policy transfer and circulation (Musselin, Charlier & Croché, Ravinet) is used to analyse reforms as travelling policies shaped by asymmetrical power relations rather than neutral diffusion. Second, a sociology of legitimacy perspective helps explain how certain models become recognised as “valid” or “modern”, while others are marginalised, thereby structuring actors’ margins of action. Third, insights from the sociology of curriculum and institutional work allow the study to examine how reforms are translated, negotiated, and sometimes reinterpreted at the meso and micro levels of programmes and everyday practices.

The Algerian case provides a particularly relevant lens for understanding these dynamics at a European and international scale. The LMD reform explicitly derives from the Processus de Bologne and aims to align the national system with European higher education standards. Analysing its local translation therefore contributes to broader debates on how European policy models travel beyond Europe, how legitimacy is constructed in North–South academic relations, and how internationally promoted knowledge shapes the conditions for action in diverse higher education contexts.

Against the backdrop of an accelerating new wave of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, international competition is increasingly centered on national competitiveness in research talent, and world-class universities are responding by expanding organized research and interdisciplinary initiatives. In this context, interdisciplinary research institutes differ from traditional departments in governance structure, staffing arrangements, and modes of research organization. They have become key organizational carriers through which universities channel high-caliber researchers toward strategic fields and advantaged platforms. Yet in practice, these institutes commonly face persistent challenges. Research talent may circulate rapidly while long-term retention remains low, talent agglomeration is often sustained through loosely coupled “virtual” projects rather than consolidated and substantively institutionalized organizational structures, and career development pathways for early-career researchers are frequently ambiguous. Accordingly, this study focuses on how interdisciplinary research institutes, through formal institutional design and effective implementation, convert short-term attraction into long-term attachment. On this basis, it comparatively examines how different institutes form differentiated models of talent agglomeration. To enable systematic comparison, the study selects six recently established yet fast-growing interdisciplinary research institutes as cases. The cases include the MIT Media Lab, the Oxford Martin School, and the Institute for Climate Change and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University. Case selection is guided by the scope of their research influence and the primary missions they undertake. Collectively, these cases represent three salient functional orientations: frontier knowledge production, public governance, and research application with industry linkage. The theoretical framework integrates the Van Meter and Van Horn systems model of policy implementation with the Attraction–Selection–Attrition (ASA) model from person–organization fit theory. This integration connects individual–organizational matching dynamics with an organizational governance perspective and highlights how standards and objectives, resource conditions, inter-organizational relations, implementer dispositions, and the wider institutional environment shape the functioning and effectiveness of formal institutions. Within this integrated framework, the study first underscores that talent agglomeration exerts a pivotal influence on research institutes’ scholarly output and societal impact. Talent agglomeration is conceptualized as a dynamic process shaped by formal organizational institutions, rather than a simple matter of attraction and headcount concentration. This process unfolds across four interrelated stages: initial attraction, talent selection, sustained retention, and synergistic reinforcement. Through these stages, formal rules and organizational routines progressively stabilize affiliation, structure internal collaboration, and strengthen organizational competitiveness. Building on this analytical framework, the study seeks to identify which institutional instruments and implementation conditions are most decisive in determining whether initial inflows can be transformed into durable organizational attachment. It further aims, through systematic cross-case comparison, to examine whether recognizable types of talent agglomeration models can be identified among interdisciplinary research institutes at world-class universities, and to clarify the shared and differentiating features of these types in relation to institutional missions and structural positioning within broader higher education and research systems.

School autonomy with accountability (SAWA) has become a centerpiece of educational reforms in recent decades, promoted as a global policy model to increase effectiveness and equity in educational systems, and to encourage innovation (Verger et al., 2019). While numerous studies have analyzed SAWA reforms and effects, focusing mainly on sanction-driven accountability systems, research analyzing alternative approaches to SAWA is still scarce. Using the SAWA reform introduced in 2019 by the “Pact for Excellence in Teaching” in French-speaking Belgium (Wallonia-Brussels Federation, Fr-BE) as an empirical case, particularly because it promotes a reflexive approach to accountability and because of the specifics of the Fr-BE education system (decentralized, fragmented, and segregated), the general aim of this paper presentation is to understand the policy enactment process.

In Fr-BE, the governance reform mandated by the Pact represents a clear turning point towards SAWA (Cattonar & Dupriez, 2019). Since 2019, every school in Fr-BE has been required to draw up a “steering plan” which, once approved by the educational authorities, becomes a “contract of objectives”. These plans and contracts define a set of objectives to be achieved by the schools and specify the means they will use to achieve them. The implementation of the contract, which covers a period of six years, is subject to two external evaluations conducted by the administration: the first after three years and the second at the end of the cycle. Throughout the process, from the development of plans based on a diagnosis to the implementation of actions to achieve the selected objectives, schools are expected to use their autonomy to develop collaborative dynamics in key areas such as teaching, pedagogical practices, and the management of material and human resources.

Rooted in the principles of new public management (Hood, 1991), the SAWA-type educational policy (Verger et al. 2019), recently introduced into the Fr-BE education system, strongly promotes school autonomy while simultaneously introducing accountability measures through management tools. These tools rely heavily on data-intensive mechanisms, such as the use of large-scale external and standardized assessments and performance monitoring to hold schools (and teachers) accountable for achieving predefined outcomes (Tröhler et al., 2014).

Recent studies on the enactment of SAWA in schools have underscored both the influence of contextual factors and the crucial role played by school teams, and particularly school leaders, in shaping how accountability pressures are perceived. Elements such as a school’s performance level or its relative position within the local education market significantly affect how actors interpret and respond to SAWA policy demands.

Accountability pressures can lead to variable implementation processes and diverse responses to policy requirements (Barbana et al., 2020; Braun et al., 2011; Pagès et al., 2023; Verger and Skedsmo, 2021). For example, while some teachers align their practices with accountability expectations, others ignore or resist policy requirements (Maroy and Pons, 2019; Verger et al., 2021). Other studies have emphasised the importance of stakeholder perceptions in shaping how policies are received and implemented (Coburn, 2005, Draelants, 2006; Braun et al., 2011; Verger et al., 2021).

This study aims to examine how school leaders perceive and interpret the SAWA reform in Fr-BE. More specifically, we will attempt to answer the following research question: How do school leaders perceive and interpret the SAWA reform in contexts characterized by varying levels of accountability pressure?

Higher education is increasingly expected to prepare students to contribute to societal change under conditions of poly-crisis, characterised by intersecting ecological, social, political, and technological disruptions. In such contexts, sustainability challenges are not only complex but also uncertain, contested, and time-pressured. Environmental and sustainability education (ESE) has responded to these expectations primarily through competence frameworks that emphasise cognitive capacities such as systems thinking and problem analysis (Wiek et al., 2011; Brundiers et al., 2021; Bianchi, 2022). While these capacities remain important, poly-crisis conditions foreground a complementary challenge: students’ willingness, confidence, and capacity to act, collaborate, and implement change in practice.

This contribution addresses this challenge by focusing on affective–behavioral change agency (ABCA), understood as students’ developing disposition and capacity to engage in change-oriented action. ABCA captures dimensions of agency that are particularly salient in poly-crisis contexts, where acting often involves navigating uncertainty, coordinating with diverse actors, and persisting despite limited control over outcomes. Although such dimensions are central to theoretical accounts of sustainability education and action competence (Jensen & Schnack, 1997; Redman & Wiek, 2021; Sass et al., 2020), they remain under-examined empirically in higher education research. Existing studies continue to privilege cognitive learning outcomes, in part because these are more readily operationalised and measured with established instruments (Rogaten et al., 2019; Probst, 2022).

The study presented in this proposal examines how experiential pedagogies relate to the development of ABCA across sustainability-oriented master’s programmes. Experiential pedagogies are conceptualised as educational approaches that emphasise authentic engagement with real-world issues, structured collaboration, and student agency within open-ended project contexts (Kolb, 2014; Breunig, 2005). Such pedagogies are frequently advocated as appropriate responses to the complexity of sustainability challenges, yet longitudinal evidence on how they shape students’ affective–behavioral agency over time remains scarce (Burch et al., 2019). Addressing this gap, the study is guided by the following research question: How do experiential pedagogies shape students’ affective–behavioral change agency during their master’s programmes?

The proposed Ignite Talk presents the study at the point of initial field deployment, when survey instruments have been piloted and ethical approval is being finalised. Rather than reporting outcomes, the contribution foregrounds two methodological challenges that are particularly relevant for ESE research engaging with poly-crisis conditions: recruiting students at programme entry and managing retention and attrition over time. The session invites reflection on how such challenges affect the study of affective-behavioral agency and how ESE research might better align its methodological practices with the complex realities of sustainability education in higher education.

Children and youth are experiencing higher levels of stress (Stapp & Lambers, 2020) and as mental health challenges continue to grow (Smith et al., 2024) children are more susceptible to stress and increased expectations to succeed in school (Stapp & Lambers, 2020). Compounding this problem is children’s elevated exposure to the internet, media, and communication technologies (Hagen & Nayar, 2014), as they continue to recover from disruptions to social isolations and learning routines in response to the global pandemic, which has had a significant impact on children’s mental health, including the Kids Help Phone receiving a 42% increase in calls related to stress during this time (Gadermann et al., 2021). More than one-third of youth experienced mental health challenges during the pandemic, with historically marginalized populations and youth living in poverty at greater risk for deleterious mental health outcomes (Smith et al., 2024). Research continues to demonstrate that yoga and mindfulness can be a helpful tool in negating mental health challenges that children and youth continue to face (Broderick & Metz, 2009; Butzer et al., 2016; MacPherson & Rockman, 2023) and increasing their well-being, a key indicator of their academic success (Holmes, 2024; Shanktland et al., 2024). A school-based yoga program ensures that all students have equal access to practices that support physical, mental, and emotional health, fostering holistic well-being. Knowing how to best integrate these practices supports teachers in cultivating a holistic pedagogy that fosters well-being and supports their students with tools to build resilience, manage stress, succeed in school, and thrive in the world.
The aim of this research, Creating Opportunities for Well-being in the Classroom: Understanding Teachers’ and Students’ Experiences of Yoga in Schools with Historically Marginalized Populations, is to explore the impact of a school-based yoga program for upper elementary school teachers and their students in schools with populations with historically marginalized groups and students experiencing economic exclusion and poverty. These populations traditionally experience opportunity barriers which are reflected in their academic achievement. A second aim is to understand how teachers working with these populations can be best supported in successfully integrating these practices of well-being into the classroom. Currently in Nova Scotia, yoga is offered as a physical education credit course in grade 11 (Yoga 11, a government-approved course in K–12 school systems).
This research responds to the call for yoga to be introduced to students at an earlier age (Robinson & Berezowski, 2016), so that they can access tools that may help them reduce stress, develop self-awareness, self-confidence, and balance throughout their development. Guided by critical narrative inquiry, the core focus of this research is shaped by teacher and student participants’ lived experiences and personal narratives, informed on how they have been informed by time, place, and sociality contexts.
The objectives of the study are to:

· Determine how a school-based yoga program may impact upper elementary school teachers’ and students’ physical, mental, and social-emotional well-being.

· Understand what background and training (if any) teachers need to successfully integrate yoga into their classroom.

The questions that will guide this research are:

1. What are the experiences of upper elementary school teachers teaching a school-based yoga program in a school with historically marginalized populations?

2. What are the experiences of upper elementary students participating in a school-based yoga program in a school with historically marginalized populations?

3. What do the participants (teachers and students) learn and understand about themselves (physical, mental, and social-emotional awareness) by participating in daily yoga lessons?