Same Standards, Different Pathways: Forgotten Voices, Neurodiversity, and Critical AI Literacy in Ancient History Teaching

Abstract

Growing attention to neurodivergence in higher education and the rapid expansion of generative artificial intelligence have made visible a series of problems that extend beyond either diagnosis or technology: how students organise complex academic work, how disciplinary competences are distinguished from the conventions through which they are normally demonstrated, and how plausible reconstructions can be separated from interpretations that are actually supported by evidence. This article develops a transferable framework from a teaching innovation project in Ancient History implemented during the 2025–26 academic year. The project brought together three concerns: the incorporation of historically marginalised actors into teaching, neurodiversity-aware educational design, and the critical use of generative AI. Drawing primarily on two classroom experiences, one in an Introductory Ancient History course and another in an advanced course on War and Imperialism in Antiquity, within a broader teaching innovation project involving other courses in the Ancient History area, we gradually came to distinguish between disciplinary operations that should remain common and organisational forms that can legitimately vary. From this process we develop a three-pathway model—guided and sequential, systematic and comparative, and synthetic and visual—available to all students without diagnostic assignment and assessed through identical historical criteria. We further argue that critical AI literacy need not entail compulsory personal adoption of generative AI, since students may analyse documented instructor-provided outputs while demonstrating the same historical competence. Five transferable activity designs translate these principles into practical teaching models concerning evidence-bounded reconstruction, simulated historical voices, narratives of war and empire, visual representation, and source verification. The resulting framework does not seek to lower or relativise academic expectations. On the contrary, it depends upon defining more precisely what students must demonstrate in order for us to say that they have learned Ancient History.