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This paper critically evaluates the shift in epistemological authority in educational settings due to generative AI, highlighting the redistribution of agency from teachers to students and machines. By analyzing various theoretical frameworks, it reveals a significant gap in addressing power dynamics, data ownership, and accountability in AI-mediated learning environments. The authors propose the Ecological Co-Agency Framework, which emphasizes relational, regulatory, and pedagogical processes to ensure human accountability in knowledge production and validation.
The shift of epistemic authority from educators to AI could fundamentally alter the dynamics of knowledge creation in classrooms.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been primarily framed as an impartial educational tool. However, this framing overlooks an even larger shift: the reassignment of epistemological authority from teachers to students to machines. This paper presents a conceptual evaluation of the extent to which GenAI redistributes students'and teachers'ability to act in classrooms to produce knowledge, validate each other's claims, and create evidence of student learning while collaborating with and competing against humans. This evaluation draws on various theoretical paradigms, including Distributed Agency, Self-Determination Theory, Society 5.0, and Technology Integration Paradigms, including TPACK and SAMR. While all of the theoretical paradigms evaluated are relevant to the role of agency within education mediated by AI, none of them address the ongoing disparity regarding equitable distribution of power, ownership of the data used to mediate interaction, and accountability in relation to human-mediated interactions. As such, this paper introduces the Ecological Co-Agency Framework, which defines agency in terms of relational, regulatory, and pedagogical processes, conditioned by a defined commitment to human accountability for epistemological claims.
