Why This and Why Now

A Reflection on The Parable of the Shadowlands

If you haven’t read it, I’ll point you back to my previous post on Substack, “The Parable of the Shadowlands.” This post is an analysis of that story.

I blame AI for this…

Parables hold a special place in my imagination. When I was studying in seminary, a professor told us, “Reading a parable is like gently tossing a baseball up into the air; but, instead of it coming back down to your hand like you expect, it shoots off at 80 mph straight ahead of you.” To my mind, parables are more bewildering than fables (which is probably the best description of what the Bluey episode “Shadowlands” might be if interpreted on its own), and a little less dense in symbolism than a full-blown allegory. I know this is splitting hairs, but for me it’s that unexpected quality of the parable, that moment of surprise that leaves the reader or listener flummoxed, which is most important. If you can hear a parable and expect what’s going to happen, then it stopped serving as a parable.

This parable is (at least mostly) based in a real event. Deep down I’m not quite this cynical, but Melody really did feel bad for Bluey and made this exact comment in such an off-hand way after watching “Shadowlands” that I was stunned. (And, now I can’t stop thinking about that silly show!). I then sat with that for a few weeks, unsure of what to really do with this strange encounter.

I think it's important to note that this was not something I set out to write down. It’s exactly the kind of thing that I might loosely use as a story in a lecture with students to illustrate a point, but I rarely concretize those events this way. In part, that is because I like the dynamic fluidity of stories being told together (the questions asked by which a student shapes the meaning of the story in the moment such that it has no canonical interpretation save what they co-constitute in class). It is also because beyond feeling personally moved by the event and getting jotted down in my idea notebook, I never really intended for this encounter to be more than a kind of one-liner.

Interestingly, AI changed that. Recently Michelle Kassorla asked some folks to test out a Socratic Questioning Bot she had built in BoodleBox to use with students. I always love to play with a tool that someone else builds to see how they are thinking about using AI with students. I didn’t end up using the bot exactly as intended (a testament to its flexibility and strength in my opinion), but ended up using its questioning logic to brainstorm the ideas that led to writing this short parable! Simply put, without this push, the parable and this post wouldn’t exist. It wasn’t until I was 10 or 12 turns in with the bot she built that it dawned on me that this parable is where I was headed.

So, dear reader, why am I telling you all this?

1. To set an expectation. By calling this story a parable, I’m signaling that we shouldn’t be looking for a simple moral. A fable has a tidy lesson; a parable, at its best, is bewildering. It’s that unexpected quality (that moment of surprise that leaves you flummoxed) that I want to hold on to.

2. To build trust. This parable is grounded in a real moment of surprise, and the insights that follow aren’t just academic; they’re born from a lived-experience. As someone who has spent most of their academic career advocating for using a phenomenology of the body to engage in praxes of critical reflection, that this emerges from lived-experience is something that I think is important.

3. Most importantly, I’m telling you this because this piece is, itself, an act of human-AI collaboration. This story was a fleeting idea until a Socratic AI bot, through its relentless questioning, provided the “productive friction” needed to bring it to life. The AI didn’t write the story, but it was an essential partner in its creation. It’s a real-time demonstration of the very argument I’m about to make.

A Loose Exegesis Through Phenomenological Bracketing

As I began to unpack this story, I realized it wasn't just happening on the screen; it was happening in the room. I saw the interplay of four distinct dispositions. I, the narrator, was playing the part of the Cynic, the adult obsessed with efficiency, trying to deconstruct the game rather than play it. My daughter, Melody, was the Oracle, representing a pure, intuitive engagement within the "magic circle" of the story. On the screen, the conflict unfolded between Bluey, the Bureaucrat who embodies a rigid devotion to process, and her friend Coco, the Utilitarian who prizes the destination over the journey.

On the surface, the episode became a simple fable: a perfect, self-contained lesson on the value of productive friction. But the story happening in the room, my own cynical reaction and Melody’s startling insight, created a kind of productive friction with that tidy lesson. It was in that collision that the deeper, overlapping lessons began to reveal themselves.

The Simple Fable

So let’s start with the Bluey episode “Shadowlands” itself. Bracketed off from my own experience of it, this is the most direct element. It can be read as a straight-forward lesson about the value of productive friction. This is Coco’s realization, and it’s a powerful one for any age, but it is especially powerful in an age of AI shortcuts. It’s the idea that the struggle and constraints of a "game" are what make an activity engaging and educational.

Why is this struggle so compelling? Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik offers a powerful answer. She sees childhood as a kind of protected R&D department for the human species. Play, for Gopnik, isn't just practice; it's a form of cognitive science. Children are like scientists in a lab, constantly forming and testing hypotheses about the world. The "rules" of a game like Shadowlands create the controlled conditions for this experiment. The friction is the research. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer takes this even further. For him, the game has a primacy over the player. We don't just play the game; the game, in a sense, plays us. We are caught up in its to-and-fro movement, submitting to its logic and its world. This is the seriousness of play. It’s not about achieving an external goal, but about participating in the event of meaning-making itself.

If our goal, as educators, is to preserve this transformative, effortful journey, then our role has to change. We can no longer see ourselves primarily as content providers; AI can do that with terrifying efficiency. Instead, we must become designers of compelling games. This isn't about making learning frivolous or turning syllabi into video games. It's about taking the craft of creating Johan Huizinga's "magic circles" seriously. Our work becomes less about delivering answers and more about crafting the questions and constraints that make the pursuit of answers meaningful.

If Gadamer is right that the game "plays us," then our job is to build a better game. It has to be a game with rules so compelling and a world so rich that our students are drawn into the serious, effortful, and transformative work of play. This is our uniquely human value in an age of artificial intelligence. An AI can generate a perfect essay, but it cannot design an experience that fosters resilience, creativity, and genuine understanding. That is our art. That is our game.

And AI is really quite bad at this. The reason it fails at this fundamentally human art is that it lacks embodied, lived-experience. A compelling game isn't just a set of logical procedures; it's a carefully calibrated emotional and psychological journey. An AI, for all its power, is a brilliant mimic of patterns, not a participant in the human condition. At its core, it’s an engine for collapsing friction. It will always try to build a bridge over the sunny patches (like Coco) because the idea of making something productively harder is antithetical to smoothly creating coherence across the vectors that comprise it.

A great educator, on the other hand, can "read the room": an embodied skill born from years of lived-experience. We have a sense of our players. We can calibrate the rules to be challenging but not demoralizing because we have a specific, contextual awareness of the human beings in our classroom. And most importantly, we can connect the rules to a deeper "why." An AI can generate a logically coherent ruleset, but it cannot connect those rules to a human purpose because it has never felt the joy of discovery, the frustration of a dead end, or the connection that comes from a shared struggle. It can build the labyrinth, but it has no idea why the journey through it matters.

And this, I think, is the straightforward fable of "Shadowlands"—the lesson Coco learns and Bluey instinctively knows. It’s a defense of difficulty in an age of ease, a reminder that the constraints are what make the journey worthwhile. If the parable ended here, with this neat and useful moral, it would be a powerful guide for our times. But, as my own visceral reaction and Melody's quiet comment revealed, the story happening in the room was far from over.

The Allegorical Frustration

Now we have to widen the brackets a bit. It’s not just the Fable of the Shadowlands, but it has to include my experience of my own frustrations as well. My rage at Coco's tidy conclusion wasn't just a cynical outburst; it was a moment of profound pedagogical friction. The simple fable on the screen was colliding with my own lived experience as an educator, and the result was a more complicated, second lesson: the danger of unexamined rules.

My frustration wasn't with the rules themselves, but with Bluey's inability to articulate why they mattered. As the "bureaucrat" of the game, she enforces a process she can't explain, falling back on a simple "because."

This is why Coco’s final realization felt like such a capitulation. She began as a good phenomenologist, bracketing the abstract rule to focus on the lived experience of her friends' frustration. She felt the group's frustration and wanted to alleviate it. Her desire to change the rules came from her lived experience of the game becoming a source of conflict rather than connection. This is a deeply human, phenomenological insight: she was responding to the feeling of the situation.

In the end, she abandons her own profound, relational insight in favor of Bluey's simpler, procedural one. My internal monologue screams the missing part: the rules created the conditions for a shared experience that was fun because they were in it together. Coco's tidy moral leaves out the most important part: the other people. She never gets an answer to her crucial question—"why?"—and instead accepts the unexplained "what" as a sufficient truth. This isn't a synthesis of two perspectives; it's a surrender to the one that held its ground. Coco's change of heart feels less like a genuine epiphany and more like accepting the victor's logic. She learns the lesson the system teaches her, rather than constructing her own meaning from the experience.

To make this completely explicit we can trace the story in an unexpected way. Coco’s journey is meant to be a triumph for the viewer, and is instead a tragedy. She starts as a phenomenologist. She begins by bracketing the abstract rule ("we must only step on shadows") and instead focuses on her lived-experience of play ("my friends are frustrated, this isn't working and I want to be with them"). She ends up as a bureaucrat herself. By the end, she has done the opposite. She has abandoned her lived-experience in favor of the abstract rule. She stops asking "why?" and accepts the "what." This is the death of phenomenological inquiry. It's the moment we stop questioning our experience and instead allow a pre-packaged explanation to define it for us. My frustration is seeing Coco give up the difficult, messy, human work of making meaning from her own experience and instead accepting a simple, clean, and ultimately hollow dogma.

It's a perfect miniature of the risk we face as learners in an age of AI: the temptation to accept the tidy, frictionless answer at the expense of our own profound, complicated, and ultimately more truthful insights. This is the correct starting point for any real inquiry. Bluey becomes a totem for the active harm of bad pedagogy. When we, as instructors, act as bureaucrats of learning, we teach our students to distrust their own lived-experience, to abandon their most interesting questions, and to accept the rules of the game without ever understanding the purpose of playing. Any simple bifurcation—AI is bad, ergo ban it; or, AI is a savior, ergo use it for everything—creates the same problematic bureaucracy for the genuinely curious student. It teaches the student to never engage AI as a form of cheating or to offload their creative distinctiveness to the middling rules of the machine.

So where does this leave the educator who wants to avoid Bluey's bureaucratic trap? It leaves us with a critical task: we must be able to answer the question "why?" Our role is not just to design the game, but to be transparent about the design. This doesn't mean giving away the ending, but it does mean being open about the purpose of the struggle. It's the difference between saying “each of you will give a 10-minute presentation” and saying “each of us will have a chance to ‘teach’ the class for 10 minutes, because the real challenge isn't just presenting your research, but translating it into a story that can spark a new conversation.” The first is a bureaucratic command; the second is an invitation into the magic circle. This transparency is the antidote to dogma. It invites the student into a partnership, transforming them from a player who is simply following the rules into a co-designer who understands the purpose of the game.

So how do we, as instructors, test our own designs to ensure we're creating compelling games and not just bureaucratic busywork? Perhaps it starts with a simple, private exercise. For any assignment, for any rule, we can ask ourselves three questions.

1. Can I articulate the purpose of this friction in a single, compelling sentence that has nothing to do with grades or assessment?

2. Does this rule open up a more interesting way to engage with the material, or does it simply close down avenues of inquiry?

3. If a student challenged this rule, could I explain its value in a way that makes them feel like a co-designer of the experience, rather than just a subject of it?

If the answers to these questions feel thin or fall back on "because that's how it's done," then we might be acting more like Bluey than we'd like to admit. It’s a small act of phenomenological bracketing for ourselves: a way to make sure the games we design are still worth playing.

The Surprising Parable

And that brings me to the final, and perhaps most humbling, lesson: the one that came not from the screen, but from my daughter. Here, we must widen the brackets of our exegesis one last time to include the most surprising element of the story: Melody’s quiet intervention. It’s about the wisdom of the amateur.

As the "expert" educator, I was so caught up in my own allegorical frustration that I completely misread the story's deepest emotional and ethical stakes. I saw the conflict between Bluey and Coco as a philosophical debate about rules and purpose. But Melody saw something else entirely. Her observation—"Poor Bluey, I wish she thought people could change"—was off key. This isn’t what this was supposed to be about. This was shaping up to be an allegory about the struggles we have with instituting and identifying productive fictions.

And yet, for Melody, it wasn't a story about the rules of a game; it was a story about a little girl who was afraid. Afraid that if you change the rules, you might lose the connection. Afraid that without a rigid structure, the shared world might fall apart. Afraid, but not able to even imagine or articulate why she might be afraid. In this moment, Melody transforms Bluey. She is no longer a bureaucrat to be scorned, but a figure to be empathetically pitied.

Bluey’s rigid adherence to the rules isn't just a sign of strength or a commitment to productive friction; it's a symptom of a multilayered lack of faith. It's a lack of faith in her own ability to stay engaged if the game changes and she gets bored: a kind of selfishness that prioritizes her own interest over the group's experience. More deeply, it's a lack of faith in the relationship itself, an inability to trust that the friendship with Coco is strong enough to survive a change in the rules. The anxiety she feels over the rules could have been generative; it could have been the spark for a conversation, a moment to co-create a better game that honored both her need for structure and Coco's need for connection. Instead, her anxiety is met with a dogmatic certainty, a closing off of possibility.

This lack of faith is not just a personal failing either. It’s a failure to believe that something new and better can emerge from the messy, unpredictable process of collaboration. It’s a retreat to the safety of the known procedure in the face of the anxiety of the unknown outcome. Bluey’s dogmatism isn't just about control; it's about a fear of what might happen if she lets go. It’s a fear that if the game is allowed to evolve, it might evolve into something she doesn't like or doesn't understand, and she would rather let the game die than risk that loss of control. This is the ultimate bureaucratic impulse: the preservation of the system becomes more important than the people the system is meant to serve.

This is the wisdom of the amateur, the profound insight of the learner who is not yet burdened by the expert's analytical frameworks. While I was busy deconstructing the game, Melody was seeing the players; and, feeling a kind of compassion for possibilities that remain unrealized.

This is a profound caution for us as educators. We can become so focused on designing the perfect "game"—the perfect syllabus, the perfect assignment—that we forget that the real learning happens between the people playing it. Our students, like Melody, often have a more insightful, more empathetic, and more fundamentally human understanding of the learning experience than our carefully constructed pedagogies can account for. The most powerful moments in a classroom are often the ones that go off-script. It is the moment that surprises us. Our task, then, is not just to design better games, but to cultivate the humility to let our students teach us how to play them.

And perhaps this is where Melody’s compassion for Bluey offers one final lesson: this one for us as colleagues. The fear that drives Bluey's dogmatism is real in our profession right now. AI is disrupting processes that feel familiar and safe. The transactional, bureaucratic model of teaching has been dying for a long time, but it has offered a predictable structure, and many of us, in moments of exhaustion, fall back on it. If we can feel compassion for Bluey, then perhaps we can feel it for the Blueys in our own departments, and for the Bluey inside each of us.

What’s needed is not judgment, but a dose of communal care that can help us build the courage to let go of the old rules, to trust our students, and to trust ourselves. We need to remember that our value as educators has never been in the tidy efficiency of our systems, but in our ability to navigate the messy, unpredictable, and profoundly human work of learning together. It is from that place of courage that we can begin to see AI not as a threat, but as an invitation: an opportunity to design new games that inspire wonder and create new parables of surprise in our own classrooms. It may be that it is only from that place of courage that this kind of approach to AI in teaching is possible.

But enough of this; Melody is ready to play “Shadowlands” again, and I need my daily dose of building up courage.

If you are looking for help with turning your AI ideas into practical realities, designing professional development opportunities, or deciding how to develop an AI strategy for your organization, feel free to contact me.