We are so busy talking about AI ‘literacy’ that we are ignoring the signs of AI ‘grief.’ We are scheduling ‘trainings’ for a problem that feels, to many, like a ‘loss,’ offering technical ‘how-to’ guides to people grappling with a fundamental ‘why me?’ This is not just a skills gap; for many, it is an identity crisis. This is the struggle we aren’t naming.

The Shape of Ambivalence

When we talk to educators, the emotions we hear are not simple. It’s not just ‘fear’ or ‘excitement.’ It is a deep and roiling ‘ambivalence’ (Nicola-Richmond et al., 2025). It is the cognitive dissonance of feeling both energised by new possibilities and, at the same time, a sense of profound, personal loss.

What is being lost?

It is a loss of craft. For an educator who has spent decades mastering the art of teaching, writing, research or analysis, seeing a machine replicate that end-product in seconds feels like a devaluation of their life’s work.

It is a loss of certainty. The reliable, time-honoured methods of teaching and, especially, assessing appear fractured. The ‘ground truth’ of what constitutes student work, what ‘good’ looks like, and how to measure it is no longer stable.

It is a loss of competence. AI asks people to let go of known ways of working. It forces seasoned experts to become beginners again—a disorienting ‘shaking’ of their foundation—to feel ‘not-competent’ in their own classrooms before they can even begin to ‘re-skill’ and find new footing.

It is a loss of role. Many educators are asking themselves: ‘What is my job now? If I am not the primary source of knowledge, and not the primary evaluator of its expression, who am I in the classroom? A prompt engineer? A content curator? A verifier of machine-generated text?’

This is the hard, emotional work of an adaptive challenge. It is not as straightforward as learning a new tool; it is about unlearning a professional identity. And unlearning, as any psychologist will tell you, is a form of grief.

Why One-Hour Workshops Fail

If the problem we are facing is one of identity, grief, and a crisis of professional craft, then the solution we are offering—a one-hour, opt-in webinar—is a bit of a mismatch.

It fails because it offers technical solutions to an emotional and existential problem. It fails because it is an individual-facing solution for what must be a collective journey. And it fails, most critically, because it offers few psychological safety.

A webinar is not a place where an educator can be vulnerable. It is not a place to say, ‘I am overwhelmed,’ or ‘I am angry that this is happening,’ or ‘I feel obsolete, and it scares me.’ By focussing only on the ‘upskilling’ and the ‘opportunities,’ our institutions are implicitly, if unintentionally, signalling that these feelings of loss and struggle are illegitimate.

What is Actually Required: From Training to Collective Sense-Making

What educators need right now is more than training. They need structured, supported and psychologically safe spaces to struggle. They need to process this change, not just be ‘updated’ on it.

This is why Faculty Learning Communities (Cox, 2001, 2004) are no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but an absolute mission-critical necessity. But we must re-imagine them. They cannot just be ‘skill-shares.’ They must be communities of practice designed for collective sense-making.

These are the spaces where educators can:

  • Name the Loss: Articulate the grief and anxieties without judgement.
  • Build ‘Situated Judgement’: Grapple together with the real, messy, ethical dilemmas that have no easy answers.
  • Share ‘Good Failures’: Create a culture where trying a new assessment and having it ‘fail’ is not a mark of incompetence, but a celebrated act of collective learning.

This is how we build the genuine, ‘programme-wide approach’ that truly, as Nicola-Richmond et al. (2025) put it, ‘takes a village.’ It is forged in shared vulnerability and the shared struggle of navigating a new, uncertain frontier.

Our institutions’ primary role in professional development, then, is not to provide answers. It is to provide the conditions—the time, the space and the psychological safety—for our educators to do the hard, emotional and collective work of building a new professional identity. We must stop pretending this is a simple logistical problem and start supporting the human beings who are at the very heart of the struggle.

References

Cox, M. D. (2001). 5: Faculty Learning Communities: Change Agents for Transforming Institutions into Learning Organisations. To Improve the Academy, 19(1), 69-93.

Nicola-Richmond, K., Dawson, P., Helen, P., & Macfarlane, S. (2025). It takes a village… Programme-wide approaches to redesigning assessment in a time of generative artificial intelligence (GenAl). Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice.