Research Article

Artificial intelligence and education: Theoretical-conceptual and methodological framework and critical reflections

Beatriz Fainholc 1 *
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1 CEDIPROE Center, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, ARGENTINA* Corresponding Author
Journal of Digital Educational Technology, 6(1), April 2026, ep2605, https://doi.org/10.30935/jdet/17550
Submitted: 01 February 2025, Published: 15 December 2025
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ABSTRACT

The world changed amidst unknowns. It can be understood as a mutation, or an attack on traditional styles of governance and management, institutional offerings, academic research spaces, production of software artificial intelligence (AI), and the processes of learning and teaching in general. This contribution aims to review the theoretical and methodological support that have inspired the explanations of the relationship between AI and education. The challenge is to reconfigure the theoretical-conceptual and methodological frameworks of interpretation of these phenomena towards others more relevant according to the digital spaces and their crisis. Also, adding the deployment of AI as a background factor that transforms all social processes. The design of AI in the scenario of a digital ecology is based on the technical-instrumental rationality of reductionist economic explanation for thinking, feeling and acting. The complex dimensions of human reality in general and the pedagogical reality in particular, physical and virtual, require a more comprehensive, systemic-holistic and recursive paradigm and their theoretical and methodological perspectives. Also, relational, hermeneutic and rhizomatic explanations. The evolution of AI sets the background for some current and possible directions for an unknown future. More with the consideration of the disruptive challenges of AI toward overcoming its political-economic and military decisions which influences on it. The conclusions and recommendations included indicate the tentativeness of scientific-technological concepts and the need for considering a critic appropriate educational technology, an interdisciplinary studies and continuous relearning in the face of the uncertain hyper-industrialized scenarios of AI in education.
Keywords: theoretical methodological frameworks, artificial intelligence, education, critics, recommendations

CITATION (APA)

Fainholc, B. (2026). Artificial intelligence and education: Theoretical-conceptual and methodological framework and critical reflections. Journal of Digital Educational Technology, 6(1), ep2605. https://doi.org/10.30935/jdet/17550

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