With the rise of various internet sources, it can feel safer to look for (impersonal) solutions on the internet, but this loses all kinds of important consideration of self and others, so I’m again thinking of the messiness of composition, the use of human resources, and the importance of being messy around other humans.

— Amanda (Team One), Question Three

Amanda‘s Reflection Responses:

---

Question One:

I try to avoid AI, especially generative AI, use in my writing because of intellectual and ethical concerns. I have long been against the use of AI to generate text that might be used (even with revision) in any submitted form of writing, including essays, articles, and applications, but as I have continued my studies and writing and composition pedagogy, I have decided to avoid generative AI in all parts of the writing process. I find the work of brainstorming, curating key research terms, sorting through ir/relevent sources, synthesizing, etc., important for formulating ongoing, reflexive thought in the research process. Moreover, when I feel stuck, other resources like peers, instructors, and writing centers enhance my ability to work through thoughts with formative “messiness.” 

Beyond concerns for personal intellectual limits (discussed more with Q5), I’m ethically against generative AI technologies for their exploitation of workers in the global south, harm to minoritized languages, factual inaccuracies and hallucinations, inherent biases, intellectual theft, financial pressures, and environmental impact. I don’t believe these technologies are built with actual care for the humans using them; they’re meant to push neoliberal productivity and hyper individualism to benefit the upper echelon.

I occasionally use other, non-generative AI tools like text readers and grammar/spell checks that help navigate research and revision as a neurodiverse person, and there are, of course, moments in which I don’t intend to use gen AI but may benefit from it (e.g. searching a term or idea on Google and preliminarily reading from the AI overview when I forget to type in “-AI”).

Question Two:

In my previous teaching, I have had AI policies against submitting generated text (with the understanding that I may not always “catch” such pieces), as this is the piece I’m most likely to see. My intention going forward is to have an additional AI statement that discourages the use of AI in earlier stages of the writing process as well, in hopes that students will engage more with their own experiences and ideas and/or the experiences and ideas of those around them.

A statement would point to the purposes of this class as one in which you think and work creatively, and it would express my interest (and grading focus) in imperfect but thoughtful work rather than grammatically “clean” and dry text. I may also share my personal concerns with intellectual development, as well as links to information about the aforementioned ethical issues.

Question Three:

I believe AI tools work against our creativity, research skills, and problem-solving. In the past, I have used tools like ChatGPT to compose what then felt like less intellectually important products, like rubrics, or to do revision work, like condensing. While some may find that gen AI outputs can give writers a better sense of how to write for a particular context, I found myself more likely to return to these tools unnecessarily for such projects. On the other hand, if I struggle through the work early on, I feel more empowered and capable the next time I approach a similar project/task. My goal in teaching is that my students will gain this same confidence, something that will be difficult if AI tools are used to circumvent perceived deficits or avoid struggle/and the risk of failure. 

While all of this is pedagogically pressing to me, I think the most likely student AI use will be to create a “clean” but not thoughtful project because many are under the impression that what matters most in their writing is grammar and, to a lesser extent, syntax. A “clean” product is my last concern and not a primary goal in my writing classroom. I worry that using AI with this mindset will prevent students from learning beyond the standardized lessons they had in high school, a point writing pedagogy scholars have determined is inadequate (Warner). Further, this will reify discriminatory and uncritical emphases on grammar rather than pushing students to creatively think through real problems and how they relate to others.

Additionally, I hope students will feel more empowered to connect with others through my writing courses, not just in hearing/understanding different perspectives but also in sharing their own moments of vulnerability. With the rise of various internet sources, it can feel safer to look for (impersonal) solutions on the internet, but this loses all kinds of important consideration of self and others, so I’m again thinking of the messiness of composition, the use of human resources, and the importance of being messy around other humans.

Question Four:

My teaching/learning goals are largely unchanged by the emergence of AI, as I’ve come into teaching (also at the time of AI’s emergence) with a focus on process over product and composition as a means of connecting with others. In my first year of teaching, I was taught to make prompts that wouldn’t be as answerable by Gen AI (e.g. those that require personal reflection), but I wanted these pieces to be part of my teaching process anyway. And, while I’ve also valued communication, relationality, and reflexivity since the start of my teaching, increasing reliance on AI (among other things), has led me to emphasize those things. Therefore, I don’t intend to use “gotcha” AI policies. I will likely implement policies against its use to hopefully discourage at least some students, but I don’t want to spend time policing work or trying to figure out if something is AI written/enhanced because that isn’t a good way to practice relationality and trust. Instead, I hope my classroom environment (not just the prompts and policies) and the relationships formed within will move students to feel challenged and engaged but also safe to turn away from AI tools.

Question Five:

I ground my assessment in the thinking process and in the production of ideas (which is why I would ask students not to use AI even in brainstorming). These are things that I don’t think AI is particularly good at, so it is likely that paper concepts from AI tools would not receive a glowing review. However, it might be more accurate to say that AI affects my approach to class facilitation and discussion, as I’m increasingly considering non-tech classes/activities and looking for more moments to engage students in communal dialogue that builds ideas. This practice of both the thinking process and the risk/vulnerability of sharing might break down seemingly increasing anxieties that prevents many from trying new things or engaging with others. In my previous teaching, I was worried about plagiarism and concerned by the fact that I didn’t notice any AI-written papers. I assumed that they were there and that I wasn’t aware enough to “catch” them, which fundamentally signified a lack of trust on my end. And, it seems possible that students will turn to AI out of their own lack of trust that we will grade them equitably, reflexively, etc. Therefore, building student confidence and classroom relationships seems, to me, like a more effective and more meaningful way to combat AI use.

I visualize a sort of human-centered collaboration with AI that remains permissible in my class.

— Gunja (Team One), Question Four

Gunja‘s Reflection Responses:

---

Question One:

I do not use AI tools in my own writing. In my dissertation work, which primarily uses a postcolonial studies lens in a Global South context, I categorically deconstruct Western colonial epistemes and methodologies, instead highlighting indigenous knowledge systems. Given AI’s affiliations with hegemonic systems of power, I believe it would be ideologically counterproductive to my scholarly ethos to use it in my work.

Question Two:

Despite my ideological resistance to the use of AI in my research work, I have recently found occasional use of LLMs as a collaborator in my pedagogical process. Previously, while teaching introductory and intermediate composition courses, I did not find the need to use AI tools in designing my lesson plans. However, recently I started teaching introductory literature courses to a miscellaneous group of students from different disciplines who have different levels of familiarity with literary analysis. I have realized that with texts that are a bit dense, fun activities that serve my teaching goals work better compared to assigning discussion questions. For these classes, therefore, I have been using LLMs to brainstorm and generate ideas for daily class activities that I can use to get students to engage with the texts that we’re studying. Sometimes I have trouble coming up with easy, warm-up activities for non-English major students that can ease them into complex texts, so I have found these tools helpful in making me think from a different, non-specialist perspective. Thereafter, I add my own tweaks to these suggested activities or even build on the ideas that it comes up with to design something new. Also, it certainly helps me save time, since coming up with an activity from scratch takes more time than going off of a sketch of an idea.

Question Three:

However, while I trust myself to make judicious use of AI tools, the prevalence of its uncritical use and potential misuse by students undoubtedly raises concerns. In my literature classrooms, the first concern is inevitably that the students would use Gen AI to summarize a literary text instead of going to the trouble of actually reading them. Such superficial summaries miss out on all the nuances of a text, preventing the students from thematically engaging with the ideas presented in the texts and forming their own interpretations. This can lead to unproductive classes without scope for discussion.

Moreover, they can use these tools to write for them instead of doing the literary analysis themselves. This would prevent them from learning some essential writing/analytical skills and cultivating their own critical thinking skills.

Question Four:

Such concerns notwithstanding, I have not significantly changed my teaching philosophy statement on account of the emergence of Generative AI. In both my composition and literature classes, I have continually stressed the importance of inculcating and honing critical thinking skills in my students and I continue to emphasize it in my teaching philosophy. Students’ indiscriminate use of AI certainly poses the risk of their critical thinking skills being rendered redundant by AI generated responses. I try to mitigate these risks by encouraging transparency in my AI usage policy in the classroom. In my policy statement I do not ban AI usage but supervise it, since I do not expect students who have Just stepped into adulthood to have enough understanding to be both ethical and responsible in their usage. Drawing on my understanding of Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, I avoid imposing my power through the use of authoritative language and disciplinarian measures, knowing that it would only encourage students to come up with ways to outwit the policy while using AI without compunction. Therefore, I phrase my ethical concerns by urging responsibility and accountability in the use of AI. I encourage students to come discuss with me how, why and where they are planning on using AI in their work. This way I can ensure that they are not using AI as a substitute for independent thinking and developing their own ideas. In my composition classes, I have allowed students (after a one-on-one discussion with me) to use AI to supplement certain technical skills that they lacked while handling a multimodal assignment. I use the opportunity to discuss AI usage with students to ensure that the ideas for their assignments are born out of their own critical thinking. In this, I visualize a sort of human-centered collaboration with AI that remains permissible in my class.

Question Five:

All that being said, it is indeed getting harder to detect the usage of AI. Currently as I teach literature in class, I try to keep discussions, activities, and prompts focused on close reading of the texts that we are studying. This helps to wean students off AI since those tools rarely help with close, detail-oriented analyses. I also tend to personalize my prompts, and encourage the use of “I” which encourages students to use their own voice while standard prompts asking for analyses ask for a more formal, detached tone which can make students unfamiliar with this kind of writing to grow increasingly reliant on AI tools. It also helps when I teach non-canonical texts from an earlier period (I usually write about and teach the long nineteenth century), since AI is not as helpful as it usually is when it is asked about a canonical text. Overall, I always emphasize in my rubrics how I prize ideas, originality of thought, and close, detailed analyses over eloquent writing with surface-level reading (like with most AI generated texts which are usually peppered with adjectives, repetitions, etc. without any deep textual analysis) beyond the plot. I do not go into the students’ exam scripts with suspicion but if I find perfectly articulated responses that are very superficial, plot-level readings which may or may not have been AI generated, I simply consider it a relatively poor attempt not entirely fulfilling the criteria of the assignment and grade it accordingly.

Question Six:

Within the classroom context, I envision putting it into practice through small group work. Everyday I make my students split up into small groups to dissect a particular aspect of a text and submit their write ups in the way of group reports for larger discussions (I encourage them to work with different groups each day to increase familiarity with the entire class and even give them a few extra minutes than is required for them to finish their task simply to allow them to chat a little and form community amongst themselves). This helps to engage the students in various ways. Firstly, students do not feel like they are put on the spot individually, which can be intimidating, and this is true especially for the reluctant and less forthcoming participants. They are more likely to speak up and contribute their own ideas in small groups as opposed to a whole class discussion, where they might feel pressured to prioritize finesse and execution over the quality of their unpolished but original ideas. Secondly, small groups allow students to draw on each other’s strengths to accomplish the task. This, I think, reduces their reliance on AI since they are free to utilize each other’s skillets. For instance, maybe one person can come up with ideas for the group to discuss while another person executes that interpretation effectively in writing. I hope that this encourages a spirit of collaboration and accountability to each other, thus making it possible for them to form micro-level human communities while reducing their dependence on AI.

AI’s relentless growth is making me ask how best to foster [my teaching] goals in meaningful ways that promote commitment to interpersonal communal collaboration and to associated activities that allow for slow, reflective exchange rather than demanding speed to product.

— Sarah (Team One), Question Three

Sarah‘s Reflection Responses:

---

Question One:

I’d describe myself as a passive user of AI. I don’t actively “ask” AI to do research on an inquiry question tied to a major argument I’m making or to synthesize an article. I don’t create a prompt and ask AI to make an image in line with the prompt. I don’t request generation of a narrative. But I’m not an active resister of the more relatively benign versions of AI either. For instance, when I’m watching a film on TV and I can’t recall the director’s name, once I move to “google it,” I will often read the “AI overview,” and I may even follow the “Dive Deeper in AI Mode” option. When I’m playing “Connections,” or doing the NYT Mini-crossword, I am comfortable asking google a question that seems factual to get toward managing a step in the game (seeing a link across terms in “Connections” or finding the term for a Mini-crossword line. At what might be seen a different level of use, since it feeds into my “own” writing, if I can’t remember the publication year for a book I’m referencing in an essay, once I ask for that datapoint in a move to Google, I might, again, follow the “dig deeper” option and be reminded of something that, while I don’t immediately feed words into the essay, I do have context that may well shape what I write. Thus, in a way, simply addressing this prompt raises a question: is there a line between mining a fact or datapoint and generating ideas? How can I be more self-critical about my own AI use, whether in a daily task or in professional writing?

Question Two:

AI is all around us, even when we’re not fully cognizant of its ubiquitousness. I want students to think critically about the “tools” aspect of AI. I know that many (most? all?) of them will actually be required to use AI in various forms in their workplaces, so I need to find ways to encourage them to reflect on its limitations as well as its benefits, to cultivate awareness of its impact on the environment, and to ponder its implications for human cognition (both at an individual and a societal level). I’m not banning its use from my classroom. Rather, I’m asking students to self-report on how they use it on major writing tasks. On the flip side, I’m trying to generate “small” and “big” writing tasks that tap into students’ own experiences and views and life goals as readers and writers and citizens so that they are encouraged, by the content and structure of the assignment, to value their own agency as thinkers and writers and to realize that their own minds will be better at generating text than would an AI author. I’m not, as of now, creating assignments that explicitly require students to use AI tools. I am try to capitalize on occasions/opportunities to bring shared assessment of “AI in action” into our shared analysis. For instance, one of my spring 2026 classes was involved in hosting a public screening of a new documentary on Phillis Wheatley Peters. In preparation for post-showing discussion with the filmmaker, she allowed us to pre-screen the film in class so students could draft questions for Q and A at the public event. Actors for Phillis and John Peters were actually AI-generated, and that became one of the questions to pose during the conversations after the public showing: what were the pros and cons? Our discussion in class went beyond comments at the public event and provided an opportunity to consider, together, some of the larger issues associated with such uses of AI. I’m also choosing more readings that address AI and how it raises practical and ethical concerns. For instance, in my fall 2025 grad course on authorship, a major reading was Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara, which addresses such issues in multiple chapters. I also sponsored one guest speaker from an academic press for one class session, and a transnational research team studying attitudes about authorship and AI for another meeting of that class: we “took” the survey that research paid developed and used it–as well as consideration of their research approaches–as another entryway into AI as an authorship topic.

Question Three:

I understand that the pressures of task quantity and speed-to-completion of those tasks in students’ lives: they are taking multiple courses, for instance, and they have many writing products to generate for those classes all the time. Some may not be invested in the course content; they may not care about the topic at hand in a segment of the syllabus, or the particular text we are studying. So they may see little value in investing the time to generate writing on their own, since it takes longer. They may lack confidence in their own thinking and writing skills. So AI calls to them. I suspect few are even aware of the ways they are pulling from AI tools passively. I doubt many think about the environmental impact of AI. At both the basic level of how they do/don’t do particular writing tasks and with what tools, and at the more “meta” level of what AI means for human society and for how knowledge is made, as well as the role of humans in that work long-term, I know I need to be adjusting my teaching to spotlight such questions in constructive ways. Because the landscape of LLMs is ever-growing and there seem to be no guardrails, I am concerned that there are not many infrastructures or shared practices emerging yet to support teaching that both acknowledges the unavoidability of AI in the culture and fosters critical reflection and engagement. What I’m seeing, at least in relation to teaching support structures, is a “here are tools you can use” approaches vs. sustained critical engagement models. And I’m hoping for more of the latter.

Question Four:

I don’t think the emergence of AI has led me to rethink my teaching philosophy and learning goals–for myself or for students. If anything, the growing presence of AI–and its celebration in many contexts–has led me reaffirm some of the most central elements of my philosophy and goals. For instance, I’m more aware of and committed to the value of fostering students’ agency while aiming to situate their exercise of agency in a context promoting awareness of cultural factors that shape it (some enabling, some constraining). I’m still valuing and providing lots of opportunities for collaboration, on small and big tasks, and in ongoing ways. I’m still aiming to promote metacognitive skills and awareness and to raise issues about historical and current power structures that can impact individual and communal knowledge-making. All that said, AI’s relentless growth is making me ask how best to foster these goals in meaningful ways that promote commitment to interpersonal communal collaboration and to associated activities that allow for slow, reflective exchange rather than demanding speed to product.

Question Five:

As I noted in a response to an earlier question, on some assigned writing tasks, I’m trying to be more explicit about valuing students’ own experiences as a source of knowledge and to encourage such specific rhetorical approaches as using “I” and thinking, as they write, about where ideas are coming from. I’m also, for big projects, breaking the work into more steps, so that I can both see students’ minds at work and encourage them to have faith in process.

Question Six:

I’m feeling somewhat bombarded by “invitations” to learn about “how to” use AI in my teaching. I’m seeking more sites of collaborative reflection and questioning, including ways to share teaching ideas for promoting students’ critical engagement with AI. I’m hoping for spaces that are non-judgmental–and that encourage a range of perspectives.