New challenges for Special Pedagogy: a study on training teachers’ perceptions of the role of AI

Abstract

The connections that can be traced between Special Pedagogy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) open up major interdisciplinary perspectives, offering new educational opportunities while raising epistemological, ethical, and methodological questions. Integrating AI in school contexts, particularly in inclusive education, requires conscious pedagogical reflection so that these technologies can represent real educational value. Based on these premises, the present study aims to investigate the perceptions of teachers in training regarding the use of AI in inclusive teaching to understand how these tools are perceived in teaching-learning processes. To this end, the research makes use of the General Attitudes Towards Artificial Intelligence Scale (GAAIS) (Schepman & Rodway, 2020), in the version repurposed by Alsudairy and Eltantawy (2024) and subsequently translated into Italian, to analyze the opinions of future support teachers regarding the role and effectiveness of AI in the educational context.