GenAI, axiology and learning design: being human is not a given

Something you learn from the humanities is that being human is not a given. It changes with time and in our personal lives. We fail at it. It’s something complex that you must work towards.

So there’s a new challenge where education helps us do that with GenAI.

As higher education revisits older epistemological languages—particularly those linking embodied experience, reflection, and lived value—it becomes clearer that the centre of gravity of learning is shifting.

In a context where GenAI increasingly permeates platforms, workflows, and even habits of thought, we seem to be at a point of crisis and therefore choice—daily, and not particularly sexy—as this translates into a myriad of working groups, policies, and programme reviews.

We see this as a branching choice: an in viva voce approach to assessment and a doubling down on a campus-based model, or one where the value of education no longer lies primarily in information access and immediate recall (do you remember a time before web search, when uncertainty had to be lived with until one reached a library?). In the latter, what matters is how meaning is recognised, worked through, and shared. In the former—well, something for another day, perhaps.

This shift maps closely onto a Husserlian phenomenology of value, reflection, and intersubjectivity, with clear implications for teaching theory. 

• First, the noematic moment of experience: something resonates because it matters, because we value it, because it aligns with values already sedimented through social life and personal history. 
• Second, reflective and investigative work: we write, sketch, research, narrate, or create in order to understand what has happened. 
• Third, intersubjective sharing: meaning is stabilised, questioned, or transformed through dialogue with others.

This is not separate from learning; it overlays it. We do this every day—at the dinner table, with friends, reading, listening to music, arguing about politics, sex, and religion. It’s not only how we learn; it’s how we update our axiological matrix as a culture. 

And how on earth do you develop the so praised “critical thinking” outside that immediate experience out in the world? Outside a system of values – from hedonistic, to aesthetical, noetic, ethical, religious? Outside the risk of performing a job, say, of a surgeon, or a different  social role? Without that loop of living and co-creating that same system? HE seems to want to teach critical thinking to aspirant New Yorker fact checkers, if you look at how we turn those notional learning hours into teaching and learning profiles and assessment design. 

The question, then, is whether learning design can deliberately create the conditions for axiological experience – time, trust, openness, the capital of summative assessment given to these moments - followed by structured reflection and investigation – multimodal capturing, lateral reading, formative articulation with feedback, relational experiences -  and finally dialogical sharing of sense-making— relational summative practice, whether artistic, clinical, or philosophical. This sounds like an old question, but there are specifics now with GenAI.

Something I’ve seen over the past couple of months—work in simulation-based education, and in reflective clinical portfolios (wonderful work in progress)—suggests that it can.

High-fidelity simulations, when designed as more than technical rehearsal, generate embodied disruption, emotional attunement, and ethical tension—precisely the conditions that trigger noematic significance. Say, when simulating - XR or not - giving bad news to a patient´s family.

Similarly, clinical portfolio-based approaches that move beyond written reflection toward multimodal artefact creation—images, narrative fragments, audio, annotated traces of practice—enabling learners to reconstruct experience perceptually rather than merely describe it. Here, reflection functions not as retrospective commentary, but as perceptual reconstruction of lived clinical moments, scaffolded through a scrapbook-style workflow.

A light, human-in-the-loop use of GenAI supports pattern recognition, thematic surfacing, and formative feedback, without displacing interpretation or ownership from the learner. It can reach deeper reflective depth, stronger professional identity cues, and increased learner confidence.

What matters is not the technology, but the pattern and what we vaingloriously call “feedback literacy”, or Socratic teaching.

The learning loop begins with valued experience, moves through structured reflection and inquiry, and culminates in shared meaning-making. This pattern cuts across domains—clinical education, the humanities, professional practice—and offers a robust way of designing for learning in a post-GenAI landscape. It appeals because it asks learners to feel something and builds on that initial moment of experience: what it is like to fail, to listen to a piece of music, to hear an idea we profoundly disagree with. And then to capture that, look at it without breaking it, and share it. 

Designing for learning with GenAI, then, can be less about efficiency or automation, and more about safeguarding the conditions under which applied skill, meaning, value, and identity can emerge.

If we do that, we can keep teaching and learning as a way of mediating meaning through our personal experience of the world, seek that seed of knowledge in experience, fact-check ourselves, and query our reactions to experience—accepting them, refuting them, even—and share them with others. 

If we design for this, people might be motivated because it starts with their context, feelings, reactions. And share these experiences and reflections as moments of learning and assessment.

If we do this, we can keep that social, joint axiological work going. GenAI fits into this as a how we do it, rather than a sort of who does it. The shift from how to who is where the danger is, if we see don’t see GenAI as a tool or an “other” but, as social media, a system that amongst other things was built to seduce, capture emotion and labour and redistribute its power.

If we feed that personal, educational and social loop, we might even keep being human.