Conference Agenda

Teacher education has traditionally conceptualised digital technology through three dominant perspectives: a skills and competencesperspective (Kereluik et al., 2013; Starkey, 2020), a pedagogical perspective focused on integration and instructional design (Mishra & Koehler, 2006; Redecker & Punie, 2017), and a societal/humanistic perspective addressing citizenship, ethics and participation (Castells, 1996/2000; Janssen et al., 2013). These perspectives have been accompanied by an epistemological undercurrent, emphasising how digitalisation reshapes knowledge practices and the conditions for inquiry, literacy and verification (Lankshear, 2003; Lund & Aagaard, 2020).

While these orientations remain important, the rapid emergence of generative AI (GenAI) has surfaced dilemmas that are difficult to grasp within these frameworks alone. GenAI challenges established assumptions about authorship, originality, judgement and professional responsibility, particularly when systems can mimic human expression in text, voice and imagery (Giannakos et al., 2024; Matusov et al., 2024; Nasiri & Hashemzadeh, 2025). Furthermore, the increasing automation of planning, feedback and assessment places pressure on teachers’ professional ontology, that is, on what it means to be a teacher when machine‑generated outputs become intertwined with core pedagogical activities (Bewersdorff et al., 2023; Martínez-Comesana et al., 2023).

To address these developments, this paper proposes an ontological turn in the way digital technology is understood in teacher education. Ontology is here understood not in its computational sense, but as questions of being and becoming: how teachers and students form themselves through participation in cultural‑material practices, including hybrid human–machine activity (Dall’Alba & Barnacle, 2007; Packer & Goicoechea, 2000). Such an ontological perspective has been suggested in both higher education research (Barnett, 2009) and recent work on digitalisation (Arstorp & Lund, 2025).

The paper proceeds in three steps. First, it revisits the limitations of the dominant perspectives in light of GenAI, arguing that they primarily address what people do with technology, rather than who they are becoming within technology‑mediated practices. Second, it examines four ontological pressure points revealed by GenAI:

1. the erosion of recognisable human expression, challenging authorship and identity (Nasiri & Hashemzadeh, 2025)
2. GenAI as an epistemic partner, shifting the location of judgement ((Aagaard & Lund, 2020)
3. orientation difficulties in accelerated meaning‑making environments (Ingvarsson, 2021)
4. transformations of teachers’ professional being under partial automation (Bewersdorff et al., 2023; Sandberg & Pinnington, 2009)

Third, the contribution discusses how an ontological turn opens new possibilities for teacher education practice, including process‑based assessment of judgement (Quellmalz et al., 2012), authorship statements, formative dialogue for orientation, and pedagogical designs that surface hybrid forms of agency (Venigandla et al., 2024).

The paper does not introduce a new framework; rather, it aims to show what becomes visible when being and becoming are taken seriously in discussions of GenAI. The proposed ontological turn resonates with ongoing European debates on digital competence frameworks such as DigCompEdu (Redecker & Punie, 2017) and contributes to a broader philosophical conversation about education in an era of hybrid human–machine practices.

Abstract

The main line of argument engages with contemporary educational temporalities by conceptualising urgency as a constitutive temporal logic that intervenes at the level of educational problem-production. In dialogue with Deleuze’s concept of the real problem, urgency is presented here as a problem-posing condition – a temporal operator that preconfigures the problematic field in which “educational problems” become thinkable, contestable, and actionable. Urgency thus operates as a temporal technology of educational problematisation that reshapes the conditions under which education becomes intelligible.

Urgency is shown to operate at the intersection of three interrelated orders: transformations in the experience and organisation of time; modes of governing through anticipation, prevention, and immunisation (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito); and processes of subjectification that position subjects simultaneously as vulnerable, at risk, and responsible. Rather than producing linear or determinate effects, urgency functions through superimposition and overdetermination, intensifying orientations toward prevention, anticipation, and optimisation while narrowing the space of educational indeterminacy and displacing educational responsibility.

This conceptual framework is illustrated through a brief analysis of contemporary discourses of neurocognitive risk in education. Such discourses do not merely describe cognitive challenges but actively participate in producing an ontology of education as preventive intervention and a grammar of education structured by urgency. Crucially, urgency plays an asymmetrical role in this configuration: it does not simply accompany neurocognitive risk discourse but organizes the temporal conditions under which neurocognitive vulnerability can appear as a real educational problem requiring anticipatory action.

In conclusion, urgency emerges not merely as a driver of accelerated action, but as a force that transforms the ontological background through which educational problems are posed as real, and ethical responsibility is reconfigured. Education is thus approached not as a domain to which urgency is applied, but as a field whose grammar is reconstituted through urgent modes of problematisation.