Adoption, Domestication, and Alienation: A Case Study of Teacher AI Integration Practices and Their Driving Factors in K-12 Classrooms

As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools undergo rapid iteration, the complexity and heterogeneity of teachers’ technology practices in authentic instructional contexts warrant closer empirical scrutiny. Focusing on a public middle school designated as an AI demonstration site in eastern China, this study drew on 17 months of fieldwork that combined critical incident interviews, participant observation, and artifact collection. Systematic thematic analysis yielded four distinct practice types: Implicit Empowerment, Ritualized Enhancement, Transformative Exploration, and Prudent Distancing. The differentiation among these types was traced to the interplay of four dimensions: professional agency, technological cognition, organizational governance, and field culture. Specifically, the professional agency dimension encompasses trade-offs in labor intensity, preservation of professional authority, and continuity of pedagogical habitus; the technological cognition dimension manifests as misalignment of technological empowerment, concerns over output hallucinations, and the narrowing of dialogic value; the organizational governance dimension includes evaluation system orientation, excessive resource consolidation, and a lack of tolerance for innovation failure; and the field culture dimension involves peer practice modeling, team cultural atmosphere, and stakeholder demands. Together, these factors help explain the diversity of teachers’ technology adoption behaviors and offer an empirically grounded framework for understanding the micro-level processes of AI integration into classroom teaching.