Currently submitted to: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Jun 21, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 22, 2026 - Aug 17, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Emerging Pedagogy in the AI Era: Lived Experiences of Higher Education Educators
ABSTRACT
This qualitative study explores the emerging pedagogy of the AI era through the lived experiences of higher education educators. Drawing on a phenomenological approach, the study examines how educators experience pedagogical change in AI-mediated teaching, how they make sense of shifts in their roles, judgment, and agency, and how they navigate the opportunities and tensions associated with teaching alongside generative AI. The findings suggest that AI is not simply being integrated as a technical tool; rather, it is contributing to a broader pedagogical transformation characterized by shifts from transmission to mediation, from fixed authority to negotiated expertise, and from routine teaching to more reflective, creative, and relational forms of practice. At the same time, educators highlight ongoing tensions regarding academic integrity, ethical use, overreliance on AI, and the preservation of human connection. The study contributes a human-centered conceptual framework that positions emerging pedagogy as a negotiated, relational, and ethically mediated process in AI-enhanced higher education.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.