Fostering SCALE habits of mind through AI-empowered arts-based pedagogy

Abstract

The SCALE taxonomy offers a future-oriented framework of educational objectives for the age of artificial intelligence (AI). This conceptual paper asks how these objectives can be enacted through a pedagogy that remains embodied, creative, and connected to human life. We thus integrate SCALE with Arts-Based Pedagogy (ABP), drawing on embodied cognition to conceptualize ABP as a life-connected learning ecology organized through four interrelated dimensions: perception, representation, creative iteration, and resonance. Rather than fixed stages, these dimensions describe how artistic experience enables learners to notice lived phenomena, give ideas perceptible form, revise meaning through making, and reconnect creation with personal social life. Building on this conceptual integration, we propose the AI-empowered ABP for K-12 education and beyond. The pedagogy moves from sensorial perception and artistic representation to feedback and self-reflection, creative making and AI-empowered iteration, and sharing for resonance. We argue that AI may generate text, images, music alternatives, or feedback, but learners retain primary responsibility for intention, interpretation, judgment, and transformation. AI-empowered ABP therefore positions AI as a generative collaborator and facilitator within a human-led, life-connected process of meaning-making, through which SCALE habits of mind can be mobilized within shared inquiry.