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In the Nordic countries, Bildung has historically been an explicit goal for education (Sjöström et al., 2017; Burman, 2014). We argue that Bildung is of outmost importance in post-digital societies where digital technologies have become intertwined and embedded in existing economic, political, and social practices, and borders between humans and technologies are blurred (Knox, 2019), where interfaces are ever changing, and we collaborate with digital tools as partners (Lund & Aagaard, 2020). These partnerships further multiply and intensify with the introduction of generative AI (GenAI) in education, calling for critical perspectives on these partnerships and the consequences for how we come to knowledge, what knowledge is for and how we learn. Bildung may offer a framework for rethinking the relationship between knowledge, society, and technology, especially GenAI.
Bildung generally revolves around social and societal interactions, understanding oneself within society (Hegel & Elster, 1967) and being able to critically contribute to society’s development (Kant & Zehbe, 1975). This entails being aware of oneself, one’s social role, power relations and ethical and democratic responsibilities in different contexts. However, through the last decades fostering this broad understanding of Bildung in education has diminished as an educational goal. Qualification, workforce relevance and measurable individual learning outcomes and competences have increasingly gained ground in the national curricula in the Nordic countries, challenging our understandings of Bildung as part of a social and relational educational development (Biesta, 2020; Erstad & Voogt, 2018). This development in educational focus threatens to reduce education from a focus on educating critical and socially oriented citizens to a more limited and individualized workforce orientation, thus challenging the traditional ideals of Bildung in education.
GenAI forces us to rethink our approach to Bildung and education.
On the one hand GenAI challenges educational practices that focus on outcomes instead of social and relational learning processes. GenAI make traditional educational outcomes, like essays, readily available with little active student engagement and the grit of learning. Consequently, we must focus more on the process of learning again, instead of the result. As GenAI challenges teaching practices, assessment, and learning outcomes, we are forced to rethink education and educational goals, thus re-actualizing ideals of Bildung.
On the other hand, GenAI also threathens traditional ways of fostering Bildung. GenAI is a possible source of misinformation across services and technologies that are easily available to us, both in and outside of school. Hence our understandings of what is valuable and ‘true’ knowledge, and the established ways of fostering critical thinking and democratic understandings through education are challenged, threatening the contents in education that contribute to Bildung.
Teacher education, and particularly teacher educators, becomes a pivot point for these challenges and threats to education and civic society. The double purpose of fostering Bildung both within the individual teacher student and enabling these future teachers to foster Bildung in their pupils, makes their understandings of educational goals, technology and GenAI crucial.
The present paper addresses these issues by studying how Norwegian teacher educators understand and deal with digital technologies, GenAI and fostering Bildung. Our aim is to unpack if, and how these practices and concepts interrelate, and the implications for teacher education and for future teachers, thus contributing to further our understanding of how to rethink education in a post-digital society.
We ask: How can teacher educators promote Bildung in a world of generative AI? We break down this research question into two subquestions: [1] How do teacher educators understand Bildung in todays’ education system? [2] How do teacher educators perceive and address GenAI and the challenges following the rise of GenAI in education?
Method
To answer the research question, we interview 20 teacher educators across five Norwegian teacher education institutions on their understanding of Bildung and their perceptions of and experiences with addressing issues of digital technologies and GenAI in education. The informants will be selected to represent different subjects areas (e.g. Norwegian, Science, Pedagogy). As the interviews are intended to give access to the informants’ thoughts and experiences with Bildung, digital technologies, and GenAI, semi-structured interviews were chosen. This will allow the interviewer to go in depth with individual thoughts shared by the informants (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996; Morris, 2015). The interviews will be conducted in February and March 2025 in a mix of online and face-to-face interviews approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Each of the five authors will interview teacher educators from a different institution than their own. The data will be analyzed through thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Clarke et al., 2015) with an abductive approach (Thompson, 2022). This will allow us to move beyond the transcribed narrative by condensing, synthesizing and structuring the findings and applying a post-digital perspective (Jandrić & Ford, 2022; Knox, 2019) as theoretical lens (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996; Thompson, 2022).
Expected Outcomes
As argued above, we see GenAI both as a threat to and a chance to rethink how to develop Bildung through education. By challenging teacher educators on how to address Bildung in the age of GenAI, we expect to explore conceptualizations and relationships both between teacher educators’ pedagogical beliefs towards digital technologies and GenAI, and towards Bildung. We also expect to find and explore the links and disconnects they address between AI and Bildung within themes such as societal impacts, sustainability and teaching and learning.
References
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