An Ontological Reconceptualization of Teacher Burnout: Beyond the Psychological Paradigm in the Age of Generative AI

Abstract

For half a century, teacher burnout has been predominantly conceptualized as an individual’s psychological failure to adapt to chronic stressors within the work environment. However, confronted with the profound ecological upheaval precipitated by disruptive technologies such as Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), the traditional psychological explanatory framework appears increasingly inadequate in addressing the deepening crisis of meaning among educators. This paper attempts to transcend the psychological paradigm by theoretically reconstructing teacher burnout from a cognitive ontological perspective. Drawing upon
Zhang Xusheng’s theory of Cognitive Stabilization Scaffolding and Wang Dongyue’s Progressive Weakening-Compensation Principle, we posit that the essence of teacher burnout is not merely emotional exhaustion, but a structural disequilibrium between cognitive thresholds and compensatory costs. By introducing a three-layer cognitive structure of "Soma-Emotion-Meaning," this study analyzes how technological alienation leads to embodied disequilibrium at the somatic layer, alienation of emotional labor at the emotional layer, and existential hollowing at the meaning layer. We argue that to genuinely alleviate teacher burnout, interventions must move beyond individualized psychological coping strategies and pivot toward rebuilding "cognitive stabilization scaffolding" within the educational system, thereby restoring the ontological dignity of teachers as the subjects of educational practice.