Conference Agenda

Efficiently navigating the flood of various information in the digital era requires critical reading abilities and research on how to support these skills. Today’s global society has been characterised as “post-truth”, referring to, for example, misleading news, propaganda machines, dishonest use of artificial intelligence and disinformation campaigns (Horne, 2021), which calls for critically reading and evaluating the multitude of information of varying quality (e.g. Paakkari et al., 2024; Strømsø & Kammerer, 2016).

Despite their importance, however, critical reading skills are not mastered as well as they might be. For example, in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2022, it was found that less than 10% of the students were able to differentiate between a fact and an opinion or assess bias in complex texts (OECD, 2023). Also, assessing reliability or recognising bias causes difficulties for students in a commercial context (Kiili et al., 2018) as well as regarding health-related information (Paakkari et al., 2025). Moreover, not only children and adolescents, but adults, too, seem to struggle with evaluating information and sources (e.g. Andreassen & Bråten, 2013; Howe & Teufen, 2014; Kendrick & Fullerton, 2019). It is clear that systematic research on critical reading skills is thus needed in order to create effective evidence-based support that is targeted appropriately.

Critical reading has been researched since the 1940’s. Still, to this day, the concept of critical reading has been defined in varying ways, which is complicating both the research field and the development of concrete pedagogical applications (e.g. Sutherland & Incera, 2021; Williams, 1959). The ways of understanding a concept are reflected in people’s thoughts and actions as individuals, researchers, practitioners and policymakers (Holt, 2016), and thus, to support the field, this paper reports a systematic conceptual review on how critical reading has been defined in the research literature.

This paper can support future research as well as teaching and assessing critical reading skills by systematically collecting and analysing the existing definitions of critical reading for the first time. The present analysis of the definitions can serve as a foundation for understanding the components included in the concept, and it can be utilised by researchers as well as practitioners, for example, when planning studies or targeted pedagogical support.

This qualitative pilot study informs my dissertation on how artificial intelligence (AI), including conversational agent (CA)-like features, can be integrated into geography-related science museum exhibits in thoughtful and just ways (Okonkwo & Ade-Ibijola, 2021; Okita & Clarke, 2021). Rather than starting from “AI solutions,” I begin with what families already do: how children and caregivers use bodies, talk, gesture, and exhibit resources to make sense of geography-rich phenomena in non-AI exhibits (e.g., gravity-themed jumping, planetary projections, and map-like spatial puzzles).

The study is grounded in sociocultural and situated perspectives on learning and treats exhibits as socio-material learning spaces where participation is organized through the entanglement of bodies, layouts, representations, and interaction rules. It draws on three strands of scholarship. First, research on family and informal science learning shows that sensemaking and identity-relevant participation emerge through intergenerational talk, gesture, and joint manipulation of museum resources (Dominke et al., 2025; Hohenstein & Tenenbaum, 2023; Nygren et al., 2024). Second, distributed scaffolding frames support as spread across tools, people, and activities—not delivered by a single “expert” (Puntambekar, 2022). Third, justice-oriented perspectives in informal STEM education argue that equity cannot be reduced to access or inclusion alone; researchers must examine how authority, recognition, and opportunities to contribute are distributed in learning spaces (Greenberg et al., 2025).

In parallel, the proposal is informed by my justice-oriented conceptual reanalysis of CA-supported collaborative science learning. From 882 initial records, PRISMA screening yielded 27 empirical studies included in the synthesis (Moher et al., 2009). I developed a three-dimensional justice lens (Fricker, 2007; Learning Towards Justice Team, 2025) focused on: (1) distribution of scaffolds (e.g., who gets explanations/translation/prompts; timing/frequency; whether support follows child vs caregiver), (2) participation structures (e.g., interface control; turn-taking; who initiates/finishes; whose ideas get ratified), and (3) epistemic agency (e.g., whether children’s hypotheses are solicited, extended, or overridden; whether uncertainty is treated as productive). I adapt this lens to museums to treat “AI readiness” as an empirical question about existing participation infrastructures, rather than a technological claim. Specifically, I treat geography-rich exhibits as participation infrastructures: their layouts, interaction rules, and representational forms quietly organize who gets to act, speak, be recognized, and taken up during family sensemaking. Here, AI is not an “add-on,” but a potential reconfiguration of these existing infrastructures.

European and international relevance is central because science museums are public educational spaces serving multilingual and mobile families, where language access, disability access, and public accountability shape what “help” can legitimately look like. In European contexts, AI-mediated visitor experiences are increasingly evaluated against expectations of data protection and transparency (e.g., GDPR principles such as transparency and data minimization) and emerging governance for AI systems in public life (e.g., the EU AI Act’s phased implementation). These conditions make museums a useful site for a European dialogue on how AI reorganizes voice, recognition, and opportunity-to-learn in public learning spaces.

Research Questions:

1. How do children and caregivers interact with and make sense of selected geography-related exhibits in a science museum that rely on physical or rule-based interaction rather than AI/CA mediation?

2. Where do visitors and educators perceive challenges and possibilities, and how do they imagine AI or CA-like prompts/adaptive feedback might be helpful or problematic for equity, voice, and participation structures?

3. How do children, caregivers, and museum educators imagine connections between AI-enhanced exhibits and classroom science/geography learning for linguistically and culturally diverse learners, and what follow-up resources do they envision?

Modern societies are shaped more than ever by crises and the discourses surrounding them. Under the term ‘polycrisis’, “multiple and partly overlapping crises” (Horsbøl, 2022, p. 293) associated with a high level of complexity and conflict are discursively negotiated, foremost among them the already occurring and anticipated consequences of climate change. Within these complex, overlapping and oftentimes conflicting discursive fields, institutions and individual actors increasingly face the challenge of implementing practices promoting sustainability on various levels. Simultaneously, the "necessities and goals of transformation" (Jaeger-Erben & Hielscher 2022, p. 140, translation by the author) to change production and consumption patterns and thereby counter ecological crises are currently being debated.

A phenomenon entangled in the discursive field of sustainability which has been garnering attention internationally — especially in educational research — is the so-called maker movement. Makerspaces, the central hubs of the movement, can be described as open workshops where people from diverse demographic backgrounds have the opportunity to realize project ideas involving a wide range of analog and digital tools and materials (Martin, 2015). Individuals and communities within and around makerspaces often adhere to certain values and mindsets, such as openness, inclusivity, and especially sustainability (see contributions in Baier et al., 2016). Furthermore, public discourses frequently attribute utopian potential to the maker scene, as shown by the discourse analysis of Hepp, Benz, and Simon (2021), which focused on the public discourse around the movement during the COVID pandemic. On the other hand, individual spaces at imes fall short of these ideals and potentials, particularly concerning their efforts toward sustainable practices (Kohtala, 2017). In sum, a high degree of ambivalence can be observed within the maker movement regarding the aforementioned values and principles, which is particularly evident in questions of sustainability.

In the dissertation project presented, the maker scene is approached as a social movement (Walter-Herrmann, 2013) in the context of which sustainability is continually negotiated. Following Gunzelmann (2019), these negotiations can be thought of as a multidirectional process: for one, the movement as a social world participates in negotiations concerning the discourses around sustainability as they are constituted in multiple societal arenas (e.g. academe, politics, education) while on the other hand, negotiations take place among actors within the movement itself. Within this construct, subjectivation processes occur as actors engage with the discursive in their daily practices. Building on an understanding of subjectivation as the relational production or epigenesis of subjects (Ricken, 2019), primary aim of the dissertation project is to investigate to what extent and which subject positions related to aspects of sustainability are discursively negotiated within the maker movement, and how these are in turn met by subjects (e.g., accepted, reinterpreted, rejected, etc.). The foundational approach of this work, which seeks to explore and reconstruct discursive elements through practices (Macgilchrist, 2020 p. 33), places the practices of makers at the center of the analysis. The following research question and subquestions guide the project.

• How do processes of subjectivation take shape within the maker movement with regard to sustainability?

• • How is sustainability negotiated in discursive practices within the maker movement?
  • How are subjects positioned or how do they position themselves within this framework?

After briefly outlining the theoretical and methodological considerations mentioned above, focusing on the specific adaptations of the heuristic tools of situational analysis, preliminary findings will be presented and discussed.