Conference Agenda

This panel addresses two interrelated questions: What constitutes foundational knowledge in higher education (HE), and what challenges does the concept of educational knowledge face in a time of rapid technological change? Understandings of educational knowledge were largely shaped during the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment era, and these legacies continue to inform HE today. Traditionally, HE has been imagined as the site in which the most advanced and authoritative forms of knowledge reside. This common perception stands in tension with a major discursive shift that has reshaped educational research, policy, and practice since the 1990s. This shift, known as “learnification” (Biesta, 2016), has succeeded in sidelining knowledge as the primary goal of HE. Together with the development of working‑life‑relevant, competence‑based degree program curricula, this has led to what Maton (2014) calls “knowledge blindness” in HE.

The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools capable of generating knowledge in just a matter of seconds, accompanied by “the virtual explosion of knowledge” (Rasmussen, 2021) and the facilitation of its access, puts the question of educational knowledge into a new light. GenAI has challenged long‑held assumptions about how knowledge is produced, how students are guided toward knowing, and even the epistemic capacities of the knower (Telakivi et al. 2025). On the one hand, the university appears to be rapidly losing epistemic authority; on the other, higher education can no longer ignore questions of what educational knowledge is, what it does, and why it matters. Redefining educational knowledge has therefore become both urgent and timely, as established assumptions about knowledge selection and epistemic responsibility can no longer be taken for granted.

We understand educational knowledge as a distinct category, different from knowledge in general. Besides, we hold that educational knowledge is relational and contingent. This means that it relies on disciplinary boundaries, involves various human and non-human actors, and depends on specific social, material, and institutional environments. It also implies historical contingency, which extends our inquiry beyond contemporary practices to the broader framework of modernity. The presenters also share a premise that interdisciplinary approach to educational knowledge is essential for conceptualising it. Educational knowledge operates across multiple domains — philosophical, sociological, psychological, cultural, pedagogical, historical, and technological — and no single disciplinary lens can account for its complexity.

In this panel, we bring forward three theoretical flashlights informed by three distinct disciplinary approaches to educational knowledge: sociology of education, cultural and literary history, and cognitive sciences. Sociology of education provides a perspective that allows us to see how knowledge is structured within the system of HE and how hidden rules and power relations shape what counts as valuable knowledge (e.g., Bernstein, 2000; Maton, 2014). Cultural and literary history highlights how the notions of educational knowledge are historically formed, reproduced, and contested across time as well as sheds light on the cultural imaginaries of education embedded in discourses, narratives, and metaphors, such as those depicted in the novels of Eliot, Dickens, or Brontë. Cognitive sciences, finally, enable us to examine how knowledge is enacted, processed, and transformed through cognitive, embodied, and material practices, including those mediated by contemporary technologies (e.g., Colombo & Piccinini, 2023; Newen et al., 2018).

In this panel, we discuss and debate possibilities for developing a new conceptual framework for educational knowledge by building on interdisciplinary approaches.