Who gets heard? Discursive formation of teacher subjectivity in the AI era

This study explores how modern teachers’ subjectivities are shaped in relation to AI technologies, focusing on the seemingly complex yet profoundly straightforward ways they are positioned in contemporary educational discourse. Using ChatGPT to generate diverse textual resources – including fictional interviews with AI-generated teachers, journal entries, and news reports – this research critically examines how teachers’ engagements with AI are framed. The analysis reveals a valorization of the teacher who enthusiastically integrates AI, alongside the marginalization and institutional correction of the teacher adopting more resistant stances. These patterns reflect dominant technological solutionist and determinist logics that underpin many visions of AI-powered educational futures. By situating these discourses within broader questions about the purposes of education, the political economy of AI, and its social, environmental, and unseen costs, the study challenges simplistic binaries of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ AI and calls for more nuanced, equitable, and context-sensitive engagements with educational technology.