Daire Maria Ní Uanacháin

Head of Geography, AI Strategist and Technology Enhanced Learning Steering Group, Italy

Workshop Information:

This session explores how co-creation, structured autonomy, and learning contracts can empower students to move from passive recipients to active agents of their learning journey.  Through an analysis of "Voices of Controversy" a grade 8 Geography and Civic Education project, we will see co-creating the course allowed students to exercise real-world agency while still meeting curriculum goals.  We'll walk through how to scaffold this classroom transformation meaningfully.

In a time of increasing student disengagement and AI disruption, classroom learning is in crisis. The value proposition of education is continuously undermined by student use of technology designed to simplify learning activities while homework is outsourced to tools. 

Let's be honest though, students were cheating long before AI, and they will continue to cheat if they can't see the value in what we are asking them to do. 

So how can we make learning truly meaningful? By building classrooms where student voice and learner agency has room to grow, without losing structure, rigor or the fiction where learning happens. 

This session shares how co-creation, learning contracts, and a flexible governance model helped transform my Geography classroom into a space of real learning dialogue, critical thinking, and agency.  We’ll see the impact of the change as expressed by the students themselves, and explore the ephegogy model, blending adolescent development with adult learning theory to meet students in the Zone of Proximal Development. 

Attendees will leave with a systems vision of educational change, a customizable student learning contract framework for project-based or interdisciplinary units, a governance planning framework to map where and how student voice can fit into their specific contexts and the MapLinks framework for planning project-based learning.

Participants will reflect on their own classroom ecosystems and leave with tools to begin this transition, no curriculum overhaul required: expect active reflection, practical tools, and a reframing of agency not as chaos, but as guided empowerment.

Session Outcomes:

• Design a student learning contract tailored to their curriculum, that balances required standards with personalized goals and expectations.

• Map their classroom’s “pockets of agency” to identify where and how student agency can be meaningfully embedded within existing structures.

• Create a scaffolded co-creation system for their contexts.

Biography:

Daire Maria Ní Uanacháin is an educator, learning designer, and researcher whose work spans adolescent learning, ethical AI integration & postdigital education, technology enhanced learning, future skills training and the disruptive didactics for teaching and learning. She is directly involved in shaping technology enhanced educational policies and strategies at Istituto Marymount, Rome where she is a founding member of the EdTech committee, and author of the institution’s AI strategy and policy.

Drawing on a range of learning theories including but not limited to Self-Determination Theory, Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, Generativism, and her own emerging theory of Ephegogy, Daire's practice-based research reimagines educational systems to meet the civic, emotional, and epistemic needs of learners and young people in an AI-mediated world. She offers new approaches to teaching, particularly in secondary school contexts, focusing on how co-creation, expansive learning, and ethical technology use can support learner motivation, agency and skills development.  Her initiatives integrate student voice, digital literacy, and critical engagement with global challenges, through interdisciplinary projects, inquiry-based civic education and design thinking courses, with her classrooms often becoming hybrid learning environments supported by generative tools. 

Beyond the school walls, she supports educators and institutions in designing human-centered, ethically grounded learning ecosystems, along with AI & digital strategy and policy, and professional development training, through a range of consultancy and volunteering initiatives.