Designing and experiencing place-based education with Socratic AI: Findings from a field workshop

This paper explores how generative AI, conceived as a Socratic companion, can support place-based education. The study draws on a workshop within the T-Place project, in which AI-guided questioning was tested to foster inquiry and collaborative interpretation in territorial learning contexts. The field experiment took place at the MED Summer School 2025 in Ferrara with 20 participants, alternating between the role of designers of educational itineraries and users engaged in exploration. Central to the experience was the T-PLACE app, developed to sustain Socratic dialogue during exploration. Participants designed and experienced itineraries with its support, producing transmedia artefacts that documented and reinterpreted their discoveries. Data sources included design templates, exploration routes and questionnaire responses, offering evidence of both processes and outcomes. Findings indicate that the AI dialogue encouraged users to make implicit knowledge explicit and to sustain meta-reflection, while the transmedia outputs transformed exploration into resources for collective learning. Overall, the results suggest that generative AI, when employed in a Socratic mode, can enrich place-based education by stimulating critical engagement with territory. Despite some technical constraints related to the prototype stage, the experience demonstrates the potential of combining dialogic AI with transmedia practices to support inquiry, reflection and continuity in teaching and learning.