Be/Coming a Teacher Stranger in the Gaze of AI: An Autobiographical Inquiry

The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly reshaped writing, teaching, and scholarly life in higher education. While some existing literature focuses on ethical guidelines, AI literacy, and instructional integration, inadequate attention has been paid to the lived, existential experience of university educators encountering AI. This article offers an autobiographical inquiry into what it means to teach, write, and remain human in the gaze of artificial intelligence. Drawing on curriculum theory, existential philosophy, and narrative inquiry, the article traces the author’s long relationship with writing and teaching—from slow, embodied wrestling with words in adolescence and graduate study to the unsettling ease introduced by AI tools. While AI promises efficiency, convenience, and productivity, this ease is accompanied by a growing sense of boredom, dispossession, and ethical unease. Writing and teaching risk being reduced to accelerated outputs, while the joys of uncertainty, struggle, and reflective presence—central to human learning—are quietly eroded. Engaging Maxine Greene’s concept of the teacher as stranger, William Pinar’s notion of non-coincidence and subjective presence, and critiques of techno-corporate culture in higher education, the article argues for a praxis of refusal and witnessing. Refusal here does not signify technophobia, but a deliberate ethical stance that resists allowing machines to think, decide, and write on behalf of educators. Witnessing, instead, becomes a reflective praxis—an ongoing attentiveness to what AI does to teachers’ identities, relationships, and inner lives. Ultimately, the article proposes be/coming a teacher stranger alongside AI: remaining wide-awake, critically attuned, and existentially present in teaching and writing. In an age that privileges speed, automation, and standardization, preserving slowness, vulnerability, and autobiographical presence emerges as an ethical and pedagogical act—one essential to sustaining shared humanity in higher education.