Higher Education Under Generative AI: Biographical Orientations of Democratic Learning and Teaching
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping higher education (HE) by reconfiguring how knowledge becomes visible, how judgment is exercised, and how recognition is distributed. These systems intervene in the pedagogical and democratic conditions under which plurality, critique, and participation can be sustained. This study examines how students and lecturers interpret and navigate these transformations and what they reveal about the possibilities of democratic education under algorithmic mediation. Drawing on n = 151 written articulations (122 students, 29 lecturers) to open-ended questions collected via LimeSurvey, analyzed through Grounded Theory in combination with biographical interpretation and oriented by education theory (Bildung) and democracy pedagogy, the research reconstructs five orientations that range from pragmatic coping to struggles over recognition. These orientations illuminate how systemic dynamics of acceleration, opacity, and infrastructural authority are refracted into everyday academic practice. They are further synthesized into three broader axes of temporal sovereignty, epistemic opacity and accountability, and recognition ecologies. The findings highlight how fragile orientations emerge as both risks and resources. The study contributes to HE didactics by outlining strategies to transform fragility into pedagogical occasions, emphasizing reflective delay, dialogical engagement with opacity, and diversification of recognition practices. It concludes that democratic education depends on cultivating spaces where algorithmic pressures become educable and fragile orientations can develop into dispositions of reflexivity, critique, and participation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".