Pedagogy in times of artificial intelligence: Inner context, power, consciousness, and care

Abstract

The article expands the notion of “educational context” by incorporating a radical dimension: the inner context, understood as an interplay of egocentrism, immaturity, and mediocrity that runs through school life and conditions pedagogical practice. Drawing on a critical autoethnography narrated in the third person, it weaves together classroom scenes, teachers’ meetings, and disputes with families in dialogue with a theoretical framework that integrates the Radical and Inclusive Approach and the Comprehensivo-Edificadora Perspective. The former orients the discussion toward the deepening of consciousness and the reduction of the ego; the latter situates the formative horizon in the otric dimension and in reciprocal edification as a criterion of care. On this basis, the article proposes a four-stratum contextual matrix (structural, institutional, interactional, and inner) and argues that education requires literacy in attention, power, and judgment across these planes in an integrated way. In this scenario, Artificial Intelligence (AI) appears both as an amplifier of dynamics of self-affirmation and control and as an occasion to exercise a care-oriented consciousness directed toward the other. The paper concludes with three propositions on innovation, power, and AI, with classroom-transferable micro-designs, and with the formulation of a consciousness-based curriculum that conceives the school as a “greenhouse of consciousness,” oriented toward transforming the inner context rather than sustaining superficial innovations.