This Teaching Practice paper documents and reflects on a workshop aiming to infuse rhetorical knowledge into Gen AI prompting. The workshop – “AI as an Academic Writing Companion” – is aimed at PhD candidates and academic faculty. It runs at a large Scandinavian university where English is a second language for most researchers, but is very much the expected language of academic publication. It is easy to be dazzled by the superficial, sentence-level fluency of Generative AIs, especially if one is a novice researcher writing in a second language. This superficial fluency may obscure the AI’s lack of rhetorical principles, however: the AI may lack them, and the researcher may not know the AI lacks them. To combine academic literacy with a critical sense of the capabilities of AI chatbots, therefore, the workshop draws on Moxley’s idea of kairos-based prompting. The aim here is to develop and apply the rhetorical knowledge necessary to guide a bot’s responses; in this way, the workshop combines the needs of researchers for both traditional academic literacies and generative AI literacy. The article describes the prompts and the pedagogy behind them, and our reflections on the development of the workshop.
Academic literacy is widely recognised as essential for student success in higher education, and there is a growing interest in embedding literacy development within disciplinary teaching. In response, Mid Sweden University launched the Writing Boost Project, a long-term initiative to strengthen literacy by supporting subject lecturers. Rather than addressing literacy as an individual student’s problem, the project focuses on disciplinary contexts where academic literacy develops. Grounded in Academic Literacies theory, it is guided by four principles: transformation, recognition of subject lecturers as experts, institutional responsibility, and inclusive support for all students. The project’s core activity consists of workshops for programme-specific teams of lecturers, facilitated by literacy development practitioners. These workshops create discursive spaces (Jacobs, 2005, 2) for critical reflection and collegial dialogue, enabling subject lecturers to examine and develop their teaching practices. Evaluations indicate that the project has contributed to pedagogical and programme development and strengthened collegial learning. The university has made the initiative permanent and increased its funding. This paper presents the project’s design and conceptual underpinnings and shows how its transformative and embedded approach can be transferable across educational settings.
What would it mean to teach writing when the act of composing itself can now be simulated, accelerated, or even “outsourced” to machines? Dylan Medina’s (2025) Generative AI in Writing Education: Policy and Pedagogical Implications provides one of the most comprehensive and reflective responses to this critical question to date. Spanning six chapters, Medina bridges computer science, rhetoric, and applied linguistics in constructing a theoretically grounded and pedagogically actionable vision for integrating generative AI (GenAI) into writing instruction.
Online poster presentations have emerged as a dynamic assessment tool that diversifies evaluation in the digital age. This article contributes to existing scholarship by offering empirical evidence from an academic literacies course, demonstrating how online poster presentations can accommodate diverse learning styles and foster critical thinking, creativity, summarisation skills, and digital literacy. Through an analysis of student survey data, the study reveals that this mode of assessment encourages students to synthesise research in an impactful visual format while engaging in meaningful asynchronous peer interaction. The findings further indicate that this assessment form aligns with contemporary educational demands, preparing students for digital communication challenges in their future academic and professional endeavours by requiring them to navigate multimodal design, digital platforms, and audience-focused knowledge dissemination. The article concludes with recommendations for implementing online poster presentations, emphasising the need for clear guidelines, robust support systems, and opportunities for peer feedback. In doing so, it positions digital posters as a pedagogically valuable and future-oriented assessment method.
