ABSTRACT
Set against the background of Paulo Freire and Danilo Dolci’s perspectives on utopia and its educational significance, this chapter focuses on the potential for a utopian ecopedagogy as a remedy to the threat posed by the irresponsible and uncontrolled incursion of AI into the primary school environment. Freire’s utopia, conceived as a path to an open future, the awareness of the imperfection of the unfinished human that provides the conditions for continuous improvement and Dolci’s vision of a ‘realisable’ utopia, which means enabling children to discover the strength to express themselves and find the intuition for ‘the new to be designed’ could both represent part of the solution. With our understanding of intelligence and knowledge, creative autonomy and agency and dependency being questioned, scrutinised and constantly redefined, the directions charted in this chapter address some of the coordinates of our era, with the intent to create new postdigital ecopedagogies that are critical and creative, accept and negotiate the contamination of the constantly shifting borders between humans, machines, nature and nonhuman animals.
