Becoming a Truth-Seeker: Navigating Competing Stories

This article is an excerpt from Dr. Dave Mulder's Teach Like a Human, a book that examines teaching through a Christian lens in the age of AI. It has been republished with permission by Wipf and Stock Publishers.

In the past few chapters, we’ve been exploring the big story of Scripture: Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration. I hope that this has been a boost for you; to think carefully and deeply about how the four Acts of this big story drama can illustrate the contours of a Christian imagination. I’m also hoping that we can use that metanarrative of Scripture to help us address the big questions and concerns we have when it comes to innovation and the develop­ment of new technologies.

The challenge is, we often find ourselves in the midst of com­peting stories. We need a way of orienting ourselves to discern the truth. And I think the big story can be a useful and effective way to make sense of the stories we find ourselves in.

For example, when it comes to the role of artificial intelli­gence in education, I think there are several competing stories that educators might sense—each of which might have some truth to them.

One story is the “incorporating innovation” story. In this story, we see the awesome potential of artificial intelligence. AI can transform what is possible for our teaching, and even for our students’ learning, so why wouldn’t we use it? It can make us more productive, freeing up time from the low-level tasks of teaching to prioritize opportunities for connection with students, empha­sizing relationships and personalizing our teaching to give each student just what he or she needs to flourish and thrive. With all this potential, it almost seems sinful to not embrace innovation!

But hold on a second, because there is another story we might see—one that directly competes with this first story. This second story is the “policing problems” story. In this story, we can clearly see the challenges that new technologies bring. We develop care­fully constructed learning opportunities for students and assign them what we see as meaningful, valuable work that will help them learn and grow. But students often don’t see the importance of the hard work and instead short-circuit their own learning by using AI to complete the assignment. In this case, educators need to regulate students’ use of technology to ensure that they are actually doing their own work, to keep them on track and truly learning. The technology gets in the way of scholarly opportunities, and we might be tempted to ban the use of these powerful tools.

And then there might be a third story we can see—a differ­ent approach altogether, compared to these first two tales. This third story is the “ostrich option” story. This is a tale of being over­whelmed and overtaxed; educators already have so many things they need to do on a daily basis, and we might want to just say “Jesus, take the wheel!” It might be true that there are benefits from using AI, and it might be true that students might misuse it, but it’s all just too much for us to take on. So instead, we trust that the Lord will sort it all out, and we take the ostrich approach of hiding our head in the sand, whether because we are fearful of being found to be inadequate with our knowledge and skill when it comes to AI or because we feel overburdened by the to-do list of other pressing tasks.

Here’s the thing, friends: I think that these three stories each actually have some alignment with the big story of Scripture! The “incorporating innovation” story sees the creative potential of technology, aligning most clearly with the Creation movement of the big story. The “policing problems” story sees the results of the Fall in full force. And the “ostrich option” story—believe it or not—might connect with the Redemption act, relying on Jesus’ work to make things right that seem out of our control. There are elements of the truth in each of these stories and connections with the metanarrative of the Bible in each one.

However, each of these reduces the whole story to just part of the story. And here is where we need the wisdom of a fully formed Christian imagination! Because each of these stories only has part of the whole truth, we need to take seriously the whole story. Cre­ation—and human creative potential—is an important part of the story. The Fall—and the way all things are twisted because of sin—is an important part of the story. Redemption—Christ’s work, that we humans cannot do—is (clearly!) an important part of the story. And we are right to take all of these parts of the story seriously. But we need to take the whole story seriously.

This is messy, isn’t it? Embracing the whole story means we are working to discern the whole truth, even when it seems poten­tially contradictory. Each movement of the big story helps us see the truth more fully. God created all things good. Human sinful­ness twisted everything. Jesus came to save the day. We are invited to work toward the Restoration of all things.

When it comes to big, complex issues like “what should we do about AI in education?” we need to have a bigger story—the biggest story!—to help us orient ourselves to the truth and find ourselves in a better story in the process.