Abstract This article presents a tripartite framework — Remix, Reboot, Reframe — for supporting faculty in adapting writing pedagogy to generative AI. Grounded in reflection, choice, and play, the framework fosters critical AI literacy and invites faculty to make intentional pedagogical decisions about AI that are both responsive and innovative.
Abstract Generative AI tools hold significant promise for transforming humanities classrooms into spaces of innovation, creativity, and ethical inquiry. This article presents a framework for integrating AI ethics and experimentation with generative AI platforms in English studies classrooms while applying a lens of science fiction and multimodal storytelling.
Abstract This article examines the integration of large language models (LLMs) into first-year writing instruction through a creative personal narrative assignment. Drawing on student reflection data, the study explores how LLMs can support iterative revision processes, genre awareness, and voice development when introduced with limited scope and attention to process-oriented pedagogy.
Abstract Scholars, policymakers, and educators have proposed definitions of AI literacy that differ in their details but share an assumption that students will inevitably use GenAI throughout their lives, opting out only occasionally. In this article, the authors discuss a hands-on AI literacy activity performed with pen and paper and designed using an opt-in approach to GenAI. Working with 113 students in multiple sections of required first-year-composition at a public university, the authors piloted the activity and administered a validated survey to assess student attitudes toward GenAI before and after. While the survey showed little change in students’ attitudes, it did reveal the range of perceptions students have toward GenAI and how it impacts their agency as writers, learners, and young professionals. As the authors show, students often reproduce the narratives found in corporate marketing and documentation, drawing on them to navigate long-standing cultural and structural problems within higher education, particularly endemic transactional views of writing. The authors conclude that AI literacy training must foreground human activity awareness, focusing on human attention, choices, perceptions, and thoughts.
Abstract This case study examines a first-year writing assignment that invites (but does not require) AI use alongside video reflections and video instructor feedback. Centering process over policing reframes AI as a tool, not a shortcut, fostering metacognition, revision practices, and ethical decision-making.
Abstract This chapter examines the rhetorical impact of instructors’ hyper-scrutinization of BIPOC students’ texts for AI involvement on their authorial agency and voice in US writing classrooms, problematizing how AI-surveilling pedagogical practices intersect with raciolinguistic ideologies, epistemic injustice, institutional distrust, instructor bias, and historical deficit-based views of BIPOC students’ multilingual composition.
Abstract Drawing on Rice's concept of para-expertise, this article asks, How can we position first-year students as experts who can speak back to Large Language Models (LLM) with authority? The authors analyze essays to demonstrate how seventy-two students drew on their felt sense of a city to respond to LLM writing.
Abstract This essay posits itself against higher education's ethos of FOMO regarding Generative AI. Instead, the authors propose Move Slow and Build Community, an ethos that conceptualizes teaching as relationship-based intellectual work, and they explore how this ethos guided an interdisciplinary community of practice experimenting with Gen AI in writing courses.
This article argues that care — especially care grounded in Black feminist traditions — is not an affective supplement to teaching but rather the radical foundation of liberatory pedagogy. Amid rising attacks on critical education and the austerity logics of the neoliberal university, the authors theorize care as infrastructure, method, and resistance. Drawing from the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Mia Mingus, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, they offer a framework for care-centered teaching that foregrounds mutuality, trust, and collective accountability. Through vignettes, student reflections, and practices such as trauma-informed design, mutual aid, and collaborative assessment, the article demonstrates how care fosters relational transformation and deep intellectual engagement. It also interrogates the structural devaluation of care labor, particularly for women and faculty of color, and challenges dominant educational paradigms that equate rigor with detachment. As one student reflected, “You believed me when I said I needed more time, without asking for proof. That made me want to do the work even more.” Drawing from their institutional experiences, the authors position teaching as a form of organizing — an insurgent, relational practice that refuses extractive academic norms while building collective conditions for educational and institutional transformation.
This article describes a project taught in a British literature survey course, in which students navigate digital archives like Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) to find a “companion piece” to a literary text. The essay shares the goals of the research project, the assignment design, and specific successes and challenges students encounter. The piece additionally offers reflections about teaching the conventional British literature survey course for undergraduate English majors, particularly considering the ways in which digital archives and historicist methodologies can expand students’ understanding of literary canons and the interrelationship between literature and history.
Students in first-year composition are often asked to read multiple texts quickly and independently during the process of researching and writing research essays, yet reading is rarely an explicit pedagogical focus. Researchers in metacognition and readerly expertise agree that expert reading is purposeful, defined in part by agility in engaging with a text, its context and its embeddedness within larger conversations and with one's own intentions beyond or within such conversations. Drawing from these concepts of readerly purpose and source use, we propose a theory of mining reading — a way of reading for conversation. Mining reading is when readers mine a text to understand the text's message within a broader topic or disciplinary conversation and make a text mine by identifying its use for the reader's rhetorical purpose. We describe ways to scaffold mining reading from our writing classes and share findings from student reflections, gathered with IRB approval, about the affordances and constraints of this approach. We ultimately situate mining reading as one way to help students understand reading as an active meaning making process and develop a flexible sense of purpose and agency in their research essays.
This essay reports the findings from a study of undergraduate students’ audio reading habits. The study involved a series of surveys conducted between fall 2020 and fall 2023 and included over one hundred students from seven different British literature classes. The survey results are both quantitative and qualitative and provide a snapshot of how contemporary college students enrolled in literature classes view and engage with audiobooks. Overall, the study found that a majority of participants reported that they listened to audiobooks (77 percent) and more than half admitted to having used audiobooks to complete assigned reading in previous classes (67 percent). Based on these findings, this essay argues that while audiobooks may not be the ideal medium for literary study, they have become an essential supplement to this practice under the conditions of the contemporary college classroom. Ultimately, this essay makes the case for putting aside disciplinary skepticism regarding the legitimacy of audiobooks as a component of literary education and instead encourages educators to learn more about how their students are using audiobooks so that they can accommodate these texts in their classrooms and provide instruction on how best to employ this medium.
When teaching in neighboring fields such as creative writing and writing studies, instructors can draw on the explicit recommendations of professional organizations and an existing scholarly consensus about threshold concepts. However, the struggle to define what exactly it is we teach when we are teaching literary studies continues. Rather than advocating for transferable skills in deference to the neoliberal marketplace, we should spend more time explaining to ourselves and to our students the particular practices, habits, and concerns that distinguish literary studies as a valuable scholarly discipline. Metacognition is essential for students to learn, and this can be facilitated more effectively by instructors able to articulate how the methods and goals of a course are informed by disciplinary norms, especially the ubiquitous and yet continually contested practice of close reading. This article reviews both recent scholarship and pedagogical resources on close reading to identify the intertwined challenges of defining and teaching this disciplinary method, making recommendations for more effective classroom practices.
This article shares course activities relying on the draw-to-learn framework from a general education humanities course focused on social media. These activities ask students to create drawings or sketches of concepts from the course — the internet and visual maps of directions to a familiar location. These drawing activities can promote similar cognitive processes to writing activities and, in turn, enhance student learning via non-alphanumeric text creation. While used far more regularly in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines, such activities may prove useful across disciplines, including the humanities.
This article considers how Jacques Derrida's theory of hospitality, applied within university literature classrooms, can help instructors meaningfully respond to competing student desires for flexibility and belonging. Derrida contends that ideals of “absolute” hospitality must be embodied in concrete and inevitably “conditional” ways. Arguing that the tension between absolute and conditional is one to embrace, the article considers how story-centered classrooms (specifically, general-education literature classes) allow teachers and students alike to move in and out of the roles of welcoming host and gracious guest. The article breaks down this pedagogical process into three overlapping stages, where class participants move from a traditional relationship where a teacher-host welcomes the student-guest, to experiences of readerly co-dwelling in which they collectively allow a story to host its disparate readers. The article argues that this pedagogical rethinking of traditional hospitality hierarchies gives students empowering strategies for welcoming diverse perspectives and inhabiting varied roles with confidence. These hospitality skills, in turn, allow them to practice and experience belonging.
Drawing from new and foundational scholarship in the field and from our experiences as teachers at a range of institutions, the authors consider how multimodal learning can support antiracist classrooms. This article emphasizes the value of cross-institutional collaboration, as the authors make a collective case for remixing the essay in first-year composition. This term denotes a method for building on the traditional college essay through activities and assignments that allow students to reevaluate and repurpose this well-established genre. The authors offer four case studies for remixing the essay—“Multimodal Translation: Playing with Post-Its” (Borough of Manhattan Community College /City University of New York), “Remixing Activism: The Essay as Personal and Political Playlist” (St. Francis College), “NYC Graffiti Autoethnography” (Fordham University), and “‘Vernacularity and Translation Activity” (Yale University). All four narratives present practices that support critical agency and linguistic justice by addressing the conventions of college writing assignments. Together, the authors offer a useful practice for composition instructors seeking to implement antiracist and multimodal instruction as well as a generative concept for administrators developing new writing curricula.
This article explores the creation and sustainment of a standing antiracist pedagogy group in a technical and professional communication program at a large, predominantly white Midwestern R1 university with a strong STEM culture. Reflecting on personal and collective experiences, group members discuss the evolution of the group, how the group fosters sustained engagement and ongoing development among its members, and its hopes (as well as challenges) for the future. Ultimately, the authors aim to provide a framework for the development of other kinds of support groups in universities and beyond.
Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) offers a feminist critique of marriage conventions and the Cult of Domesticity that prevailed in the nineteenth century. Yet hidden behind protagonist Edna Pontellier's entrapment in marriage and domestic life lies another systemic hierarchy: white privilege sustained by African American labor. Building from existing scholarship and from sources on teaching race, this essay explores the hidden Black labor that allows Edna's “awakening” to happen at all, given that the entire system is built around white privilege. This essay considers ways to teach The Awakening to a college literature class, illuminating the historical silencing and limitations of Black people in the United States and identifying the mechanisms of white privilege. The essay poses a key question for students: how do the silent Black bodies in The Awakening reinforce white privilege? Using various pedagogical approaches, this essay aims to help students investigate, uncover, and confront white privilege in other texts and in their world.
Upon arrival at college, students often experience difficulty integrating themselves into the new space of a university classroom. They may wonder how their previous skills connect to present use or they may feel linguistic, social, gendered, racial-ethnic, or class-related barriers to inclusion — barriers that are all too frequently invisible to faculty members. Classroom Community Agreements (CCAs) can ameliorate these situations by helping students to express their needs to their classmates and to faculty. CCAs operate on principles of antiauthoritarian teaching embraced by bell hooks; they embody Krista Ratcliffe's “rhetorical listening” and Lisa Blankenship's “rhetorical empathy,” both of which offer strategies for orienting instructors’ and students’ awareness to others’ needs within a classroom environment. This article studies the processes and effects of CCAs in a first-year writing program at a large university. Five faculty members from the Expository Writing Program at New York University narrate their practices of creating CCAs, which they initiated both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives illuminate the ways CCAs build trust, clarify course values and expectations, and enhance experiences of presence and agency. Collectively, our findings demonstrate the potential that CCAs have to foster student belonging and learning in virtual and physical classroom spaces in first-year writing and other disciplines.
