Am I Still the Expert? Teacher Educators' Negotiation of Professional Identity in the Age of Generative AI

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has completely transformed the field of higher education, jeopardizing the traditional concept of who is an expert and who holds authority. The present study investigates the ways in which teacher educators bargain their professional identity and epistemic authority during the fast adoption of GenAI. The study is a qualitative phenomenological study. The lived experiences of fourteen teacher educators who are currently teaching D.El.Ed. and B.Ed. programs at various teacher education institutions in the Delhi region. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the interviews and resulted in five primary themes: (1) Questioning Epistemic Authority, as educators grapple with the computational power of AI; (2) From Knowledge Holder to Learning Facilitator, representing a shift toward critical curation; (3) Anxiety, Adaptation, and Identity Tension, highlighting the emotional labor of role renegotiation; (4) Reconstructing Professional Relevance through human-centric competencies; (5) The Crisis of Assessment: Negotiating Validity and Integrity. The results indicate that teacher educators are re-establishing their professionalism. It shifts to pure content mastery to so-called relational expertise of the content based on ethical stewardship and socio-emotional coaching. This change would require identity-aware faculty training and a curriculum that would put critical AI literacy into the center. Although GenAI is fuelling identity crisis, it seems to allow a unique opportunity to anticipate uniquely human values in teacher education, which empowers the profession in an even more automated world.