Refining posthuman aesthetic pedagogy for teacher education through multidisciplinary expert consultation

1 Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI), generative media, immersive environments, and networked platforms are altering the conditions of teaching, learning, and artistic production. Their educational significance cannot be reduced to whether teachers can operate new tools. Teachers increasingly encounter outputs whose authorship is distributed, recommendations whose reasoning is opaque, and learning situations in which agency is shared among people, algorithms, interfaces, datasets, and material environments. UNESCO's AI Competency Framework for Teachers appropriately emphasizes human-centred agency, ethics, AI pedagogy, and continuing professional learning (UNESCO, 2024). Yet competency descriptions alone cannot settle what teachers should notice, value, question, or do when technical possibilities conflict with educational purposes.

This problem places professional judgment at the centre of teacher education. Professional knowledge is not simply applied to stable situations; it is interpreted in cases marked by uncertainty, competing values, and incomplete information. Shulman’s (1987) account of pedagogical content knowledge and Schön’s (1983) account of reflection-in-action both resist a purely technical conception of teaching. Biesta (2015) further argues that educational judgment concerns purposes as well as means. In AI-rich environments, this point becomes especially consequential: a technically efficient response may still be educationally undesirable, aesthetically impoverished, or ethically irresponsible.

Posthuman perspectives help name the conceptual challenge. They question the autonomous human subject and describe agency as relationally produced among human and non-human actors (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2016). Educational researchers have used such perspectives to unsettle familiar distinctions between learner and tool, online and offline, and teacher and technological system (Bayne, 2015; Snaza et al., 2014). However, philosophical critique does not automatically become a pedagogical orientation. Without educational refinement, posthuman language can remain too abstract to guide teacher educators or can be misread as diminishing human responsibility precisely when algorithmic systems make responsibility more urgent.

Aesthetic pedagogy offers a productive bridge because aesthetic experience concerns qualitative relations: how situations are perceived, felt, composed, interpreted, and transformed. Dewey (1934) described experience as transactional and art as an intensified mode of meaning-making rather than a separate cultural ornament. Greene (1995) emphasized imagination, perspective, and attentive engagement with possibility, while Eisner (2002) showed how the arts cultivate forms of judgment that cannot be reduced to rule following. These traditions make aesthetic pedagogy relevant beyond specialist art technique. They suggest ways of educating perception, interpretation, imagination, and responsiveness under conditions in which the significance of technology is not given in advance.

The initial framework examined in this study brought these traditions together under the term Posthuman Aesthetic Pedagogy. It proposed five interrelated dimensions—relationality, mediation, dialogicity, transformative creativity, and reflective responsibility—as resources for interpreting human-technology relations in education. The framework was theoretically coherent but remained insufficiently specified for teacher education. In particular, the relations among the five dimensions, their connection to professional judgment, and the status of technology within the framework required multidisciplinary scrutiny.

Accordingly, the present study asked: (1) Which elements of the initial framework did experts confirm as educationally coherent? (2) Where did experts identify conceptual tensions, ambiguities, or divergent interpretations? and (3) How did expert consultation refine the framework's contribution to teacher education? The aim was not to generate a new theory, achieve expert consensus, or claim empirical validation. It was to refine an existing conceptual framework through critical dialogue across relevant disciplines.

The study contributes a teacher-education argument distinct from curriculum-development accounts of art education. It does not propose a staged curriculum or define art education primarily as a mediator between humans and technology. Instead, it explains how a posthuman aesthetic orientation can strengthen professional judgment: the situated capacity to perceive relations, interrogate mediation, sustain dialogue, imagine alternatives, and accept responsibility. This positioning also distinguishes the framework from technology-integration models such as TPACK and DigCompEdu, which remain valuable but address different questions (Mishra and Koehler, 2006; Redecker, 2017).

2 Literature review

2.1 Reframing teacher education in the posthuman condition

Teacher education has long sought to connect disciplinary knowledge, pedagogy, experience, and ethical responsibility. Darling-Hammond (2006) argues that powerful preparation programs integrate knowledge of learners, subject matter, pedagogy, and clinical practice rather than treating them as separate components. Shulman (1987) similarly locates professional knowledge in transformations that make subject matter educable for particular learners. These accounts remain foundational, but digitally mediated environments complicate the object of judgment: teachers now interpret not only learners and content but also automated classifications, generated representations, platform constraints, and the political histories embedded in data.

A posthuman condition does not mean that teachers cease to matter. It means that teaching cannot be adequately explained through an isolated human agent acting upon passive tools. Barad’s (2007) account of intra-action emphasizes that entities and boundaries emerge through relations rather than preceding them. Braidotti (2013) describes the posthuman subject as relational, embodied, and situated, while Haraway (2016) insists on learning to live responsibly within entangled worlds. For teacher education, these positions invite attention to how pedagogical agency is assembled and how responsibility persists within distributed action.

Educational posthumanism has productively unsettled anthropocentric assumptions, but it also creates a translation problem. Bayne’s (2015) account of the teacherbot demonstrates that automation can redistribute teacher presence without simply replacing the teacher. Snaza et al. (2014) similarly show that educational research changes when human exceptionalism is questioned. Yet teacher educators still need criteria for deciding when redistribution supports learning, when it obscures accountability, and when it narrows educational possibility. The conceptual issue is therefore not whether technologies possess agency in some abstract sense, but how teachers learn to judge the educational consequences of socio-material arrangements

UNESCO’s (2024) framework is significant because it treats AI competence as more than operational fluency. Its five dimensions include a human-centred mindset, ethics, foundations and applications, pedagogy, and professional learning. DigCompEdu likewise organizes educators’ digital competence around professional engagement, resources, teaching, assessment, learner empowerment, and learners’ competence (Redecker, 2017). These frameworks provide essential policy and capability architectures. Posthuman Aesthetic Pedagogy addresses a complementary layer: the qualitative and ethical judgment through which competencies are enacted in ambiguous situations.

Teacher education should therefore resist two symmetrical errors. One is technological instrumentalism, in which AI is treated as a neutral tool and educational quality is equated with efficient integration. The other is conceptual dissolution, in which distributed agency becomes an excuse for weakening professional responsibility. A refined posthuman approach instead asks future teachers to identify what relations make an educational event possible, whose interests are amplified, what forms of perception are invited or excluded, and who remains answerable for consequences.

2.2 Professional judgment as the core of teacher education

Professional judgment is exercised when general knowledge is insufficient to determine action. Schön (1983) described professional practice as a conversation with situations that ‘talk back,’ requiring practitioners to reframe problems during action. Shulman (1987) similarly emphasized comprehension, transformation, instruction, evaluation, and reflection as interdependent processes. These traditions challenge the assumption that teacher expertise consists in following protocols. They are especially relevant when algorithmic recommendations appear authoritative despite being contingent on data, design choices, and institutional priorities

Biesta (2015) distinguishes educational questions of purpose from questions of effectiveness. What works is never sufficient without asking what it works for and for whom. In AI-mediated education, judgment includes deciding whether assistance enhances a learner's agency, whether generated content supports or substitutes for inquiry, whether personalization opens possibilities or fixes identities, and whether efficiency displaces relationships worth preserving. Such questions are normative and contextual; they cannot be delegated wholesale to a system or resolved through competence checklists.

Professional judgment also has perceptual and affective dimensions. Teachers must notice what is happening before they can deliberate about it. A classroom dashboard may make measurable activity visible while concealing hesitation, alienation, cultural difference, or the material conditions of participation. Posthuman Aesthetic Pedagogy treats this selective visibility as a pedagogical concern. It asks teachers to attend to how interfaces, images, sounds, bodies, spaces, and temporal rhythms configure experience.

This account does not romanticize intuition. Judgment requires knowledge, dialogue, evidence, and accountability. Its aesthetic quality lies in responsiveness to the form and felt qualities of a situation; its professional quality lies in connecting that perception to educational purpose and defensible action. Teacher education can cultivate such judgment by slowing down interpretation, making mediation visible, comparing alternative framings, and requiring students to justify the consequences of design choices.

2.3 Aesthetic pedagogy and professional learning

Recent art-education research has likewise emphasized the need to reconsider digital literacy and technology integration in response to changing technological environments. Cho and Lee (2024) proposed a digital-literacy framework for art education in the context of digital transformation, while Lee and Kim (2023) examined the implementation of educational technology within art-education practice. More recently, Hiçyilmaz (2025) showed that art education students engaging with generative AI recognized its potential for idea generation and creative development while also raising concerns about originality and human creativity. Together, these studies suggest that the educational significance of emerging technologies cannot be reduced to their adoption or technical use, but requires critical attention to how they reshape artistic experience, creativity, and educational judgment

Dewey’s (1934) theory of experience rejects a separation between perceiving, doing, undergoing, and meaning-making. An experience becomes aesthetic when its parts develop toward a qualitative unity, not because it occurs in a museum. This insight is useful for teacher education because technology-mediated learning is also composed: prompts, interface sequences, visual conventions, feedback loops, bodies, and materials organize attention and possibility

Greene (1995) links aesthetic education with wide-awakeness, imagination, and the capacity to see otherwise. Imagination is not escape from reality but a means of perceiving alternatives within it. Eisner (2002) similarly argues that the arts teach attention to relationships, qualitative nuance, multiple solutions, and judgment in the absence of formulas. Together, these accounts show why aesthetic pedagogy can support professional learning: it develops ways of noticing and composing that technical training alone cannot supply.

Aesthetic pedagogy must nevertheless be protected from three reductions. First, it is not synonymous with beautification or sensory stimulation. Second, it is not confined to personal expression without public consequence. Third, it is not a license to celebrate every technological novelty as creative. In the proposed framework, aesthetic experience becomes educational through dialogue, critical interpretation, and responsibility.

In this context, aesthetic literacy should also be distinguished from adjacent literacy constructs. Visual literacy primarily concerns the interpretation and production of visual meaning, while media literacy extends attention to the forms, conventions, and social conditions of media communication. Multimodal literacy addresses meaning-making across multiple representational modes, and critical digital literacy foregrounds questions of power, participation, representation, and inequality within digital environments. AI literacy, in turn, emphasizes the knowledge and capacities required to understand, use, critically evaluate, and ethically engage with artificial intelligence. Aesthetic literacy, as used in the present study, does not replace these constructs or constitute an additional dimension of the proposed framework. Rather, it refers to a qualitative mode of perception and judgment through which teachers attend to form, relation, affect, ambiguity, and possibility within technologically mediated educational situations. Its distinctive contribution therefore lies in cultivating sensitivity to the qualitative configuration of experience and connecting such perception to interpretation, imagination, and responsible educational judgment.

For future teachers, arts-based inquiry can make mediation available for examination. Students might compare a hand-drawn and generated image, trace how training data and interface defaults shape visual form, stage multiple interpretations, or redesign an activity after considering accessibility and cultural representation. The point is not to choose the human artifact automatically. It is to make relations perceptible and discussable so that pedagogical judgment becomes more explicit.

This orientation also clarifies the place of creativity. Creativity is often invoked as an unquestioned benefit of digital technology. A posthuman aesthetic account instead treats creativity as distributed and transformative but evaluates transformation by its educational consequences. The relevant question is not only whether something novel was produced, but whether the process expanded perception, agency, dialogue, and responsible participation.

2.4 Toward a conceptually refined framework

The literature establishes a sequence of claims. Posthuman scholarship makes distributed agency and socio-material relations visible; teacher-education scholarship establishes judgment as contextual and purposive; aesthetic pedagogy contributes attention, imagination, and qualitative composition. The initial framework brought these resources together but did not yet explain their internal order strongly enough for educational use.

The central need was therefore conceptual refinement. Relationality risked becoming a general statement that everything is connected. Mediation could be confused with neutral transmission. Dialogicity could be reduced to verbal exchange. Transformative creativity could be celebrated without criteria. Reflective responsibility could appear as one dimension among others rather than the ethical orientation of the whole framework. Expert consultation was used to test these ambiguities through disciplinary criticism, not to count agreement or confer authority. Importantly, these five dimensions were established theoretically prior to the formal expert consultation; they were not generated inductively from the consultation data. The role of consultation was to critically examine their conceptual coherence, boundaries, interrelations, and educational significance and, where warranted, to refine their formulation.

The working proposition entering consultation was that the five dimensions describe a recursive movement of professional judgment. Teachers first attend to relations, then interrogate how meanings and actions are mediated, open interpretations to dialogue, compose alternatives, and evaluate consequences responsibly. Reflection can redirect any earlier movement.

3 Methodology

3.1 Research design

This study adopted a theory-informed qualitative expert-consultation design. The object of inquiry was an already articulated conceptual framework; accordingly, the purpose was conceptual refinement rather than inductive theory generation. Grounded theory terminology was deliberately avoided because the analysis did not begin with open-ended category generation and did not claim theoretical saturation. Expert consultation instead created a structured setting in which informed participants could confirm, challenge, distinguish, and elaborate the framework. Figure 1 presents the overall research design and the process of conceptual refinement through multidisciplinary expert consultation.

The design treated disagreement as analytically valuable. Consensus methods are appropriate when a study seeks standardized recommendations, but this inquiry required disciplinary differences to remain visible. A philosopher's concern with ontology, an art educator's concern with learning, a technologist's concern with systems, and an artist's concern with material practice could reveal different weaknesses in the same proposition. The analytic task was to reconstruct these differences as refinements without forcing unanimity.

3.2 Provenance of the expert consultation and selection

The present study developed from a broader research trajectory examining the changing role of art education in mediating relationships between humans and digital technologies. During the earlier phase of this research, the author engaged in preliminary scholarly consultation with specialists from several relevant fields to clarify emerging philosophical and educational issues. These preliminary exchanges were exploratory and were not treated as research data in the present study. On the basis of the conceptual issues identified through this broader research process, five experts with directly relevant disciplinary expertise were subsequently purposively selected for formal written consultation. Only the responses obtained from these five participants through the formal consultation procedure constituted the expert dataset analyzed in this study.

Purposeful expert sampling was used to recruit five field specialists able to examine the framework from complementary perspectives. The panel covered art education, curriculum studies, educational philosophy, media aesthetics, and contemporary artistic practice. Selection prioritized relevant expertise, sustained professional experience, and the capacity to engage the framework critically. Sample sufficiency was judged by disciplinary coverage and depth of consultation, not by statistical representation or theoretical saturation (Patton, 2015).

Participants were assigned identifiers E1–E5. Table 1 reports the panel at a level that protects confidentiality.

Table 1. Expert-panel profile.

3.3 Data collection

Following the development of the preliminary conceptual framework, a semi-structured questionnaire consisting of five open-ended questions was prepared. The five questions collectively addressed the preliminary framework, with each question foregrounding a primary conceptual dimension while allowing overlap with other dimensions, and invited participants to critically evaluate, confirm, challenge, or refine the proposed concepts. Before distribution, the questionnaire was reviewed for clarity and coherence. Table 2 summarizes the consultation architecture. The complete domain-specific consultation protocols are provided in Supplementary Appendix A and B.

Table 2. Semi-structured consultation architecture.

The formal written consultation was conducted individually by email between July and October 2025. This asynchronous format was selected because the participating experts were located in different institutions and professional settings and because it allowed participants sufficient time to reflect on complex conceptual questions. The questionnaire was distributed individually to all invited experts via email. Participants received an information sheet explaining the purpose of the study, the voluntary nature of participation, confidentiality procedures, and the intended scholarly use of anonymized quotations. Written informed consent was obtained electronically before participants submitted their responses.

All written responses were anonymized immediately after collection and assigned participant identifiers (E1–E5) before analysis. The responses were originally provided in Korean. For the purposes of analysis and reporting, the author translated relevant excerpts into English, and the translated excerpts were reviewed against the original Korean responses to ensure conceptual and semantic consistency. Quotations were translated as closely as possible to the original Korean wording, with only minimal grammatical adjustments for readability in English; no substantive meaning was altered. Each of the five experts provided a written response of approximately five pages, addressing all of the consultation questions. Following the initial written responses, two participants were contacted once each with follow-up questions for clarification or elaboration, resulting in two follow-up exchanges in total. Because the purpose of the study was conceptual refinement rather than statistical generalization, the written consultation focused on obtaining reflective disciplinary perspectives regarding the preliminary conceptual framework. The resulting corpus comprised all submitted written responses, which formed the basis for the subsequent theory-informed interpretive analysis.

3.4 Conceptually guided qualitative analysis

All qualitative analysis was conducted by the author using the original Korean responses. English translations were prepared for the reporting of relevant excerpts and were not used as the primary material for analytical interpretation. Initial analytic notes were generated in Korean and documented conceptual claims, supporting examples, objections, counterexamples, and disciplinary assumptions.

Analysis proceeded recursively between transcripts and the initial framework. In phase one, transcripts were read in full and accompanied by analytic memos recording conceptual claims, examples, objections, and disciplinary assumptions. In phase two, relevant passages were mapped to the initial dimensions and to relations among them. This was deductive only in the limited sense that analysis was guided by the pre-existing framework; the author remained open to revisions of its language, boundaries, interrelations, and educational significance. Passages that did not readily fit the initial framework, contradicted an initial proposition, or reflected minority disciplinary positions were retained rather than excluded and were examined as potential evidence of conceptual divergence or refinement.

In phase three, interpretations were organized through three lenses. Conceptual confirmation identified propositions experts regarded as coherent or educationally useful. Conceptual divergence identified ambiguity, disagreement, counterexamples, or disciplinary differences. Conceptual refinement documented changes that clarified a dimension, specified a relation, or strengthened implications for teacher education. This structure prevented the five dimensions from being misrepresented as categories that ‘emerged’ independently from data.

In phase four, a change matrix compared the initial and refined framework. A revision was retained when it was traceable to consultation evidence, resolved a conceptual problem, and remained coherent with the study's purpose. The author repeatedly checked whether a proposed change strengthened educational interpretation rather than merely adding terminology. A proposed refinement was retained only when it could be traced to specific consultation evidence, addressed an identifiable conceptual ambiguity or limitation, and remained coherent with the theoretical foundations and educational purpose of the framework. Counterexamples and alternative interpretations were reconsidered before the final refinement was adopted.

Figure 2 summarizes the analytic process Table 3 provides an explicit mapping between the consultation questions and the conceptual dimensions that guided the analysis. Table 4 provides an audit-oriented account of the analytic phases and their corresponding outputs.

Table 3. Mapping of consultation questions onto the five conceptual dimensions.

Table 4. Analysis phases and audit trail.

Although the wording of the questions was adapted to each expert's disciplinary background, the five consultation protocols followed the same thematic sequence. The questions were designed to examine different but overlapping aspects of the initial five-dimensional framework rather than to operationalize each dimension as an independent variable. Table 3 therefore provides an explicit mapping between the consultation questions and the conceptual dimensions that guided the analysis. Because relationality, mediation, dialogicity, transformative creativity, and reflective responsibility were understood as interconnected dimensions, each question was assigned a primary conceptual dimension while allowing secondary dimensions where substantive overlap occurred. This mapping served as an analytical guide rather than a predetermined coding matrix, thereby allowing expert responses to confirm, challenge, or refine the initial conceptual structure.

The mapping was used as an analytical guide rather than as a fixed coding matrix. Because the five dimensions are conceptually interrelated, individual questions and responses could inform more than one dimension. The primary dimension indicates the principal conceptual issue addressed by each question, while the secondary dimensions identify overlapping analytical concerns.

3.5 Relationship to the related curriculum study

The initial five-dimensional framework examined in the present study was informed by the author's broader research on art education as a mediating pedagogical practice (Jeong, 2025). A related curriculum study translated mediation, relationality, dialogicity, transformability, and reflectivity into an aesthetic experience-based digital-literacy curriculum aligned with the 2022 Revised Korean National Art Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2022). The present study, however, addresses a distinct research question: how these conceptual dimensions may be critically refined as a posthuman aesthetic orientation for professional judgment in teacher education. Accordingly, although the two studies emerged from the same broader research trajectory and drew upon related expert consultation, they differ in their analytic purpose, conceptual development, and educational outcome. The present analysis does not reproduce or evaluate the curriculum model developed in the related study.

3.6 Trustworthiness, reflexivity, and ethics

Trustworthiness was supported through an explicit audit trail, repeated comparison of transcripts and framework versions, attention to both convergence and disagreement, and reflexive memoing. These practices align with credibility, dependability, sincerity, and meaningful coherence in qualitative inquiry (Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Tracy, 2010). Reflexivity was especially important because the author had developed the initial framework. Memos therefore distinguished prior propositions from consultation-based revisions and recorded plausible alternative interpretations (Finlay, 2002).

The study does not claim that expert participation validated the framework in a psychometric or universal sense. Expert authority is situated, and a five-person panel cannot represent all cultural, educational, artistic, or technological contexts. The outcome is a more defensible conceptual version whose empirical usefulness remains to be studied. The study involved voluntary written consultation with adult experts. Participants received information about the study purpose, procedures, confidentiality, intended scholarly use of anonymized quotations, and their right to withdraw, and written informed consent was obtained electronically before responses were submitted. No minors or vulnerable populations participated.

4 Findings

4.1 Conceptual confirmation: preserving the framework's educational core

Across disciplinary positions, experts treated the five dimensions as a coherent vocabulary for examining technologically mediated educational experience. Relationality was valued because it displaced the image of a teacher or learner acting independently upon a passive tool. E2 (educational philosophy) stated that: “Education is fundamentally about relationships. As digital technologies become embedded in everyday life, education must consider relationships not only between teachers and students but also between humans and technologies.” E1 (media aesthetics) further warned that “the combination of digital media environments and artificial intelligence risks normalizing simulated realities and reinforcing algorithmic bias.” Similarly, E3 (curriculum studies) argued that “humans are members of complex networks of relationships, and digital media are part of those networks. Educational practice must recognize these interdependencies.” These findings suggest that ethical engagement with technology cannot be treated as an auxiliary component of digital education. Rather, these responses reinforced the importance of an ethical orientation within relationality, through which learners and teachers critically examine the social and cultural consequences of technological systems.

Mediation was recognized as necessary for explaining how technologies shape what becomes visible, sayable, and doable. E3 (curriculum studies) explained that: “Mediation is not merely a process of connection. It is a process of mutual transformation and growth. Curriculum should therefore be designed around interactions among learners, knowledge, technologies, and environments.” Such approaches encourage interdisciplinary learning, collaborative inquiry, and dynamic interactions among human and non-human actors.

Dialogicity connected relational awareness with shared interpretation, while transformative creativity described the capacity to recompose situations. E5 (art education) argued that: “Digital technologies should not replace artistic processes. Instead, they should be approached as one medium among many that can support artistic exploration.” This perspective emphasized that technological innovation should not displace embodied artistic experience.

This confirmation was conditional. Experts did not support the dimensions as a list of desirable traits or as a linear instructional sequence. Their value lay in the relations among them. Relationality without mediation remained too broad; mediation without dialogue risked deterministic analysis; creativity without responsibility could reproduce novelty-driven technology adoption. The framework was therefore confirmed most strongly as an interconnected orientation to judgment rather than as five separable competencies.

Experts also supported the framework's relevance to teacher education. Their reasoning converged on the insufficiency of technical proficiency when teachers must interpret opaque or contested situations. The aesthetic emphasis was seen as a way of cultivating attention to qualitative differences—tone, form, absence, rhythm, embodiment, and affect—that conventional digital competence frameworks may not foreground.

4.2 Conceptual divergence: locating tensions and limits

The first divergence concerned agency. Some interpretations emphasized distributed agency among humans and non-humans; others worried that symmetrical language could obscure the institutional and moral accountability of teachers and technology providers. E4 (contemporary artistic practice) explained that: “AI can democratize artistic production by lowering technical barriers and providing opportunities for experimentation. However, it may also reduce opportunities for deep reflection, personal struggle, and individual expression.” E5 (art education) similarly argued that: “AI should be used as a material rather than as a substitute for artistic creation. It can support idea generation and exploration, but it should not replace human judgment.” E1 (media aesthetics) emphasized that “AI has the potential to transform artistic practice in ways comparable to the emergence of photography, creating entirely new possibilities for artistic expression.” This tension showed that the framework needed to distinguish causal participation from professional answerability. Technologies can shape action without bearing responsibility in the same educational sense as persons and institutions.

A second divergence concerned mediation. A narrow reading treated mediation as a bridge between two already separate entities—human and technology. Other experts understood it as constitutive: relations through technologies help produce the identities, capacities, and meanings involved. These perspectives challenge teacher-education approaches that position technology as an external instructional tool. Instead, participants’ accounts suggested that future teachers need to recognize how technologies actively configure perception, participation, and pedagogical possibilities. Such approaches encourage interdisciplinary learning, collaborative inquiry, and dynamic interactions among human and non-human actors. The latter interpretation was more consistent with the framework's posthuman foundations. The refined account therefore rejects both technological neutrality and simple two-sided bridging.

A third divergence concerned aesthetic experience. Participants cautioned against equating aesthetics with beauty, taste, emotional engagement, or art products. From an educational perspective, aesthetic experience needed to include critical perception of exclusions, friction, opacity, and discomfort. E1 (media aesthetics) explained that “digital literacy is no longer simply about technological devices. What is needed now is literacy that encompasses aesthetics, art, media, and ethics. Through aesthetic education, learners can creatively engage with media while expanding their understanding of digital environments.” This expanded the framework from appreciative experience toward inquiry into how situations are composed.

A fourth divergence concerned creativity. The language of transformation could be read as celebrating disruption and novelty. Experts emphasized that generated novelty may reproduce stereotypes, extract cultural labor, or narrow learner agency. Transformative creativity consequently required explicit criteria: expansion of perception and participation, openness to revision, and responsibility for material and social effects.

Finally, participants differed over whether reflective responsibility should remain a discrete dimension. Treating it as the final step suggested that ethics entered only after creative action. The refined interpretation instead retained it as a named dimension while also making it a transversal orientation that shapes noticing, mediation, dialogue, and creation from the outset.

These divergent and minority positions were not treated as deviations to be resolved through consensus. Instead, they were retained as theoretically informative cases that exposed limits or ambiguities in the initial framework. In particular, differences concerning technological agency, the meaning of mediation, the scope of aesthetic experience, the educational value of novelty, and the status of responsibility directly informed the subsequent conceptual refinements.

4.3 Conceptual refinement: professional judgment as the connective capacity

The principal refinement was to position professional judgment at the centre of the framework. The five dimensions now function as mutually corrective movements through which judgment develops. Relational attunement asks what and who participates in a situation. Critical mediation asks how interfaces, representations, algorithms, materials, and institutions configure participation. Dialogic interpretation brings different experiences and disciplines into contestable meaning-making. Transformative composition develops alternatives rather than merely criticizing existing arrangements. Reflective responsibility evaluates purposes, consequences, exclusions, and answerability.

Each dimension was also sharpened. Relationality became relational attunement, emphasizing disciplined noticing rather than a generic claim of connectedness. Mediation became critical mediation, emphasizing that technologies actively configure experience. Dialogicity became dialogic interpretation, extending beyond speech to encounters among images, bodies, artifacts, environments, and perspectives. Transformative creativity became transformative composition, emphasizing situated recombination and redesign over novelty. Reflective responsibility was retained but expanded as both a dimension and the ethical orientation of the framework.

The refined framework is recursive. A judgment about consequences may require renewed attention to neglected relations; dialogue may expose how mediation was initially misread; a creative alternative may change the problem itself. This refinement changes the framework's educational status. It is not a curriculum model, developmental sequence, or assessment rubric. It is a pedagogical orientation for designing and interpreting teacher-learning experiences. Its intended outcome is not conformity to five behaviours but stronger capacity to justify action in complex human-technology arrangements. Professional judgment is therefore not proposed as a sixth dimension or an additional competence; it is the connective pedagogical capacity through which the five dimensions are interpreted and enacted recursively in situated educational practice. Figure 3 represents this recursive organization.

Table 5 records the conceptual change from initial to refined terms and its significance for teacher education.

Table 5. Conceptual refinement of the framework.

5 Discussion

The expert consultation supported the educational core of the initial five-dimensional framework while also revealing tensions that required conceptual clarification. The discussion below interprets these refinements in relation to professional judgment, teacher education, and adjacent competency frameworks.

5.1 From posthuman relation to professional answerability

The findings address a recurring difficulty in posthuman educational thought: how to acknowledge distributed agency without dissolving human responsibility. Barad (2007), Braidotti (2013), and Haraway (2016) each challenge autonomous humanism, yet none requires educational actors to abandon ethical response. The refined framework makes this distinction explicit. Technologies, materials, and environments participate in action; teachers and institutions remain professionally answerable for how arrangements are selected, interpreted, and revised.

This clarification matters in AI-mediated education because agency and accountability are easily conflated. A generative system can influence a lesson, but it cannot assume a teacher's obligation to justify purposes, protect learners, or respond to contextual harm. Professional judgment is therefore not restored by denying non-human agency. It is strengthened by understanding the arrangement well enough to locate obligations within it. This distinction also requires differentiating relational or causal participation from moral and professional accountability. AI systems, interfaces, datasets, and algorithms may participate causally in shaping educational action, but such participation does not confer moral agency in the same sense as human actors. Teachers remain professionally accountable for pedagogical decisions within their sphere of practice, while institutions, developers, and platform providers bear differentiated responsibilities for governance, design, data practices, accessibility, and system-level consequences. A posthuman account of distributed agency therefore does not imply an equal distribution of ethical accountability.

5.2 Extending competency frameworks through aesthetic judgment

The refined framework complements UNESCO’s (2024) AI competency architecture and DigCompEdu (Redecker, 2017). Those frameworks identify important domains of capacity and progression. Posthuman Aesthetic Pedagogy addresses how teachers experience and interpret situations where competencies must be brought to bear. It foregrounds perception, ambiguity, qualitative relations, imagination, and ethical composition. To clarify this complementary relationship, Table 6 compares the refined dimensions of Posthuman Aesthetic Pedagogy with relevant dimensions of UNESCO’s (2024) AI Competency Framework for Teachers. The comparison does not imply equivalence between the two frameworks; rather, it identifies areas of conceptual overlap and clarifies the distinctive contribution of Posthuman Aesthetic Pedagogy to situated aesthetic and professional judgment.

Table 6. Conceptual comparison of posthuman aesthetic pedagogy and UNESCO's AI competency framework for teachers.

The distinction is visible in a common teacher-education task. A competence-oriented activity might ask candidates to select and use an AI tool responsibly. A posthuman aesthetic activity would additionally ask them to trace what the interface makes salient, compare whose visual conventions are normalized, attend to how learners experience authorship, redesign the activity through dialogue, and justify the resulting arrangement. The latter does not replace competence; it gives competence a situated educational direction.

TPACK similarly explains the interaction of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (Mishra and Koehler, 2006). The refined framework does not compete with that knowledge model. It focuses on a different problem: how teachers judge the qualitative and ethical form of a situation after relevant knowledge domains have been recognized. In this sense, professional judgment is the connective capacity that prevents integration from becoming an end in itself.

5.3 Implications for teacher-education design

The framework suggests that teacher education should create occasions for candidates to examine mediation rather than merely practice adoption. Cases can be built around ambiguous outputs, contested representations, authorship disputes, accessibility tensions, environmental costs, or shifts in classroom authority. Candidates should be asked to map relations, identify what the system obscures, invite alternative interpretations, compose more responsible arrangements, and explain their choices.

The following implications should not be interpreted as a separate taxonomy of teacher competencies or learning outcomes. Rather, they illustrate how the five dimensions may be enacted in teacher-education settings through the connective capacity of professional judgment.

Aesthetic inquiry is especially valuable because it makes judgment observable. Sketches, image comparisons, material experiments, multimodal annotations, and reflective exhibitions externalize how candidates notice and reframe a situation. Dialogue around these artifacts can expose assumptions that remain hidden in abstract discussion. Assessment should therefore attend to the quality of noticing, reasoning, revision, and responsibility rather than the polish of a technological product alone.

Teacher educators also need to model uncertainty. If the framework becomes a five-item checklist, it will reproduce the technical rationality it was designed to resist. Productive use involves movement among dimensions and openness to surprise. Teacher educators can document how judgments change after encountering another person's interpretation, a material constraint, or an unexpected system output.

Institutionally, the framework supports collective rather than individual responsibility. Decisions about approved tools, data governance, accessibility, and intellectual property cannot be left entirely to individual teachers. Programs should connect classroom inquiry with institutional policy and invite collaboration among educators, artists, technologists, ethicists, and affected communities.

5.4 Conceptual and methodological contribution

Conceptually, the study refines Posthuman Aesthetic Pedagogy by making professional judgment its connective educational capacity. This avoids presenting posthumanism as another content area to be mastered. Instead, posthuman concepts reorganize how teachers attend to agency, mediation, meaning, creativity, and responsibility.

Methodologically, the study demonstrates a disciplined use of expert consultation for conceptual refinement. Expert views were not counted as votes and the framework was not declared validated. The confirmation-divergence-refinement structure preserves criticism and makes the logic of change visible. This approach may be useful when educational scholars need to strengthen an existing theory-informed framework without falsely claiming inductive emergence.

The study's distinct contribution lies in teacher education. Whereas adjacent art-education scholarship may focus on curriculum mediation or staged curricular development, this manuscript focuses on the formation of professional judgment and does not reproduce those models. Art and aesthetic inquiry appear here as modes of perception, interpretation, and composition within professional learning.

5.5 Limitations and future research

The study has several limitations. First, the small purposive panel provided disciplinary breadth and conceptual depth but cannot represent the diversity of cultural, geographic, institutional, or disciplinary perspectives relevant to posthuman and AI-mediated education. Second, because the consultation questions were informed by a pre-existing conceptual framework, the study was necessarily theory-led and therefore carried a risk of confirmation bias despite deliberate attention to divergence and counterexamples. Third, written asynchronous consultation enabled reflective responses but limited the spontaneous probing, interaction, and co-construction possible in synchronous interviews or focus groups. Fourth, all qualitative interpretation was conducted by a single researcher who had also developed the initial framework. Reflexive memoing, audit documentation, and attention to discrepant cases reduced but could not eliminate this interpretive risk. Fifth, the original Korean responses required translation for reporting in English. Although translated excerpts were checked against the Korean originals for conceptual and semantic consistency, translation inevitably involves interpretive choices. Sixth, the small panel and structured consultation yielded a limited range of negative cases, and minority positions should therefore be interpreted as conceptually informative rather than representative of broader disciplinary disagreement. Finally, the framework was refined through expert discourse rather than classroom implementation; its pedagogical usefulness and transferability therefore require empirical examination in preservice and in-service teacher-education settings.

6 Conclusion

This study refined an initial framework of Posthuman Aesthetic Pedagogy through multidisciplinary expert consultation. The analysis documented what experts confirmed, where they diverged, and how their criticism sharpened the framework for teacher education. The refined framework positions professional judgment as the connective capacity linking relational attunement, critical mediation, dialogic interpretation, transformative composition, and reflective responsibility. Its contribution is an orientation for helping future teachers perceive and justify educational action within entangled human-technology arrangements. It complements technology-competence and knowledge-integration frameworks by addressing qualitative, aesthetic, and ethical judgment under uncertainty. Rather than offering another theoretical interpretation of posthumanism, this study demonstrates how philosophical ideas may be conceptually refined into educational frameworks that strengthen teachers’ professional judgment in increasingly complex human-technology relationships.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. During the preparation of this manuscript, the author used ChatGPT, OpenAI, solely to support English-language editing, improve readability, and assist with the organization of preliminary author-generated notes. Generative AI was not used to collect research data, conduct qualitative coding, categorize or interpret expert responses, identify themes, generate findings, or make analytical or conceptual decisions. All qualitative analysis was conducted by the author using the original Korean responses. No participant response data or identifiable participant information were uploaded to or processed by the generative AI system. All AI-assisted text was critically reviewed, revised, and verified by the author, who assumes full responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, and final content of the manuscript.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2026.1940834/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Bora Basaran, Anadolu University, Türkiye

Reviewed by: Suhan Wu, Nanjing Polytechnic Institute, China

Norfarizah Mohd Bakhir, University of Science Malaysia (USM), Malaysia