Neoliberalism, Confucian Ethics, and Chinese Teachers’ Identity (Re)Making in an AI Age: An Archaeological Analysis

• In Event: Recalibrating Teachers’ Subjectivity in a Globalized World: Work Struggles, Neoliberalism, and Confucianism

Abstract

Objectives
Teachers in China, akin to those in Western nations, are increasingly integrating digital technology into their pedagogy. The advent of advanced AI technologies like ChatGPT, with its unprecedented human-like intelligence, significantly influences educational development. This article explores the educational experiences that new AI digital technologies bring to Chinese teachers. Specifically, it analyzes the configuration of AGI and examines how subjectivities are (re)constituted. It further explores how different discourses orient teachers to the world, others, and themselves amidst the collision of AI advancement and traditional Chinese culture, and it also outlines what good education and good teacher is desired for.

Theoretical framework
Utilizing Foucauldian archaeology (Foucault, 1972) as its methodology, this study performs a comparative analysis to scrutinize the contemporaneous interchanges between various discourses shaping the teaching environment and subjectivities. Digital technology is seen as complicit in themes such as neoliberalism (see Grimaldi & Ball, 2021) and thus relevant to the agenda of neo-colonialism (Kupferman, 2018). Besides, teachers are increasingly situated in other forms of governance such as performativity metrics (Ball, 2003), traditional Confucian ethics (Lin & Zhao, 2023). Focusing not on individual thoughts or actions but on discursive formations, the archaeological approach unravels the structures and rules underpinning concepts and practices in educational digitalization. It thus enables analysis of how differing rationalities use specific vocabularies and procedures to generate truths regarding teacher subjectivity, and revealing a cross-section of discursive regimes (Foucault, 1972, 1980).

Methods
The analysis uncovers the underlying epistemes that makes the narrative of AI technology possible, by scrutinizes the discursive patterns that determine teacher’s perceptions of AGI, understanding of teaching and learning, and their imagination of education.

Materials
The analysis for this study is largely based on empirical data obtained from interviews with 25 Chinese teacher, who are invited to use generative AI in their work for a week. During these semi-structured interviews, the teachers’ educational experiences are examined from an archaeological perspective, aiming to uncover how they adapt and perform their roles in response to the digitized education agenda. Polidy documents and other discursive materials are also analyzed.

Results
This research identifies the intersection western modernity and traditional Confucian rationality that provide the conditions for the possibility of educational digitalization and which play a pivotal role in the (re)making of a teacher’s identity. To be specific, teacher is constituted between 21st century “learning logic” (Lewis 2013; Biesta, 2016), post-industrial principles, and Confucian “study” logic (Zhao, 2019), which give rise to a particular kind of teacher, who felt bewildered and is made divided in the AI age. This paper also identities three forms of teacher response to the AI technology governance: resistance to AI technology, self-transformation into lifelong learners to maintain relationships with students, and a (re)turn moral cultivation inherent in traditional Chinese educational values.

Scholarly significance
This study provides empirical data to understand how the tensions, paradoxes play out in education of the AI age and how different epistemologies are enacted in making kind of teachers.

Author

• Min Lin, Beijing Normal University