From Technological Empowerment to Wisdom Cultivation: Essence, Generative Mechanisms, and Cultivation Pathways of Teacher AI Literacy in the Intelligence Age

As generative AI reshapes educational practice, the meaning of teacher artificial intelligence (AI) literacy has become central to teacher professionalism and student development. This conceptual article argues that teacher AI literacy should be understood as human–AI synergistic educational wisdom: a phronesis-based, situated practical capacity in which professional judgment serves as the central mode of operation. The construct is distinguished from AI literacy, AI competency, and AI-TPACK, which are treated as knowledge, skill, and integration resources that teachers draw upon rather than as sufficient accounts of the literacy itself. Drawing on practical wisdom, pedagogical reasoning, reflective practice, and research on appropriate reliance on automation, the article specifies four analytical facets of this capacity: purpose-and-value judgment, situated pedagogical judgment, boundary-and-agency judgment, and reflective-and-generative judgment. Because generative AI is uncertain, opaque, partly agentic, and rapidly changing, this wisdom-oriented capacity cannot be transmitted as a fixed skill set; it is theorized to emerge through an AI-native practical inquiry cycle in which teachers frame pedagogical problems, deliberate about purposes and boundaries, orchestrate human–AI action, evaluate evidence, and reconstruct practice through reflection. The article then proposes cultivation pathways centered on wisdom-oriented content design, practice-based cultivation modes, and evaluation for improvement.