Critical pedagogy and complex thinking in higher education in the age of artificial intelligence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70577/asce.v5i2.902Keywords:
Artificial intelligence; higher education; pedagogy; university teaching; educational innovationAbstract
This article examines how the field of pedagogy in higher education has evolved in the age of artificial intelligence between 2021 and 2026, addressing its main trends, theoretical foundations, and emerging challenges. A bibliometric study was conducted on 592 documents indexed in Scopus, retrieved using the descriptors “artificial intelligence”, “higher education”, and “pedagogy”. Descriptive statistics characterised productivity, citations, countries, affiliations, and sources, while VOSviewer enabled the construction of keyword co-occurrence maps and thematic clusters. Findings reveal exponential growth in scientific output, notable citation impact, and a strong geographical and funding concentration in the Global North. Five clusters were identified, structuring research around: critical governance and data protection, institutional reforms, technology-enhanced instructional designs, ethics and academic writing with Generative AI (GenAI), and experimental evaluation of large language models (LLMs). Taken together, the results show that AI integration in higher education is approached as a technical, pedagogical, and political phenomenon, yet epistemic asymmetries and technocratic perspectives persist. The study provides an integrated cartography that brings these bibliometric patterns into dialogue with Freire's pedagogy of liberation and Morin's complex thinking, arguing that future research and practice should move toward critical, situated, and systemic models of AI pedagogy that democratise knowledge production and foster learners capable of engaging reflexively and ethically with intelligent systems.
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