Becoming Human through Stories: Transformative Islamic Narrative Pedagogy and the Reconstruction of Selfhood among Primary School Students in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
The thunderous expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in educational settings has fundamentally altered how children acquire knowledge, process information, and construct personal identity. Contemporary primary education, increasingly dominated by algorithmic content delivery and competency-based frameworks, risks neglecting the formative dimensions of human selfhood, consciousness, moral imagination, and narrative identity. This study introduces Transformative Islamic Narrative Pedagogy (TINP) as a novel theoretical framework for reconstructing selfhood and moral consciousness among primary school students through Islamic narrative traditions. Drawing on the animated series Pada Zaman Dahulu (PZD) as a primary analytical corpus, this research employs qualitative narrative inquiry combined with multimodal discourse analysis to examine how narrative structures, visual symbols, dialogues, and character archetypes function as transformative pedagogical tools. The study reveals that PZD operates as a rich symbolic narrative space encoding Islamic moral epistemology weaving together consciousness, memory, imagination, and language into coherent narratives of selfhood. The findings demonstrate that TINP offers a culturally grounded, spiritually enriched alternative to AI-centric educational models, fostering not merely cognitive competence but moral consciousness and authentic human becoming. This article argues that narrative remains an irreplaceable pedagogical medium, capable of resisting the anthropological reductionism inherent in AI-driven education while nurturing the full dimensions of Islamic humanistic selfhood.
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