Johanna Velander defends her doctoral thesis, “AI in Educational Practice: Designing for Critical AI Literacy“, at Linnaeus University on September 25.
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in educational practice, yet AI literacy is often defined through predefined competencies that say less about how it is understood, enacted, and shaped in specific contexts. This research investigates how AI literacy is conceptualised in research and policy, understood by teachers, enacted through interaction with generative AI (GenAI), and used to inform the design of educational GenAI systems that support reflective and critical engagement.
The methodology combines Emergent Research Design structured with Design Research Methodology. This allows the research focus to develop in response to empirical findings, methodological insights, and rapid changes in the educational AI landscape, while maintaining a coherent progression from problem clarification and descriptive inquiry towards exploratory design-oriented knowledge. Adopting a practice-oriented perspective, the thesis synthesises conceptual, empirical, interactional, and design-oriented inquiry across eight studies.
Findings show that AI literacy is frequently framed in operational and competency-oriented terms, while sociotechnical, critical, and agentive dimensions remain less developed. Teachers’ understandings of AI are often shaped by fragmented and informal learning, although their concerns extend to trust, responsibility, authorship, bias, and pedagogical judgement. Technical understanding does not automatically lead to broader sociotechnical reasoning, and recognising AI-related risks is not equivalent to acting critically in practice. Teacher–GenAI interaction reveals AI literacy as situated and relational: it becomes visible through how teachers delegate tasks, interpret and adapt outputs, question suggestions, exercise judgement, and negotiate responsibility.
The thesis further argues that literacy is increasingly bound up with machine processes. Meaning-making, knowledge production, and pedagogical action are no longer exclusively human activities but emerge through relations among teachers, learners, AI systems, infrastructures, and institutional conditions. This resonates with critical posthumanist accounts of literacy and shifts attention from what individuals know about AI to how humans and non-humans jointly shape what can be known and done.
Supporting critical AI literacy therefore requires attention to both education and design. Educational GenAI systems should be evaluated not only for accuracy, usability, and efficiency, but also for whether they support reflection, surface uncertainties and question assumptions. The thesis contributes a situated account of AI literacy and an interaction-informed rationale for educational GenAI system design rather than a universal literacy framework or validated design solution.
Supervisors
– Marcelo Milrad, Professor, Linnaeus University
– Nuno Otero, Senior Lecturer, University of Greenwich
– Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Professor, Stockholm University
Opponent
– Jimmy Jaldemark, Professor, Mid Sweden University
