Can education set the agenda for AI? Simulated innovation and pedagogical direction-setting in teacher education

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) creates a critical inflection point in the relationship between educational innovation and technological development. For decades, educational systems have often been positioned reactively: technologies emerge, institutions search for their possible pedagogical uses, and teacher education programmes adapt belatedly to tools designed elsewhere. This article argues that GenAI makes this sequence increasingly insufficient. Because GenAI can produce texts, explanations, feedback, learning resources, and assessment artefacts that resemble evidence of educational performance, it compels education to define more clearly what should count as learning, authorship, judgement, and valid evidence. The article develops the concept of simulated innovation to describe technology-led change that signals modernisation without transforming pedagogical purposes, assessment logics, teacher judgement, student agency, or learning relationships. It then argues that GenAI opens the possibility of pedagogical direction-setting: beginning from educational, ethical, epistemic, and democratic aims, and requiring technology to respond to those aims. Teacher education is positioned as a strategic site for this shift, not because teachers alone can govern AI-mediated education, but because professional formation can prepare educators to translate pedagogical purposes into criteria for design, assessment, ethical judgement, and technology governance.