Conference Agenda

This paper presents the research design and early stage of project IB24159 (co-funded by the EU, the Regional Government of Extremadura, and the Government of Spain.), which examines the implementation and evolution of the «Future Classroom» programme in schools in Extremadura (Spain) as a strategy for digital transformation combining redesigned learning spaces, educational technologies and active pedagogies.

The regional programme (AdFE) is embedded in the InnovaTed plan and is explicitly connected to European initiatives such as Future Classroom Lab (European Schoolnet), positioning the Extremadura case within an international agenda on innovative learning environments and school modernisation.

By 2024, Extremadura reports 81 Future Classrooms across primary, secondary and teacher support centres (CPR), in an expansion process linked to infrastructure, digital equipment and professional development for teachers.

The project makes two contributions. First, it shifts the analytical focus from «does it work?» to «how is it implemented?», addressing a central challenge in innovative learning environments: spatial redesign does not automatically produce pedagogical change.

Second, it aims to generate transferable evidence to inform educational policy and practice on scaling digital transformation with attention to quality and equity, an agenda shared across European education systems.

The study is grounded in implementation science and uses the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) as its main theoretical, methodological framework. CFIR, still emerging in educational research, is applied here to identify barriers and facilitators, as well as issues of fidelity, adaptation and sustainability when implementing a complex innovation. The programme is conceptualised as an Evidence-Based Innovation (EBI) that may show promise in controlled or pilot conditions but requires contextual adaptation for real-world scaling in schools.

The research questions are: (1) How does the programme evolve across phases 2 and 3 of implementation and consolidation, and how does it interact with schools’ curricular design and organisational arrangements? (2) Which CFIR factors (intervention characteristics; inner/outer setting; individual characteristics; implementation process) explain adoption trajectories, fidelity and local adaptations? (3) What teaching practice models emerge in Future Classrooms, and how are they connected to the development of key competences and to teachers’ perceptions of learning space transformation?

For ECER 2026, we will report the research protocol and preliminary outputs from the diagnostic phase (document analysis and initial stakeholder interviews), laying the groundwork for a longitudinal implementation study and for internationally comparable indicators that can support cross-case comparisons and knowledge exchange with similar European «future classroom» initiatives.

The contemporary context, known as surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) or the platform society (Van Dijk et al., 2018) is characterized by being highly mediated and permeated by technology. There is no sphere of life that is not, in part, digital (Pancrazio & Sefton-Green, 2021), and this also affects children from early childhood.

Digital technologies offer new forms and modes of participation, but they constitute also new forms of surveillance, discipline and control. Platforms, their architecture and their logic, affect and cause problems to contemporary democracies (Dussel & Williams, 2023; Van Dijk et al., 2018), weakening democratic institutions, such as the public school, that are especially important for looking after minors, and have to tackle digital vigilance, data colonialism or issues related to misinformation and fake news (Salcedo et al., 2025).

In this scenario, dominated by platforms and algorithms, it is crucial to prepare and instruct a critical digital citizenry. As Pancrazio and Sefton-Green (2021) state, it is of great importance to prepare people so that they can develop their full potential and express themselves in the world that they live in, far from the neoliberal logic of preparing them for the labor market. This type of logic, the economic logic, is strongly present in the sociotechnical imaginary, as there is a direct link between digital technologies and economic growth, productivity or employability (Dussel & Williams, 2023). These are conceived as key to the progress of economy, as highlighted by this investigation (Castañeda & Williamson, 2021; Jandric et al., 2024). Given this reality, to exercise digital citizenry, which refers to the right to participate in the digital society (Pancrazio & Sefton-Green, 2021), it is essential to possess the necessary knowledge to participate in a critical, informed, responsible, ethic and complete way in a world mediated by technology, addressing the digital divides: material access, instrumental skills, opportunity for use and participation. This situates digital competence as fundamental knowledge in contemporary society.

National and international governments have not been unaware of this priority and in recent decades educational policies that address the integration of digital technologies and media in schools have multiplied, as well as those that incorporate learning related to them. In this regard, in the European context, the DigComp Project, currently in its 2.2 version (Vuorikari et al., 2022), has emerged as a common competency framework for the development of citizen’s digital competence.

In Spain, the Organic Law 3/2020, of 29 December, which amends Organic Law 2/2006, of 3 May, on Education (LOMLOE, 2020) also addresses the need for a digital competence so that children and young people can develop and participate in a reflective, ethical and with critical sense way in the digital world in which we currently live.

In recent years, following the coming into effect of the LOMLOE (2020), multiple educational policies that address the digitalization of schools have proliferated in Spain. These policies highlight digital competence for critical citizenry in a world facing major technological challenges. As part of a broader project, CiDiC_EI [Project PID2023-148530NA-I00, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER, EU], which seeks to identify and analyze best educational practices that help form a critical digital citizenry from early childhood, this study, in accordance with one of the project’s landmarks that seeks to map ICT educational policies for students in early childhood education and based on a previous work by Dussel and Williams (2023), seeks to identify and analyze the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, in Dussel & Williams, 2023, p. 43) in the educational policies of three regions of Spain: Galicia (northwest), Madrid (center) and Murcia (southeast).

Digital technologies profoundly shape everyday life and function as structuring elements of social, cultural, and educational realities. In postdigital conditions, digital technologies are no longer experienced as an “addition” to otherwise analogue practices; rather, their absence becomes the exception (Knox, 2019). Educational space, in this sense, cannot be reduced to physical settings such as classrooms but emerges as a relational configuration. It emerges as a sociomaterial arrangement constituted through institutional conditions, pedagogical practices, and technological infrastructures. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) intensifies these dynamics: it does not merely provide new tools and opportunities for teaching and learning, but intervenes in the conditions of education through epistemic transformations of knowledge production, validation, and circulation in school contexts.
Generative AI reshapes authorship, assessment, and teacher professionalism (SWK, 2023). In response to these shifts, emerging international AI literacy and competency frameworks for teachers seek to define and stabilise new forms of teacher professionalism under conditions of generative AI. This paper critically examines three influential models—the AI extension of the European DigCompEdu framework (Bekiaridis & Attwell, 2024), UNESCO’s AI Competency Framework for Teachers (Cukurova & Miao, 2024), and the OECD AI literacy framework for primary and secondary education (OECD, 2025)—to analyse how they frame educational space, pedagogical relations, and professional responsibility in postdigital schooling.
One characteristic is particularly relevant for schooling: social perceptibility, that is, the capacity of generative AI systems to interact as a social counterpart—an affordance that may contribute to the anthropomorphisation of chatbots (Mishra et al., 2023). At the same time, generative AI can be conceptualised as an epistemic technology: it produces and systematises knowledge and thereby influences which knowledge becomes available and which content remains invisible (Alvarado, 2023; Eynon, 2024). These developments directly speak to the ECER 2026 Network 06 Special Call “Educational Space Responding to Social Transformations: Learning Environments and the Changing Conditions of Education”, as they mirror how educational space is reconfigured under postdigital conditions and reshaped through emerging socio-technical infrastructures. We conceptualise educational space as an enacted assemblage (Fenwick & Landri, 2012) to emphasise that it is not a neutral container for educational activities but is actively produced through sociomaterial relations. Human actors, AI systems, pedagogical practices, and institutional norms are mutually constitutive in this process, as they co-emerge through their ongoing relations. This perspective is particularly important under postdigital conditions, where generative AI reshapes epistemic practices, agency, and responsibility rather than simply being added to existing educational settings. Educational space can be understood as opening up a ‘Third Space’ (Bhabha, 1994), in which meanings, norms, and forms of knowledge are not fixed but emerge through ongoing processes of negotiation and translation. In this sense, educational space is shaped by encounters between diverse cultural backgrounds, epistemic positions, and sociotechnical arrangements, rather than being tied to predefined settings such as classrooms.
This paper contributes to the call by analysing how international AI literacy and competency frameworks for teachers conceptualise educational space under conditions of generative AI. Building on critical policy analysis that examines how frameworks embed sociotechnical imaginaries (Linderoth et al., 2024), we ask what these frameworks assume about educational space, pedagogical relations, and the distribution of agency and responsibility in education, rather than treating AI literacy as merely an individual and instrumental skills set. Our research questions are:
(1) How do international AI literacy frameworks for teachers conceptualise educational space under conditions of generative AI?
(2) To what extent do these frameworks make visible (or obscure) epistemic, infrastructural, and responsibility-related transformations inherent in these emerging configurations of educational space?