The youth of the contemporary India is extremely influenced by media and social pop culture. Their understanding of gender and sexual diversity is also mediated by films, web-series, other social media platforms. The narrative surrounding gender and sexuality, thus enter the classroom discourse through students’ writings rather than formal curricular intervention. This study examines how media narratives are imported by Grade 10 ELT (English Language Teaching) students into their written discourse and how it constructs empathy, stigma, and representation associated with transgender individuals within school-sponsored literacy. This study aims to identify the dominant media-derives representations present in students’ writings. The data was collected from Grade 10 students across four private schools situated in Haryana. The students were requested to produce written paragraphs in response to a classroom task which involved visual prompt depicting transgender people. The study adopts a qualitative design grounded in Critical Applied Linguistics and informed by Queer Studies, using a two-stage analytic procedure: intertextual uptake mapping and CDA-informed micro-analysis. The findings suggested that the students’ writings often demonstrated narratives of social awareness framing representation as a tool for educating society. The students’ writings also revealed narratives of stigma which often appeared coupled with comic -ridicule and moral panic, constructing abnormality and negative influence along with explanations that frame marginalisation as an individual act rather than institutional discrimination.  Based on the findings, my study recommends integrating critical media literacy tasks in ELT that explicitly compare media portrayals with rights-based and lived-experience perspectives and providing teacher scaffolds for discussing SOGIESC topics using language-focused activities (stance, framing, intertextuality) which helps foster inclusivity by educating students to move from conditional tolerance toward non-othering, citizenship-based representation.

Much of the recent conversation about AI in writing classrooms has centered on plagiarism, detection software, and what makes student texts authentic. What has received less attention is how AI tools actually change the way students write, specifically, the lexicogrammatical choices they make to express their own voice, position themselves as writers, and connect with their readers. While expressing criticality in academic writing cannot be reduced to linguistic features alone, the metadiscursive resources students deploy to signal stance and engage readers constitute an important dimension of their development as critical writers. This study examines how AI-generated feedback affects these choices in undergraduate English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms. 

We analyzed 70 argumentative essays written by undergraduate students, comparing drafts before and after students received AI feedback. Drawing on Ken Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, this study combines quantitative corpus analysis and qualitative revision analysis to identify changes in interactive and interactional metadiscourse across the drafts. The patterns identified reveal a systematic shift in the corpus. After receiving AI feedback, students consistently increased their use of interactive metadiscourse, transitions, frame markers, and endophoric references, resulting in texts that were more tightly organized. However, interactional resources such as attitude markers, self-mentions, and engagement markers were systematically reduced. The revised essays became more assertive, impersonal, and more standardized in their rhetoric. 

These patterns indicate that AI feedback tends to normalise a restricted model of academic writing oriented towards stance suppression and expository objectivity. For undergraduate writers learning what it means to write critically, this narrowing limits how critique is expressed and how authorial presence is developed. The paper, therefore, argues that critical writing pedagogy should treat AI-assisted revision as an object of analysis rather than a neutral aid, positioning metadiscourse instruction as a means to make rhetorical choices visible and contestable.

The use of Artificial Intelligence has increased significantly in classrooms over the last two years, particularly in language learning contexts where AI-powered writing assistants like Grammarly, ChatGPT and Quillbot are considered as "neutral" tutors assisting English as a Second Language (ESL) students in particular to improve their writing skills. While most research on Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) focuses mainly on the accuracy and efficacy of these systems, this paper scrutinises the ideological work performed by AI feedback as an agent shaping (students') normative conceptions of what constitutes "good writing".

This study uses a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model to examine the ideological assumptions embedded in AWE, incorporating theories from critical pedagogy, sociolinguistics and critical algorithm studies. This proposed framework will analyse AI feedback on ESL writing samples available in the public domain from multiple perspectives, including linguistic prescriptivism through the enforcement of a Standard English; rhetorical control by promoting specific argument structures and voice; and the portrayal of the writer-subject as a deficient entity in need of correction. Initial analysis indicates a tendency of AI feedback to decontextualize and depersonalize data to provide stand-alone truths and a marked preference for speed over in-depth intellectual exploration.

The argument then is that uncritical use of these AWE tools undermines the goals of critical writing pedagogy, bypassing entirely the years of exposure and practice that go into creating a distinct authorial voice and style influenced by translingual and culturally specific rhetoric practices, which are now completely overridden by these tools enforcing a form of algorithmic prescriptivism: a narrow, formalist version of English that is mistaken for universal quality. Therefore, the need is for users to interrogate and evaluate the values and biases inherent in these tools before integrating them into contemporary writing instruction and classroom practices.

Critical writing programmes in Indian universities are routinely positioned as supplementary skill-building initiatives or remedial interventions, implicitly tasked with compensating for students’ perceived deficits rather than interrogating institutional norms. This paper challenges that framing by arguing that such programmes operate as consequential sites where academic belonging is actively produced—or withheld. Far from merely teaching technique, critical writing classrooms and writing centres function as spaces where students are inducted into, negotiate, and at times resist the epistemic and linguistic regimes of the university. 

Grounded in writing-centre and critical writing classroom practices, including iterative feedback, ungraded exploratory drafts, collective textual discussion, and dialogic instructor conferences, the paper examines how pedagogical design shapes who is authorised to speak, think, and be taken seriously in academic contexts. Drawing on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concept of communities of practice, the paper conceptualises writing programmes as sites of legitimate peripheral participation, where students learn the norms of academic discourse through participation rather than prior mastery. This framing disrupts deficit-oriented models of writing support by shifting attention from individual students to institutional assumptions about knowledge and authority, and by treating belonging as a structural condition produced through pedagogical design. 

The analysis is further informed by Nancy Fraser’s (1995) framework of recognition and redistribution which enables the paper to theorise how writing programmes can simultaneously affirm students’ intellectual contributions while redistributing access to the tacit linguistic and epistemic resources that underpin academic gatekeeping. Within the Indian higher education context, marked by linguistic plurality, unequal schooling histories, and entrenched hierarchies of English proficiency, these dynamics are particularly pronounced. 

At a moment when AI tools are increasingly proposed as solutions to “writing problems”, this paper argues that the most critical function of writing programmes lies precisely in what cannot be automated: relational pedagogy, collective meaning-making, and the slow work of legitimising students as academic participants. It concludes by asserting that critical writing programmes should not be understood as marginal support structures, but as spaces of inclusion central to the university’s ethical and pedagogical commitments.

his paper draws on ongoing qualitative fieldwork to trace how handwriting functions as a central mode of assessment, discipline, and meaning-making in government primary schools in Haryana. Drawing on classroom observations, teacher interviews, and artefacts of children’s handwritten notebooks, the paper documents a locally coherent writing pedagogy in which cursive writing, copying, dictation, and textbook question–answers are treated as key evidence of learning—particularly in English as a second language.

Teachers consistently frame handwriting as more than a technical skill. Neat, legible writing is read as an index of personality, sincerity, discipline, and mental order; it shapes classroom behaviour, structures attention, motivates learners through aesthetic pride, and directly affects assessment outcomes. Writing is positioned as a linear, skill-building process in which form and repetition precede comprehension. These practices are especially justified in relation to children from labour-class backgrounds, where handwriting is framed as a pedagogical entry point into academic engagement. Teachers describe cursive practice as a “source” for generating interest in schooling: regular handwriting leads to task completion, which in turn draws children into reading, memorisation, and gradual engagement with the syllabus. Rather than merely compensating for limited resources, handwriting is mobilised as a way of inducting children into academic life itself.

The paper places these everyday pedagogies in tension with the official Haryana D.El.Ed English pedagogy syllabus, which explicitly names cursive writing, dictation, cloze, and textbook Q&A as “current assessment procedures” to be reviewed, not upheld as ideals. The syllabus asks trainee teachers to examine what these practices actually measure, and to compare them with alternative assessment strategies such as miscue analysis, metalinguistic awareness, teacher diaries and anecdotal records. Yet, in classroom practice, these same procedures continue to dominate judgments of learning. 

Rather than framing this as a gap between policy and practice, the paper argues that handwriting-centred assessment persists because it performs crucial pedagogical, moral, and institutional work that broader notions of “critical writing” often overlook. By foregrounding handwriting as a way of governing attention, producing discipline, and making learning visible, this study complicates dominant understandings of writing pedagogy and asks what it means to speak of “critical writing” in contexts where writing primarily operates as form, habit, and social signal rather than argument or inquiry.

Children’s literature and the genres and trends within it have advanced and responded to the signs and demands of the time within the country and the wider changing world. With the fast paced tech-driven world children are born into now, a humanitarian education has become even more critical and urgent to meet and nourish a child’s changing emotional and mental needs. Children see and understand the world visually before words come to them. Hence, picture books become a strong and immediate tool in not only engaging with a child’s visual literacy but building its formative understanding of the world. 

Recent picture book publications have moved away from its earlier didactic, moralistic, humour-centric and even nation-building roots to cater to issues relevant to contemporary childhood- gender, bullying, prejudices of caste, class, language and so on and also emotional and mental issues. Books have been designed to cater to unique temperaments of every child while also building their empathy toward the differences and nuances of the world around them. In the wordless picture book When the Sun Sets by Ogin Nayam, children are allowed to dive into their imagination and come up with their own understanding and interpretation of the layered pictures, each creating their own unique story in contrast to the didactic dictates earlier texts had. In Thoithoi Feels Shy by Rishita Loitongbam, the pictures unravel the story of a seemingly shy (thus, not-so-ideal) student finding her own unique way of participating in class. While Guthli Has Wings opens a child’s perspective on gender identity, Biksu and Payal Kho Gayi represent the childhood of an adivasi boy in a residential school deep in the jungles of Jharkhand and childhood in a basti, respectively. 

This paper analyses the role of picture books from contemporary publications in developing humanitarian and critical thinking in early childhood and thus argues how some of these texts—and pictures—are works of critical writing as they are purposefully and intentionally designed to be palatable for children. 

The contemporary English language classroom in Indian universities is shaped by two intersecting pedagogical realities: pervasive multilingualism and the increasing integration of artificially intelligent writing tools. Together, these realities give rise to a distinct three-stage learning process. First, students actively participate in classroom discussions using Hindi and other regional languages, drawing on these linguistic resources to achieve conceptual clarity and cognitive engagement. Second, this understanding is transferred into English through AI-assisted drafting, where generative tools mediate the initial articulation of ideas in the target language. Finally, students revise, edit, and rework these AI-generated texts, attempting to infuse them with an individual voice and a sense of authorship.

This layered process complicates conventional assumptions about language acquisition, originality, and the role of writing in learning. Rather than representing a simple shift from dependence to mastery, it reveals how multilingual practices and AI technologies together reconfigure writing as a negotiated, iterative, and mediated act. The classroom thus becomes a site where thinking, translation, technological intervention, and stylistic agency intersect, raising important questions about how English proficiency and critical writing are developed in post-AI, multilingual higher education contexts.

It is therefore writing and the processes involved therein that are in question. In this paper, it is highlighted how students from different states of India studying at Azim Premji University navigate through these challenges and pedagogical realities to find a way forward 

This paper is an attempt to reflect and theorise certain pedagogical innovations implemented by the author as an educator of Literature and allied fields to create alternative modes of thinking and writing in the classroom. The contemporary classroom, now increasingly saturated with AI technologies, stands at a crucial juncture where traditional forms of written assessment, such as term papers and response papers, are gradually losing relevance due to the instantaneous speed with which AI models can reproduce responses. What was once intended to be an exercise in reflection, critical thinking, and skill development is often replaced by shallow and flimsy work enabled by the seductive ease of automated knowledge production.

The paper argues that this seduction poses an inherent threat to the experience of learning ‘writing’ in a classroom with far reaching repercussions. To write anything is to face blankness and confusion; and then carve order out of such chaos. And AI tools offer immediate relief from this uncertainty. They reduce the classroom into a sanitised space where doubt is not allowed to exist. This paper contends that embracing confusion without the compulsion to immediately resolve it is a necessary component of both academic writing and human existence. 

Against this backdrop, the paper presents specific pedagogical interventions employed in the classroom to foster creative modes of critical engagement which produce different kinds of classroom writings. These include reflective journalling, creative performances, and visual and material assessments, which invite students to think through self-directed and personal forms. The presentation will also illustrate the work that has been produced in the classroom through such pedagogies. Collectively, these interventions propose a shift away from envisioning the teacher as a mere disseminator of information, towards understanding the educator as a creative practitioner who transforms the classroom into a porous and innovative space. A space of radical slowness that invites reflection, participation, and meaningful intellectual engagement.

Generative AI, with its ability to “write” large volumes of text without human intervention or sustained thought, has begun to reshape writing itself. The college essay and the take-home assignment, for long the mainstay of a deliberated, well-drafted, and edited academic text that responds critically to a prompt or question, have become increasingly problematic as tools for assessing student contribution. For writing pedagogies, this challenge is particularly acute, since students most often rely on GenAI for take-home writing tasks. At the same time, Getting students to write under proctored settings without access to GenAI is neither realistic nor does it allow students to deliberate and edit their work.

This situation calls for a rethinking of both pedagogy and assessment while noting that the ability to work with GenAI, to use it productively and efficiently while remaining alert to its limitations, is an essential skill for the workplace. Students therefore need opportunities to use AI while preserving the critical learnings of higher education.

Keeping the above in mind and using the five-level Artificial Intelligence Assessment Scale (AIAS) outlined in SNIoE’s GenAI usage policy, a single writing assignment has been designed to engage students at all five levels of AI use. Level 1 prohibits the use of GenAI, Level 2 permits its use for ideation, Level 3 allows its use for drafting, Level 4 focuses on critique and analysis of AI-generated text, and Level 5 permits its unrestricted use. Within this assignment, students move across all five levels, while also being required to engage with and revise generated text without relying on GenAI.

This design enables students to learn academic writing in a way that preserves core learning outcomes, while simultaneously developing a critical, reflective understanding of how GenAI can be used in academic work.

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is commonly taken to be about making a brave and  courageous choice over an easier, more common one, though critical work shows how the  poem reveals the similarities between the two choices (Orr, Robinson). In India, the poem is  popular at the school level, finding a place in the NCERT textbook for the CBSE board, in  ICSE textbooks, and the state board syllabi of Maharashtra and Karnataka. This lesson  demonstration aims to use “The Road Not Taken” as a tool to teach the foundational step of  critical thinking and writing – identifying the ‘what’ of the text and paraphrasing it. This is  pertinent at a time when, with the growth of AI tools, reading itself has begun to be seen as  ‘the road not taken’ by educators. 

The lesson will begin by explaining the categories of stanza, line, and sentence in the poem.  Instead of line breaks, it will take up punctuation marks as points to pause, discuss, and  paraphrase the poem. It will discourage the attendees from going beyond what is literally  written. The aim of the lesson is to arrive at the ‘story’ of the poem or what is being said in it without delving into suggestions and implications. The demonstration will end by showing  some excerpts from the ‘Poem Guide’ on Poetry Foundation, which address the who, where,  why, and how of the poem.  

This approach will minimize the pressure for students to come up with ‘interesting’ points in  the classroom. Moreover, there will be no pressure to read faster as the classroom will read  out loud together. The familiarity of the poem from school books will act as a scaffold. Finally, by identifying and delineating a starting point, the lesson aims to make reading more  approachable. At the same time, the demonstration only offers a starting point by cutting  across intimidation. Underlying it is the recognition that institutional challenges to reading  such as the pressures of exams and syllabi and the longer length and difficulty of academic  readings contribute to AI use for reading (@aaina_edu) 

Reflexive writing remains one of the most difficult practices for students enrolled in a qualitative research methods course, particularly those socialised into positivist research traditions. Increased reliance on AI-mediated writing practices has further made these submissions formulaic, jargon-laden, and increasingly homogenised. This poses a special risk for qualitative research, which is committed to bringing forth relatively marginalised and understudied concepts and populations. 

This lesson demonstration presents body mapping as an embodied and arts-based reflexivity prompt integrated into an undergraduate Qualitative Research Methods course. Students conduct a small-scale interview study on a topic connected to their experience as university students. Traditionally, reflexivity in this course had been assessed through written submissions. The body-mapping activity is now introduced after data collection and before formal coding, functioning as a pre-analytic reflexive memo. Through body mapping, students express aspects of experience that resist verbalisation; account for the affective, tacit, and sensory dimensions of meaning and surface meanings that remain unarticulated in text

The demonstration will outline the pedagogical rationale for this approach, detail the structure and prompts of the classroom activity, and reflect on its impact on students’ engagement with reflexivity. The session invites educators to consider embodied pedagogies as vital tools for cultivating reflexive depth in an era of increasingly automated academic writing.

Building on my background in creative writing as well as qualitative research, I have developed a  pedagogy that teaches critical skills through creative means, and helps writers unlock their voices.  This lesson, co-developed with a writing and teaching peer, is one I have taught in multiple  settings, including Composition and Poetry seminars at the undergraduate level at the University  of Pittsburgh. 

In Composition courses, this lesson is introduced midway through the semester, at a point when  students have been practicing freewriting and thinking critically about the concept of archive. Typically run between 3-4 classes of 50 mins each, this lesson aims to get students thinking  about the concept and elements of voice, potential blocks, and start leaning into parts of their voices that may have been trained out of them.  

The lesson begins by inviting students to freewrite about their favourite artist (singer/writer/painter/designer) and reflect on what makes their style unique. This is followed  by introducing the concept of Voice in writing—a writer’s distinct signature on the page—using  definitions from writing teachers like Pat Schneider and Peter Elbow. The class then collectively  reads short samples of both academic and creative writing, including pieces by Lucille Clifton  and Gertrude Stein. The discussion that ensues is used to introduce the various elements of a writer’s voice, and factors that inhibit voice.  

The discussion on inhibitions to voice deepens when students read and reflect upon the short  essay Mother Tongue by Amy Tan—linking the conversation on Voice to the politics of language,  and thinking about which parts of ourselves are silenced and/or encouraged, and why. The final  writing prompt that follows encourages students to unpack parts of themselves on the page that  lean into their mother tongue(s), while considering questions of syntax and audience. I have  found that this lesson is extremely effective with both monolingual and multilingual speakers,  and helps young writers in my classrooms write more freely, and with depth.

The integration of artificial intelligence into higher education necessitates a re-examination of critical thinking and the extent to which its core fundamentals remain relevant in a post-AI classroom. Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” with its historical allusions, dense symbolism and affective intensity offers a compelling framework for advanced critical thinking, interpretive debate and ethical evaluation in a technology-mediated learning environment. This lesson demonstration proposes an innovative group-based pedagogical intervention. Working in groups of three to four, the students deliberately prompt AI to generate constrained or flawed interpretations of the poem. They may for instance generate readings that presume that the duke was a moral man or normalize his patriarchal control. Rather than treating AI output as explanatory or authoritative, students critically interrogate these misreadings by identifying interpretive violence, historical distortions, ideological assumptions and ethical blind spots embedded within the generated responses. Through close textual analysis, prior guided discussion and collaborative debate, students then construct alternative interpretations grounded in textual evidence and literary theory. The activity operationalizes key dimensions of critical thinking like analytical evaluation, counter-argumentation metacognitive awareness and ethical reasoning while also making visible the limitations of algorithmic interpretation. By positioning AI explicitly as a foil rather than a co-authority, the lesson demonstration foregrounds that critical thinking in post AI classrooms is not only conceptual but dialogic. The instructor facilitates connections between AI misreadings, close reading practices and theoretical frameworks while guiding reflective discussions on epistemic responsibility and interpretive ethics in AI-assisted literary analysis. Methodologically, the lesson demonstration draws on classroom observation, peer feedback and student reflection to assess how critical thinking practices are not displaced but recalibrated in the presence of AI. By mobilizing AI as a productive mis-reader, the proposal demonstrates that reasoned judgment, evidence-based interpretation and ethical reflection remain not only relevant but indispensable fundamentals of critical thinking in the post-AI literature classroom.

We wish to reflectively demonstrate a workshop/classroom exercise that we have conducted with different student and teacher communities across critical writing classrooms and other institutional contexts. The session invites participants to map educational emotions—that is, to notice, label, describe, and decode emotions—in order to open up possibilities for critically re-orienting them. The exercise uses three modalities: visual scenarios (to identify how emotions emerge in context), prompt-based group discussion (to examine their social and pedagogic mediations), and reflective journalling (to reorient and rescript one’s experience of educational emotions).

We will argue that this workshop may offer useful insights for critical writing pedagogy. First, it frames the act of (research) inquiry as an embodied practice, involving sensory perception, introspection, speculation, and close reading. Second, the act of labelling and describing an emotion is, in a way, a careful and sometimes even inventive search for language—to specifically and contextually describe the emotion rather than resort to generic templates. Third, it invites participants to experience how the acts of critical self-inquiry and the decoding of social structures are conjoined, not separate. Fourth, the exercise is essentially about developing critical agency and educational praxis—to imagine possibilities for rescripting the (normative) workings of the emotion within educational settings, for both teachers and students. 

While presenting this exercise, we will also reflect on how we carry different pedagogic insights from university critical writing classrooms to diverse educational contexts (with student teachers, primary school teachers, high school children, and young professionals among others) and back, as we adapt and rework this workshop across sites. 

In a Writing class, “thinking through writing” could have many meanings, ranging from, making meaning of a text through comprehension that is bound to happen while writing, or making meaning of thoughts and ideas by articulating them. In both cases, meaning making is as central to writing, as is reading. That is to say writing begins from reading. 

In a foundation Craft of Writing course for students at the Shiv Nadar School of Law, in order for writing to begin, there are modules that first delve into reading – for content, for structure, and for context. There was one such exercise that combined the three and then produced a writing output in the form of a translation. 

The exercise was a close reading of some eight translations of Sappho’s Fragment 31, from more than the 100 that exist in English alone. The purpose was to arrive at meaning (since the students were made aware of their lack of access to the “original” text from Greek). This meant that the process of interpreting the text(s) as one required a thorough understanding of the content and structure of each text individually, with a critical analysis of the context to realise any additions or biases made by the translators. 

This was done to – 

1. Arrive at a critical and analytical understanding of the poem, through the semantic essence of the translations as well as by tracing their “tangents” and the contexts of the translated texts in their “afterlife” (Benjamin, 1923). In a reading and writing class, this helped in both, an objective understanding of the text and a discovery of the translator’s writing style, some with an already established canon. For example, Lord Byron, William Carlos William, Anne Carson. 

2. Write a creative and researched addition to the translation based on their understanding. This also helped in an assessment of their understanding. 

Finally, the entire exercise turned out to be a hands-on tool for the students to understand how meaning is made, using the major schools of literary criticism — formalist and structuralist reading of the text, to approaches of historicism and post structuralism to ultimately write a creative reader-response.