Who says?
I’ve just finished seven weeks as a student teacher in an NZ secondary school, and this was a question I posed whenever students would make a claim as part of a class discussion or assignment. And I reckon it’s a question every teacher should be asking often.
For a decade we have talked about an informational crisis – how do we know what sources we can trust to make sense of the world? – and now we are in the midst of an epistemological crisis.
Everyone (and every bot) can be a publisher, AI is generating plausible bullshit at an industrial scale, and deep fakes mean we cannot even trust our sensory organs.
As educators our job is to help students to understand the world so they can change it. Essential to this challenge is to give them the tools to discern truth from truthiness (thanks, Stephen Colbert).
Fortunately there are some great resources out there. Check out Squiz Kids’ Newshounds program in Australia and its recent podcast series The Big Threat.
Teaching media literacy is not merely the domain of English teachers – every educator needs to instill in their students media literacy habits of mind: critiquing sources of information as a matter of course.
This might involve students interrogating the credibility of the source, verifying facts independently, probing the biases and motivations of authors, and triangulating evidence from multiple sources. When it comes to AI-generated content, teachers should mandate that students probe deeper for the originating source.
Yes, that means that teachers themselves, and the sources they use, should be subject to scrutiny. We should expect – indeed, teach – our students to activate their bullshit detectors whenever we make a claim.
Some teachers may find that the sources they rely on do not stand up to scrutiny. Good. We should do better.
I look forward to hearing students ask their peers, their teachers and themselves, “Who says?” – and listening hard to the answers.
First posted on LinkedIn in July 2026.
Ari Sharp 