This interdisciplinary research explores the dynamic relationship between knowledge and students in higher education (HE). By focusing on employer-driven “competencies” and “learning outcomes,” contemporary HE reduces knowledge to the currency of competencies and skills (c.f. Biesta, 2016). This shift results in ‘knowledge blindness’ (Maton, 2014) in educational policy and practice, which obscures the value of knowledge beyond its immediate utility and questions its role in contemporary education as such. At the same time, the digitalization of education, the encroachment of shortcut formats of knowledge such as Wikipedia, the facilitation of instant access to information (e.g., via Google search), and, most recently, the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (i.e., generative AI), fundamentally challenge traditional knowledge-making and learning patterns.

Our project asks: how do we understand knowledge today, and what does it mean to make, employ, retain, or access knowledge in HE? Detecting the roots of these shifts in educational policies and practices in patterns that evolved and iterated in the 18th and 19th centuries, we develop a complex interdisciplinary approach across educational studies, literary studies, intellectual history, and cognitive sciences.

The study of students’ relationship with knowledge draws on three theoretical perspectives:

1. The history of ideas and literary studies have explored cultural attitudes to knowledge and various formats of knowledge. For example, 18th-century encyclopaedias and dictionaries revolutionized reading and learning practices (Holmberg, 2023). Previous studies have examined the configurations and discourses of knowledge in classical modernity (e.g., Wittrock, 1993; Daunton, 2005; Moro & Anacker, 2016), but they often overlook the relationship between knowledge, learning, and students. By (re)reading historical (fictional and non-fictional) narratives in dialogue with contemporary knowledge-related agendas in HE, we aim to build a diachronic understanding of this relationship, crossing boundaries between fictional/historical and real-life students.

2. Sociology of education, and particularly Bernstein (2000) elaborates how knowledge becomes educational knowledge through the interaction of three fields (production, recontextualization, and reproduction); the fields are hierarchical and regulate student’s access to different forms of knowledge. These concepts offer a frame through which we aim to explore descriptions of students’ relationship with knowledge in educational policy documents and curriculum innovations today.

3. Cognitive sciences understand knowledge as information stored in the mind. This information can be accessed and utilised to understand the world, make decisions, solve problems and interact with the environment. Rather than such brain-centric and individualistic phenomenon, recent understandings in the extended mind theory (Clark & Chalmers, 1998) explain human cognition as embodied and extended to the environment. The theory demonstrates how humans can outsource cognitive operations or offload cognitive functions to technology (Wahn et al., 2023; Weis & Wiese, 2019). Understanding AI tools as extenders of mind opens the debate on how AI shapes learning processes and, thus, our human relationship with knowledge (Telakivi, 2023).

The research questions are:

1. How has the idea of knowledge evolved in the course of modern cultural history and affected the way we envision and imagine the student’s relationship with knowledge today?

2. How do current discourses directing the educational purpose of HE regulate the student’s access to knowledge?

3. How does the use of AI shape the construction and alter our notion of knowledge, and how this new paradigm of knowledge-making and learning invites us to rethink the student’s role in the learning process?

The paper presents an interdisciplinary project (funded by Kone Foundation, 2025-2029), and its theoretical and methodological underpinnings, to be discussed with European scholars early on. The question of ‘knowledge blindness’ is particularly relevant in Europe, especially given the emphasis on competencies in the European Qualification Framework, which significantly influences HE policy and curricula (see e.g., Annala, 2023).

This qualitative research consists of three sub-studies: Sub-study 1 (RQ1) examines literary narratives and intellectual discourses of knowledge from mid-18th century until our day. The material for the sub-study includes historical fictional and non-fictional texts that describe schooling and learning practices, with a particular emphasis on Anglo-American pragmatism (Emerson, Spencer, Dewey) that anticipates contemporary student-oriented approach in higher education. The analysis applies the methods of both close and distant (Moretti, 2013) reading of literary texts and discourse as well as narrative analyses. The sub-study engages with theoretical frameworks of economic criticism (Woodmansee & Osteen, 2005), gift theory, and intellectual history to explore how ideas about knowledge evolve and circulate across different texts and discourses. Sub-study 2 (RQ2) focuses on the current societal and state-led discourses on knowledge, competencies, digitalisation and learning in university education. The material for this sub-study is comprised of key higher education policy documents in Finland and EU (e.g. documents on European Education Area 2025, Digivisio in Finland) as well as 2-3 curriculum case studies (e.g. micro-degrees or challenge-based learning initiatives). Through Foucauldian discourse analysis (Foucault, 2002) and theory-driven conceptual tools (e.g. Bernstein, 2000; Maton, 2014) we examine how state documents envision knowledge and its role in education and learning, and students’ approaches to knowledge. Sub-study 3 (RQ3) examines how AI may shape thinking – redirecting learning processes – and how students constitute themselves as learners within the interaction with AI. The material for this sub-study is comprised of students’ logs in AI tools (three rounds of data collection of student logs every 3 months), individual interviews (N=30), and art-based focus group interviews (6 groups of 5 students). Drawing on the extended mind theory, we will develop a theory-driven coding protocol, allowing us to analyze and understand cognitive aspects of the students’ interactions with genAI during their independent studies. Parallelly, we employ a thematic analysis in the individual and focus group interview data to unravel how students conceptualise knowledge and recognise themselves in their learning processes when using AI tools in independent learning. Working from such different disciplinary perspectives and across such dissimilar registers as policies, curricula, logs, literary texts, interviews, and art-based focus groups, we aim at breaching the self-contained methodologies of our different disciplines.

Producing a rich understanding of the students’ relationship with knowledge from history to today serves rethinking the educational role and purpose of higher education in the digitalized era. The diachronic course of understanding knowledge in its relationship with its main ‘consumers’ and ‘carriers’ is a vital question to science community, its renewal and continuity. This project creates a fertile portrayal of interdisciplinary perspectives to educational knowledge revealing links between past and present, imaginary fiction and actual practices. It also allows rethinking how to face the complexity and limits of knowledge and prepare for an unknown future in a holistic and sustainable way. Our working hypothesis is that we can detect how the obsession with knowledge in modernity has eventually resulted in the ‘knowledge blindness’ in contemporary education policy and practice, and how the iterating metaphors of knowledge-making and sharing have inadvertently affected contemporary curricula and educational strategies. We intend to make visible whether literature imagined and described human/non-human entanglements in the learning process long before the invention of AI. By uniting approaches from sociological curriculum studies and cognitive sciences, we are able to explore curriculum as planned – with certain interests and directions – at the institutional level and as lived in pedagogical practice. Our presentation will introduce the theoretical and methodological perspectives of this research and discuss its interdisciplinary connections. We will invite the audience to explore with us the ways and benefits of working (theoretically and methodologically) across literary and cultural studies, sociology of education, and cognitive sciences. We hope that presentation interactions will offer directions for charting the way forward for research and practice around the dynamic relationship between knowledge and students in higher education.

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