Reconfiguring Teacher Learning With GenAI: An Onto-Epistemological Framework for AI Integration in STEM Education

• In Event: Affective, Ecological, and Technological Entanglements in Education

Abstract

This study presents an empirically grounded, posthumanist framework for understanding how PreK-12 STEM educators engage with generative AI (GenAI) as pedagogical co-participants. Drawing on data from a conjecture-based teacher education course, we investigate how GenAI intra-actions catalyze epistemological shifts, pedagogical reflexivity, and ethical-cultural awareness. Using diffractive analysis, we explore how teachers’ encounters with GenAI reconfigure what counts as knowledge, how authority is negotiated, and how culturally responsive pedagogy is enacted. Our findings reframe GenAI not as a neutral tool, but as a relational actor in dynamic, culturally relevant-oriented science and mathematics teaching. This study contributes a novel onto-epistemological framework that expands AI integration beyond skill acquisition to include relational ethics, cultural responsiveness, and distributed cognition in STEM education.

Authors

• Sophia Jeong, The Ohio State University

• Sevil Akaygun, Bogazici University

• Mutlu Sen-Akbulut, Bogazici University

• Ulku Seher Budak, Bogazici University