Sub Theme 1: The Charged Curriculum: Epistemology, GenAI and What Students Learn

Generative AI has illuminated – like a lightning strike – the assumptions buried in our curriculum design, assessment architecture, and credentialing logic. But we must be cautious about what kind of mirror GenAI actually is. It may reveal a version of learning already thin enough to be processed, returned, and credentialed at scale, yet it may be distorting as much as it reflects and refracts – a fun-house mirror as alarming as it is illuminating. Like a Highveld storm, this illumination is sudden, disorienting, and not entirely in our control. The lightning shows us the landscape for a moment, but it also flattens it into stark relief, stripping away the texture of place, history, and relationship. This subtheme asks: What does a curriculum that knows where it stands look like? It explores how we transform imported frameworks through the soil they land in, rather than adopting them wholesale or rejecting them entirely. It insists that learning is embodied, relational, and situated in place and time.

Provocations:

• What does the GenAI mirror reveal about our learning and teaching practices, what does it distort, and what new possibilities or challenges does it illuminate for learning?
• How do we co-create a curriculum that is contextually responsive, not just globally standardised?
• Where, if at all, does human judgment and relational learning remain irreplaceable?