Conference Agenda

As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems are increasingly imposed on and integrated into educational contexts, higher education institutions are tasked with preparing future and current teachers to engage with these rapidly evolving technologies critically, ethically, and pedagogically. Recent research and policy documents identify AI literacy as a key professional competency for teachers and a necessary capability to cultivate in students. AI literacy extends beyond functional or technical proficiency to encompass critical judgment, ethical awareness, and pedagogical decision-making about when, how, and whether AI systems should be used in educational settings (Long & Magerko, 2020; Ng et al., 2021; UNESCO, 2023, 2025; Webb et al., 2025).

Aligned with the ECER 2026 theme Knowing and Acting, this panel discussion examines how educational research can move beyond descriptive accounts of AI use toward active engagement with the institutional, pedagogical, and ethical conditions shaping GenAI adoption in teacher education and schools. The panel brings together researchers from four countries to critically explore how teachers and teacher educators are making sense of GenAI technologies while simultaneously being required to act within policy environments, assessment regimes, and technological infrastructures that often outpace research-informed guidance.

The contributors to this panel will address three interrelated questions: (1) How is AI literacy currently conceptualised and enacted within teacher education and school contexts? (2) What tensions emerge between institutional imperatives to adopt GenAI and teachers’ professional judgment, ethics, and pedagogical values? (3) How can research advance our understanding of teacher agency, critical imagination, and responsible practice in relation to GenAI?

The panel includes empirical studies of pre-service and in-service teachers’ engagement with GenAI, analyses of co-design approaches that position teachers as active knowledge producers, and critical examinations of policy and infrastructural constraints shaping educational action. We draw on our research, which includes, but is not limited to:

• How Australian pre-service English teachers engaged with GenAI tools across scaffolded learning tasks and summative assessments (Curwood et al., 2024)
• What are Finnish teacher educators’ perceptions about the potential and challenges with ChatGPT in education (Vartiainen et al., 2025), and how GenAI can impact higher-order thinking skills and understanding of programming logic (Nathaniel et al., 2025)
• What Norwegian teacher educators’ pedagogical beliefs about GenAI (Han et al., in preparation), and how lower secondary school students use GenAI as a dialogue partner in English as a Foreign Language (Røkenes & Gilje, in preparation)
• How do Swedish teacher educators perceive their dual didactic role in developing pre-service teachers’ professional digital competence (including AI literacy) to a level where they can develop school students’ digital competence (Lindfors & Olofsson, 2023)

Across these contexts, the studies highlight how teachers negotiate uncertainty, experiment with GenAI tools and AI-mediated assessments, and develop situated forms of AI literacy through reflective and dialogic practices.

By foregrounding teachers’ knowing-in-practice and the conditions under which they are asked to act, this panel contributes to ongoing debates about the role of educational research in times of rapid technological change. It argues for research approaches that not only analyse GenAI’s impacts but also support teachers in developing ethical, pedagogically grounded, and context-responsive ways of working with AI. In doing so, the panel advances a human-centred, research-informed agenda for AI literacy.