Artificial Intelligence and Gender-Fair Language in School Books: Pedagogical Insights from Potentialities of Using An Autocorrect in Education.

This paper reflects the application in education of an autocorrect for Italian designed to make it easier to adopt gender-fair language consistently in administrative documents. Sexism in Italian produces important effects in educational contexts as confirmed, for example, by research analyzing school texts. The literature highlights how certain gendered expressions influence our cognition, and how masculine terms evoke masculine images with the effect of excluding, depowering and make invisible women, non-binary and trans people. The analysis of sexism in Italian is thorough and several national and international bodies issued gender-fair language guidelines, that constitute a vast know-that on the subject. However, there is a lack of operational tools to facilitate their implementation, bridging the gap between the know-that and the know-how. This contribution aims to explore, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the pedagogical and training potentialities arising from the use of a gender-fair autocorrect in education. In particular, we argue that the benefit of such a tool is twofold: on the one hand, it produces fair texts and, on the other, it helps its users to develop the ability to recognize and replace sexist expressions.