Experiences from Italy
By
UNIPD Team (Juliana E. Raffaghelli, Francesca Crudele, Martina Zanchin)
🇮🇹 Versione Italiana: leggi qui
When conversations about Artificial Intelligence and ethics enter educational settings, they often become trapped in familiar formats: lectures, guidelines, compliance frameworks, or lists of principles to remember. While these approaches are valuable, they rarely address the central challenge educators face:
What should I actually do when ethical dilemmas emerge in practice?
This same question reveals another important issue: how difficult it is to teach and learn about moral questions, which are often perceived as part of our existential journey and as belonging to the deeply personal realm of our values.
Within the ETH-TECH project, we approached this challenge in several ways: collaborating in framing the problems we face in class through the awareness raising sessions, co-designing Open Educational Resources and…the Educathons.
What is an Educathon, in the context of the ETH-TECH project?
Borrowing inspiration from hackathons while fundamentally reimagining their purpose, the educathon places educational inquiry, rather than technological production, at its centre. It transforms participants from recipients of knowledge into co-designers of possible futures.
We conceived Educathons, hence, as collaborative spaces designed to explore uncertainty, imagine alternatives, and collectively construct responses to the ethical challenges posed by AI and data in education.
This reflects a long-standing epistemological tradition within educational research itself. Education does not simply seek to understand the world as it is. It understands through transformation and transforms through understanding. Inquiry becomes inseparable from action; knowledge emerges through experimentation, dialogue, and collective reflection. Many traditions in education have embraced the idea of this as “the reflection on practice” (in participatory and critical action research, like it was expressed in the work of Paulo Freire or in professional reflection, as in Donald Schön) as “interventionist and developmental methods” (in Activity Theory) or as a design-science (in Learning Design).
We added to this perspective, the relevance of digital activism and social movements to engage in divergent ways with technology. Particularly, the original idea of hackathons is that of contesting power and finding new pathways through collective engagement in the margins.
For this reason, educathons deliberately embrace ill-defined problems. Instead of looking for one correct solution, participants investigate situations characterised by ambiguity, conflicting values, uncertainty, and multiple legitimate perspectives. Such complexity was aimed at mirroring the everyday reality of educational practice, particularly when AI technologies increasingly mediate teaching, assessment, decision-making, and institutional governance.
This was our starting point, in a workpackage that is being led by the University of Barcelona, working now on the methodology and the implementation of educathons across Germany, Italy, Romania, and Spain.
Educathon: the approach
Across both educathons, participants followed a common sequence, designed by the ETH-TECH partners under the leadership of UB.
1. Mapping present experiences. Working individually or in small groups, participants reflected on good AI practices , problematic AI practices , personal and institutional training needs. We used analogical activities, handwriting and dynamic engagement in class, through post-it mapping activities grounded in the three ETH-TECH ethical dimensions explored during the session
2. Exploring the ETH-TECH tools. Participants then interacted directly with the project’s resources. Using QR codes, each group explored the ETH-TECH Framework, the self-reflection tools and the OERs. The tools were not presented as finished products but as mediational artefacts supporting reflection and collaborative inquiry. Particularly in the second educathon, participants highlighted the self-reflection instrument and the storyboard-based OER as valuable resources for stimulating dialogue and perspective-taking.
3. Future scenario design. The core activity invited each group to choose an ethical scenario and hence, to imagine how it could become more problematic in the future. The groups were hence guided to design a desirable educational future responding to that challenge. Upon these scenarios, the participants constructed pedagogical interventions, specifying objectives, activities, resources and expected educational transformations. The activity deliberately privileged imagination over prediction, encouraging participants to think beyond current institutional constraints.
Results
The two Educathons at a glance
Emerging future scenarios
Although every group generated different proposals, several common themes emerged.
Human agency must remain central. Participants repeatedly imagined futures where AI increasingly replaces human judgement, particularly in assessment and learning. Their responses consistently emphasised the need of keeping teachers “in the loop”. They also considered the relevance of valuing learning processes over products, recognising mistakes as essential for learning. Finally the participants suggested activities where AI supports rather than replaces human thinking. The role of analogical activities spaces and spaces where technology remains “outside” was valued as forms where the human is fully embraced.
Ethical assessment. Several scenarios imagined educational systems relying entirely on AI for grading and feedback. Participants proposed to focus on formative assessment, balancing human-AI evaluation and promoting reflection on mistakes. They also emphasized the relevance of revealing automated feedback, considering its limitations. Assessment became understood not simply as measurement but as a pedagogical relationship.
AI should support, not replace, learning. Language learning offered here another recurring example. Participants feared futures where automatic translation eliminates the need to learn languages, weakening intercultural understanding and marginalising teachers. Their alternative vision proposed AI as a scaffold for learning rather than a substitute for human educational effort, moving from moments in which exercises with AI require peers-supervision or discussion about the outcomes, to avoid cultural loss.
Privacy and representation. The international educathon also generated important discussions around image generation and children’s data. Participants questioned whether consent when using students’ images is enough to protect children’s rights, given the persistence of AI-generated datasets. They also discussed bias reproduced through visual representations and the impact in different contexts, with or without activism about such biases. Interestingly, rather than rejecting AI, they proposed transforming it into an object of critical inquiry, asking students themselves to analyse AI bias using generated materials.
Participants’ reflections
Across both educathons, participants consistently reported that collaborative discussion deepened their ethical awareness. Also, they considered relevant the possibility of interacting directly with the ETH-TECH tools, because this last stimulated richer imagination than abstract discussion alone, informing their views. Indeed, as it was considered by some of the participants, the lack of deep understanding of many of the ethical issues when engaging with AI, was one of the most complicate elements to deal with during the scenario creation.
The participants also highlighted that more time would have allowed deeper exploration and design work. This element brought to the fore how complicate is the “futuring exercise”.
Many also recommended systematic teacher education on AI ethics and argued that ethical reflection should become an ongoing component of professional development rather than a one-off training event.
Some final thoughs
A Pedagogy of Care Through Collective Inquiry
Underlying both educathons is an understanding of learning that extends beyond cognition alone.
Inquiry flourishes when participants feel able to experiment, question assumptions, acknowledge uncertainty, and imagine together. These conditions depend not only on intellectual engagement but also on what can be described as affective infrastructures: the relationships of trust, reciprocity, openness, and mutual recognition that make genuine collaborative thinking possible. Affective infrastructures also support individual positionalities in difficult situations, when there is pressure to adopt technology, when overwhelming by technology innovation is not necessarily accompanied by institutional or regulatory support. Instead, everyday support between students and teachers is key to -as one participant described it- endure or -in the words of others- react and resist to some violent forms of technological transformation in our contexts.
In this sense, the educathon also embodies a pedagogy of care, from its format and approach. It invites participants, we argue, to experience ethics as an ongoing practice of collective responsibility. Care becomes something enacted through listening, dialogue, disagreement, imagination, and the shared construction of desired futures. It does not impose the current time, the present, and its urgent needs of solutions.
This approach could be deemed particularly important in discussions about AI. Technologies often appear overwhelming, opaque, or inevitable. The educathon deliberately interrupts this narrative by restoring educators’ capacity to act, to question, and to imagine alternatives.
Looking Ahead
The sessions positioned educators as imaginative practitioners capable of interrogating present practices, envisioning alternative futures, and collectively constructing pedagogical responses. The ETH-TECH tools functioned not simply as resources to be assessed, but as catalysts for collaborative inquiry. We must also acknowledge that this exercise requires careful preparation, time, and experience. Imagining and designing futures depends not only on creativity, but also on the capacity to recognise emerging patterns in the present, anticipate how they may unfold over time, and identify the drivers, constraints, and leverage points that shape future possibilities.
As the project moves forward, the ideas generated during these educathons will continue to inform the development of open educational resources, teacher education practices, and future collaborative initiatives across the consortium. And the experiences will help us polish educathons as methodology, too.
The best is yet to come. Soon, we will bring together the reflections emerging across all partner countries to build a truly transnational perspective.
Stay tuned!
Leave a Reply