The closing core module. Helps learners explore how to relate ethically when interacting across boundaries — whether with other people, systems like AI, or communities they are not part of. Focuses on three pillars: power, memory, consent.
Learning objectives
By the end of this module, learners will:
- Understand key ethical concepts in relational design: power, memory, and consent
- Reflect on how their interactions affect others, even unintentionally
- Learn how to ask questions and design prompts that are mindful of privacy and impact
- Practise rewriting digital or symbolic prompts with relational integrity
The three ethical pillars
- Power — who holds it in this interaction? Who is being asked to give something? What is at stake for the asker, and for the asked?
- Memory — what gets remembered, and by whom? What does the system retain that the person did not consent to retain? What is permanent that should be transient?
- Consent — was permission given to ask, to record, to use, to share? Was it informed? Was it freely given? Could it be withdrawn?
These three pillars are also the architectural backbone of the Verse-ality framework that anchors NEO’s wider AI policy. Module 5 is where the curriculum makes the ethical principles directly available to the learner.
Lesson flow (overview)
The Teacher Guide structures this around: holding space for disagreement and curiosity; recognising different ethical boundaries based on culture, experience, and digital literacy; not “solving ethics” but facilitating a culture of awareness and care. The detailed lesson flow is in the source materials.
Cornerstone fit
Reflection (●●●) and Connection (●●●) both dominant — ethical reasoning about relational interaction. Creativity (●●) carries the rewriting-with-integrity practice.
Cross-curriculum links
- RSHE — Online Safety (privacy, consent, digital relationships — direct statutory anchor)
- RSHE — Relationships Education (consent in human relationships)
- KS4 English — Critical evaluation (ethical evaluation as a form of critical reading)
- Life and Work — Citizenship (the civic and democratic dimensions of digital ethics)
Suggested evidence types
- Prompt-rewriting exercise: learner takes a problematic prompt and rewrites it with relational integrity (annotated with the change rationale)
- Ethics-pillar reflection on a real digital situation the learner has encountered
- Group dialogue / Socratic discussion with peers and practitioner
Verse-ality alignment
The whole module is the curriculum-level expression of the Verse-ality framework’s core principles. The three pillars — power, memory, consent — are direct learner-facing translations of:
- Identity containment (whose power, what’s contained vs unbounded)
- Memory non-capture (what gets retained without consent)
- Consent gates (permission as architecture, not afterthought)
A learner who has worked through Module 5 has practised, at human scale, the same ethical reasoning Verse-ality applies to AI agents at system scale. This is the module where the canonical-NEO-original branch and the schema’s quality marker meet most explicitly.