Figuring GenAI: Toward a Technocurious Framework for History Education

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Background: GenAI has entered education rapidly, intensifying debates about pedagogy, authority, ethics, and disciplinary integrity. In history education, these tensions are especially pronounced because GenAI can support access, scaffolding, and experimentation while also flattening interpretation, obscuring evidence, and reproducing dominant narratives. Focus of Study: This conceptual paper introduces technocuriosity as a methodological and pedagogical stance for history educators, teacher educators, and researchers engaging GenAI in practice. Situated in conversation with postdigital and speculative scholarship in education, technocuriosity approaches GenAI as an emergent, sociotechnical problem space best studied through recursive, critical experimentation. Research Design: We develop a four-part framework centered on configuration, figures, liveness, and speculative futures, and use these layers to trace the conditions under which GenAI is introduced, negotiated, resisted, or incorporated in history classrooms. We then outline the methodological commitments that follow from this stance, including recursive prompting, persona work, shadow archives, and classroom experimentation. Conclusions: Technocuriosity offers a way to engage GenAI with curiosity disciplined by historical thinking, ethical scrutiny, and attention to power, while keeping inquiry, interpretation, and evidence at the center of history education.