Conference Agenda

Abstract

This article presents insights from a two-year educational innovation project (August 2023–July 2025) conducted in the Education and Pedagogy programmes at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. The project focused on creating dialogic spaces for engaging with sensitive and controversial topics and was developed in response to a growing demand for opportunities that enable meaningful dialogue between students and lecturers on contentious social and political issues in higher education.

Drawing on project-based data, our analysis pursues three interconnected aims. First, we offer a reflective analysis of the dialogue project to contribute to practical knowledge about the design and implementation of such interventions in universities internationally. Second, we situate both the project and our reflections within the historical, current, and anticipated socio-institutional context of European higher education, particularly its ongoing struggle to engage productively with diversity and controversy. In doing so, we reflect on the broader need for dialogical initiatives in universities across different contexts. Third, informed by a cultural-historical activity theory perspective on learning, we use these analyses to critically examine underlying assumptions about the purposes of learning and education in universities, with particular attention to how diversity and controversy are currently managed. In this discussion, we engage with competing expectations and assumptions concerning academic freedom, divergent political values, ideological positions, and the responsibilities of higher education institutions in responding to these dynamics.

Dialogue initiatives at universities

In recent years, we are observing that universities are confronting wider social polarization, in which complex and often painful issues, such as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, climate change, or “woke” culture, make their way into academic life. We see lecturers and students expressing their views on specific conflicts in different ways. These can range from staying silent to sharing one’s own opinion and emotions during a lecture, to demonstrating, or even occupying university buildings. Parallel to these developments, at many universities, both in the Netherlands and internationally, there has been increased attention to the question of how lecturers and students can engage in a meaningful conversation about sensitive issues (Shaffer and Longo, 2023).

Although dialogue trainings in which students learn how to conduct dialogue on sensitive topics with people who hold a different position or come from a different background are not a new phenomenon in higher education, the recent politicized context asks for a rethinking of such interventions.

Politicization of Higher Education

Recent political tensions have heightened the relevance of such interventions for universities in Europe and beyond. Despite the fact that many universities have developed support provisions for lecturers, and in some cases for students, to facilitate conversations on so-called “hot topics,” there remains limited scholarly attention to the analysis of these initiatives, particularly with regard to the nature of the increased demand for them and the characteristics of the interventions themselves. This lack of analysis may, on the one hand, be related to the ways in which topics concerning social justice, diversity, and inclusion are subject to censorship or de-prioritization (Garces et al. 2025; Darian-Smith 2025), while, on the other hand, equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) policies, including those related to dialogic pedagogies, may be adopted by university management as a result of external policy pressures and accountability regimes without substantial ownership or involvement from university staff and students (Cho et al. 2024; Walker 2025).

The contemporary era is marked by a strong acceleration in knowledge production processes and an unprecedented proliferation of information. In this context, the diffusion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) highlights the need for pedagogical and critical work that does not focus exclusively on the technology itself, but rather on its educational and cultural implications.

In particular, teachers and future teachers are increasingly required to address these transformations within competence-based educational design. A crucial aspect concerns the growing role of content—both textual and visual—often produced or mediated by AI. While such content is highly persuasive, it frequently conveys partial, fragmented, or simplified representations of complex phenomena. As a result, knowledge construction increasingly relies on visual and audiovisual languages.

Research by Chang, Yang, and Wong (2024) shows that AI has become an integral part of everyday life and that, already in primary school, children develop preconceptions and representations related to AI. In this scenario (Manovich, 2016; Panciroli & Rivoltella, 2023) the role of algorithms in shaping information flows. Social media environments, where images and short videos dominate both the production and circulation of knowledge, represent a paradigmatic example of this process.

Although the human brain is intrinsically visual (Robertson, 2011), formal schooling has historically privileged verbal language, marginalizing systematic education in visual creativity and visual language. This imbalance becomes particularly problematic in contexts where knowledge is increasingly mediated through images and videos. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Black (1983) argue, a fundamental characteristic of human thinking is its metaphorical and creative nature: meaning is constructed through processes of projection, analogy, and imagination. Images, therefore, are not merely illustrative supports, but cognitive devices that actively participate in shaping plural, situated, and culturally embedded representations of the world.

Within this framework, AI emerges as a central actor in meaning-making processes. The systematic review by Heigl (2025) highlights how professional artists recognize AI as a powerful tool for creativity, while simultaneously stressing the importance of human agency in the construction of meaning. Similarly, Yaşar et al. (2025) show that university students tend to conceptualize creativity not only as an individual capacity to generate novelty, but as a competence situated within hybrid cultural ecosystems in which AI acts as a mediator. These authors frame prompt literacy not as a purely technical skill, but as an educational, cultural, and ethical issue. From a more instrumental perspective, Mujica-Sequera (2025) defines prompting as a lever of cognitive efficiency aimed at formulating effective queries, optimizing data processing, and identifying patterns.

AI currently functions as a synthesizer of information: the images it generates tend to be generic, idealized, and stereotyped, privileging iconic and recognizable elements while excluding the ordinary, the marginal, and the everyday (Manovich, 2025). Converging evidence is provided by Freixa et al. (2025), whose analysis of 600 images shows that AI-generated visuals respond more precisely and coherently to textual prompts. However, this very alignment reinforces dominant visual schemas, making stereotypes more efficient, reproducible, and standardized, while reducing the semantic and narrative complexity of representations.

In this scenario the DigComp 3.0 (Cosgrove & Cachia, 2025) highlights a strong emphasis on critical digital literacy, where the production and interpretation of texts and images require reflective and critical thinking in order to counter processes of semantic homogenization. In light of this theoretical framework, the present paper analyses video stories created by pre-service primary teachers enrolled in the Primary Teacher Education programme at the University of Turin, within the course Educational Technologies. The study is situated in an innovative learning environment that integrates artificial intelligence both as a tool for digital artefact production and as an object of critical reflection.

Contemporary labour markets and welfare systems are increasingly shaped by rapid economic, technological, and social change, also overlapping crises that continuously transform professional practice. The resilience of helping professionals has become a critical issue, particularly in terms of their ability to adapt to changing demands while maintaining professional competence and well-being. Resilience is often framed as an individual capacity to cope with uncertainty; however, such an approach risks overlooking the role of education, organisational support, and institutional frameworks. There is relatively little research on the promotion of students of helping professions’ vicarious resiliency as a relatively innovative concept in the curriculum of higher education which appears to hold varying meanings. This contribution adopts a reflexive perspective on the preparation of helping professionals, focusing on how training and professional development can strengthen their capacity to respond to contemporary challenges in a sustainable and structurally supported manner.

Many helping professions’ professional practice in the field (social work, nursing, doctors, educators etc.) is fundamentally relational, with the creation of value-based, supportive, growth-oriented, and healing relationships constituting its central task. They routinely deal with service users who are in vulnerable life situations and disclose traumatic experiences. A key complexity of professions grounded in relational work lies in the fact that harmful experiences are not always immediately visible or explicitly articulated. In many cases, helping professionals are exposed to the same or similar circumstances as the individuals they support, which blurs the boundary between professional and personal experience. This shared exposure makes it particularly challenging to recognise, reflect on, and address the cumulative impact of such experiences, while simultaneously sustaining professional functioning and well-being. Because of the nature of their work, students who study to become professionals working with people in vulnerable life situations need assistance in the development of effective coping strategies. Because challenges such as isolation, exposure to adversity, and burnout often arise through close and sustained engagement with those receiving support, it is essential for future helping professionals to develop resilience and sustainable self-care strategies. The risk for compassion fatigue can be argued to be relatively high when one is still learning a new profession as a student, and during the first years of practice, when the tools and techniques are still relatively new and possibly just developing. For this reason it is important to enlarge the curriculum of higher education with innovative concepts such as vicarious resiliency.

This paper presents a joint research initiative integrating two complementary research trajectories. The first trajectory builds on our previous continuing research conducted at Vytautas Magnus University and the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, which substantiates the importance of interprofessional collaboration between social workers and other helping professionals in creating and sustaining a person’s supportive social environment (Bruneviciute et al., 2007; Veckiene & Eidukeviciute, 2009; Bruneviciute, Veckiene et al., 2011). These studies highlight that complex social problems require coordinated professional responses that extend beyond individual disciplinary boundaries.

The second research trajectory focuses on strengthening professional resilience within the contemporary labour market, particularly when working with highly complex and vulnerable client groups (Pirskanen, Eidukeviciute, Daugeliene, 2025). This line of inquiry explores how professionals can maintain emotional sustainability, professional effectiveness, and ethical sensitivity while simultaneously mobilising external resources available in the broader social, organisational, and community environment.

By integrating these two perspectives, the joint research aims to analyse how interprofessional collaboration and external resource utilisation contribute to resilience-building among helping professionals. The study emphasises the dynamic interaction between individual professional capacities, organisational contexts, and intersectoral cooperation, proposing a holistic framework for supporting professionals facing increasing demands and structural pressures in modern social service systems

As learning environments become increasingly diverse, teacher educators are challenged to design pedagogical approaches that are inclusive, innovative, and responsive to digital transformation, as well as processes of internationalisation (Oesterle, 2025; Rindenow et al., 2025; Symeonidis & Impedovo, 2025). Digital competence encompasses not only subject-specific and didactic knowledge, but also the capacity to critically reflect on and actively reshape teaching practices in response to digital change (Engeness, 2021; Nagel, 2025). During the pandemic, many educators transferred their traditional practices one-to-one into an online format, without adapting the content or the pedagogy (Popov et al., 2025). However, particularly considering advances in AI, teacher educators are now expected to make informed pedagogical decisions, to select and adapt digital tools purposefully, and to engage in reflective practice that transforms learning environments rather than merely digitising existing routines.

This paper examines the implementation of an innovative, transnational continuing professional development (CPD) programme designed for teacher educators at university-level. The programme was developed as part of an Erasmus+ Project, digiTED, with ran from 2022 to 2025 and was tested three times. Combining pedagogical creativity, emerging technologies, and interdisciplinary, transnational collaboration the programme ensures that the participants do not merely receive digital training but actively engage in experiential learning, co-creation, and reflection. Thereby, it moves beyond passive training models by incorporating Challenge-Based Learning (Costa et al., 2018), Gamification (Pujolà & Nonell, 2025) and Learning Experience Design (Kircher et al., 2021), ensuring that participants engage deeply with digital tools through real-world problem-solving. Unlike conventional workshops that focus on tool demonstrations, this programme challenges educators to design and develop their own educational escape games, fostering creativity, innovation, and hands-on experimentation both during a short-term mobility, as well as within a virtual makerspace.

This paper presents findings from an empirical, longitudinal study conducted within the Erasmus+ project, drawing on data from three cohorts of teacher educators who participated in the programme. The study is based on data from 55 teacher educators from Germany, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, and Estonia. Participants represented diverse disciplinary backgrounds, professional roles, and levels of digital competence. The study adopts an experiential and interpretive perspective. Rather than focusing on effectiveness or predefined learning outcomes, it seeks to understand how teacher educators experienced, perceived, and evaluated this form of transnational collaboration as a professional learning environment. Particular attention is paid to how transcultural group work, multimodal game design, and virtual elements shaped participants’ engagement, collaboration, and sense-making processes. Data were collected through surveys, interviews, reflective artefacts, and observations and analysed thematically.

Findings indicate that dialogue and challenge-based design were central to professional learning. The shared task of collaboratively developing a multimodal escape game fostered sustained exchange, collective problem-solving, and peer learning, which participants valued more highly than tool-focused training. Transnational and interdisciplinary group work was experienced as inspiring and inclusive, supported by multimodality and linguistically mixed groups, while also limiting subject-specific depth. Time and space for dialogue, including informal and social activities, were consistently highlighted as crucial for meaningful collaboration.

In this paper presentation, the authors will illustrate the design of a novel transnational CPD programme for teacher educators, outlining the pedagogical framework and the innovative methodologies and activities employed, including challenge-based learning, collaborative escape game design, and virtual formats. It then reports empirical findings from a longitudinal study based on a rich, multimodal data corpus comprising surveys, interviews, reflective artefacts, observations, and design outputs. Finally, the paper discusses implications for the design of transnational, collaborative learning environments, highlighting how physical and virtual learning spaces can be intentionally combined to support dialogue, collaboration, and inclusive professional learning.