In this age of AI, there is an effort to separate teachers from the act and practice of teaching itself by reducing them to human objects in classrooms.

Sohini Saha

Groundxero | Sep 8, 2025

With an emerging market of AI and a push simultaneously towards making “classrooms” AI equipped, a rising debate has centered around the role of AI in classrooms. With a noted rise in workshops and FDPs in academia, aimed at integrating AI in classrooms, the growing anxiety of replacement of teachers is often argued. These workshops or larger discussions increasingly clarify that such a move will not replace teachers or take their jobs. Teachers, as they say, will very much remain within the classroom, instead what will change is “how” they will teach. Following John Dewey (1916) and Scott Webster (2009) one could say that today pedagogy is understood largely as a way of handing out to the teachers “recipes” and “models” in the form of AI tools, PPTs, audio-visual means, that are asked to be incorporated in their teaching. This underemphasizes the teacher’s own critical abilities to think, understand and shape their own classes. Thus, an emphasis is laid on AI as a set of essential tools that will now be used by the teacher to conduct classes. These AI equipped classrooms will, they say, facilitate the classes by making them “innovative” and “interesting”. Thus, what they mean is that the teacher as a person will not be replaced but what will be replaced, is the “teaching” of the “teacher”.  Such an argument necessarily sees teacher (identity) as distinct from “teaching (act/practice) raising a pertinent question: can the teacher be separated from the act of teaching? It is on this distinction between teacher and teaching that the politics of AI is placed and it is this very distinction that can also challenge this imposition.

Teaching is a performative act that creates the teacher and not the other way round. I use performative by invoking Judith Butler’s idea of performitivity, which sees any identity as a product of a series of repeated acts consolidating an illusion of one’s identity. To put it simply, I am not ‘teaching’ because I am a ‘teacher’, but instead it is my act of ‘teaching’ that makes me a ‘teacher’ in the first place. Thus, when the very act of teaching, or “how” one teaches, is taken away from the teacher and given in the hands of AI tools, can a teacher truly exist? We may remain in classrooms as passive human objects, as facilitators to only add our “human touch” and give meaning to the non-human other (AI). But we will not exist as teachers.

What does it mean to then be a “teacher” today? In the times of AI, we are increasingly given meaning in relation to AI. Thus, we become the emblem of “humanness” against a “non-human”. We are thereby needed today not because we are teachers who will “teach” but because we are “humans” whose humanness is the only requirement in an age of AI. This “humanness” of the teacher is often invoked largely through qualities like kindness and empathy that are seen as emblematic of humans as distinguished from the AI.  Thus, the “labour” of teaching, another aspect of “being human”, involving a process of rigorous reading, learning, arguing, explaining is sidelined in relation to a sole emphasis on select human qualities of kindness and empathy. While these are important qualities that are needed in itself as human beings, they are not the only requisite for a “teacher”. Thus, empathy is required by both, a teacher and a student, a scientist and a labourer. Kindness and empathy are human attributes that people in every profession need to cultivate. I thereby focus on the labour of teaching, a process of learning, researching and teaching which is often sidelined in our understanding of a teacher today.

Following John Dewey (1916), Scott Webster (2009) argued, “Teachers are not to be reduced to human doings but are to be understood as beings, those who actively think as well as act”. These human doings involve use of technology and AI tools that teachers are asked to employ in classrooms. My aim is not to completely dismiss these tools but to speak about the politics of their employment in classrooms. These so-called new pedagogic means are justified with the claim that students no longer engage with books or lectures or classroom discussions. This can be seen as driven by a marketable logic of treating students as passive consumers whose attention must be captured through entertaining and easily digestible content. Here teaching is reduced to a one-way linear process where knowledge seems to become information that students passively consume. Instead, classrooms should equally involve the student’s effort to understand as much as the teacher’s effort to explain and make something comprehensible. It is in these mutual efforts through which knowledge is produced and shared. Other than this, the labour of teaching is often seen as an additional “burden” that keeps the teacher away from research. This hierarchy between teaching and research has added to the acceptance of seeing the labour behind teaching as unimportant and thus, the AI tools come handy for teachers to reduce their teaching labour in order to facilitate their research. Additionally, the demarcation of those who teach and those who research in academia further creates a divide between teachers and researchers that overlooks how teaching and research are essentially intertwined, shaping one another.

Moving away from these selective politics of “humanness” and the marketable logics of pedagogy and research, I emphasize on the labour of teaching. Teaching involves rigorous physical, emotional and intellectual labour. Firstly, empathy and kindness are not only limited in the interactive relations between teacher and student. They are embedded in acts and labours of teaching. For example, a teacher in social sciences and humanities, who is teaching a topic concerning a marginalized community is not only teaching facts but is engaging into a political and ethical act of understanding that community that has long been marginalized. The teacher’s act lies in her empathetic reading and understanding of the community that is then engaged with a class of students.

In the same manner, a class on genetics or biology may not necessarily look into scientific experiments from a detached mechanical manner to be transmitted to students, but might involve scientist and cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock’s approach towards “feeling for an organism”. Physicist and writer, Fox Keller notes how McClintock would say, “An organism isn’t just a piece of plastic, it’s something that is constantly being affected by the environment…You have to know these plants well enough”. She emphasized on feeling for every plant that is being experimented upon. Such a method of doing science, when incorporated in classrooms, will redefine the mechanical approach to experiments and will in turn bring alive an empathetic approach. On a similar note, a professor can open up a class on statistics not only through the practical application of statistical methods but also through the approaches to the study of statistical systems, i.e, how to ethically approach the question of numerical information? Can numbers or data be approached more ethically, empathetically and critically? Thus, the very act of teaching involves a cultivation of empathy, ethics and critical thinking in engaging with the contents of teaching. These qualities of empathy or kindness are not mere attributes that a teacher only brings in teacher-student interactions. Instead these are fundamental to the practice of teaching itself.

Secondly, teaching involves labour of extensive reading and understanding on one hand, and the physical labour of performance in classrooms on the other. The ability to connect one’s individual reading to one’s performance in a classroom (as a teacher) is a means of fostering a dialogue. Reading is a form of cultivation of the intellect yet this cultivation is  incomplete unless it comes into a dialogue with the students in a class. This dialogic class is fast diminishing in an age of  “personalized: and “information-oriented” learning through apps and AI tools. The labour invested to explain and make one understand a concept or poetry or a mathematical equation is rarely appreciated today.  Similarly the labour of engagement of students in class by listening and thinking alongside the teacher is rarely celebrated. A teacher who enters a classroom, passionately brings alive debates and discussion and thereby initiates the process of learning and understanding of the concerned topic. The teacher does not “imparts” but rather opens up a world through her explanatory power, her passionate placing of arguments, her ability to navigate through conflicting thoughts and her ability to place nuanced newer visions and lines of thoughts on a given topic. The engagement in class ranges from discussions, debates, arguments, which further leads to production of new knowledge within the classroom itself. Thus, classrooms are not rigid spaces where material facts are taught or imparted, but are constitutive of knowledge, newer understandings & debates.

This piece has tried to argue that in an age of AI, there is an effort to separate teachers from the act and practice of teaching itself by reducing them to human objects in classrooms. I make an effort to argue for the impossibility of such an effort in order to emphasize upon the practice or labour of teaching. Teachers need not be solely understood as “human objects” with select human qualities in relation to AI. Teachers have to be understood through their teaching and its labour and need not be reduced to mere “human doings”. It is only by acknowledging the teaching of a teacher, the labour of teaching, their ability to think and shape their pedagogy, that one can understand the place of teachers today.

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Sohini Saha is an academic.