Ecoliteracy and Artificial Intelligence: Two Opposites for a Common Goal in Education

Abstract

In the last two years, the massive diffusion of GenAI and LLM had worldwide shockwaves, opening up new horizons in various fields, including ecoliteracy and ecopedagogy. Despite the use of these tools for teaching and learning, there’s still a gap between ecoliteracy and AI. Teachers and school students need to be prepared to become aware of the potential use of these tools to fully understand them. This paper aims to show the need for an ecoliteracy “and” AI, in order to use all the potential of the technology, but also an ecoliteracy “of” AI, aware of the impact from its use to the environment. To show how AI can be useful to this field, in this paper there are two attempts to interact with AI to obtain insights regarding the above-mentioned shortcomings, through two simple and scientifically relevant prompts. Analysing the current situation of the literature and theoretical contributions, it is clear that there is still a lack of a specific framework focused on these two axes. An “EcoAI” framework that should be integrated into school programs in order to best exploit the potential of these new tools, in light of the EU's requests to complete the Sustainability Development Goal (SDG) 4 objectives.