Digital Transformation and Vocational Teacher Role Reshaping: Industry Collaboration, AI Application and Workplace-Authentic AI Pedagogy in Liaoning Province

Abstract

Purpose: This study develops a mediation framework explaining how institutional digital transformation may reshape vocational teachers' roles in Liaoning Province, China, through industry collaboration and AI application. It responds to a persistent problem in TVET reform: digital platforms, smart classrooms and AI-enabled systems do not automatically change teachers' professional judgement, boundary work or role identity.

Design/methodology/approach: This conceptual paper combines role theory, socio-technical perspectives, teacher digital competence research and recent TVET scholarship. It specifies nine hypotheses and sets out a proposed empirical testing strategy for future survey-based PLS-SEM analysis, while making clear that the present manuscript does not report field data or statistical findings.

Findings: The framework suggests that industry collaboration operates as a workplace-authenticity mechanism and that AI application operates as a pedagogical-intelligence mechanism. Their serial connection explains how authentic enterprise tasks, standards and assessment criteria can be converted into AI-supported diagnosis, simulation, feedback and evaluation. The proposed concept of workplace-authentic AI pedagogy captures this linkage.

Originality/value: The study shifts attention from infrastructure-centred digitalisation to teacher role reconstruction. It theorises digital transformation as a role-structuring condition and positions Liaoning as an industrial and policy setting in which digital governance, school-enterprise collaboration and AI-supported pedagogy intersect