Teachers’ doings in the AI era: From transmission to relation

This commentary argues that teachers today operate under a persistent assumption: their primary role is to transmit curricular knowledge shaped by standardized assessments (Muth & Lüftenegger, 2025; Weisberg & Dawson, 2024). Influenced by psychologized models, constrained by overcrowded classrooms, and tasked with an ever-increasing workload, many educators adopt dualistic views that separate mind from body and emotion from reason. As Maturana (1987, 2002) emphasizes, these dualistic and transmissive assumptions rest on the false premise that understanding can be transmitted from one individual to another rather than stemming from relational coordination within living systems. Research on teachers’ epistemic beliefs shows that they often conceive knowledge as fixed and certain, to be delivered by experts and reproduced by students (Chai, 2010; Jacobson et al., 2010), a stance systematically associated with transmissive pedagogies and reliance on standardized testing (Lammassaari et al., 2024; Aguilar-Valdés et al., 2024). In this framing, teachers appear as conduits rather than creators, and students as recipients rather than co-participants in learning (An et al., 2025; Hull & Saxon, 2009). These tensions intensify with the introduction of AI systems that still operationalize learning as information delivery (Tan et al., 2025; Hariyanto et al., 2025). Such systems reinforce mechanistic assumptions and even raise concerns that teachers may be replaced (Chan & Tsi, 2024; Stenberg, 2025), despite clear evidence of their limitations and biases (Abdallah et al., 2025; Cukurova, 2025).