Reconstructing tourism educators’ professional identity in the AI era: a critical narrative review

Generative AI is rapidly reconfiguring knowledge work in universities and unsettling what counts as legitimate pedagogical expertise. This critical narrative review synthesizes scholarship on AI in higher education, teacher professional identity, academic labor, and tourism/hospitality education to explain how educators make sense of AI-driven disruption. Using iterative searching, purposive sampling, and interpretive thematic synthesis, the review develops an Adaptive Professional Identity Trajectory for tourism educators and other experiential disciplines. The synthesis identifies three recurring, re-visitable moments of identity work: (1) threat appraisal, in which educators confront automation anxiety, legitimacy erosion, and assessment uncertainty; (2) coping and capacity-building, in which selective adoption, peer learning, verification routines, and boundary-setting become central; and (3) identity reconstruction, in which educators re-center human judgment, care, ethical accountability, and contextual interpretation while using AI for appropriate supportive tasks. Movement across these moments is shaped by governance, workload regimes, professional recognition, and local infrastructure. The review therefore cautions against treating AI adaptation as individual tool training alone and offers evidence-linked principles for faculty development that strengthen AI literacy while protecting educator autonomy.