Human Connection: Collaboration, Student Voice, and Personal Conferences
Connecting Futures: Student Voice and AI in EFL Writing Classrooms (Olga Yashenkova)
As artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation reshape higher education, writing classrooms face the challenge of helping students engage creatively and critically with emerging technologies. While discussions about AI often focus on institutional policies or teacher perspectives, students’ own visions of technological futures remain underrepresented. This presentation explores how speculative writing can foster meaningful connections between student voice, creativity, and critical AI literacy in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. Drawing on classroom practices with pre-service EFL teachers at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, the session presents speculative writing assignments in which students imagine AI-driven futures of higher education. Students create short narrative scenarios exploring possibilities such as AI-assisted language learning, hybrid global classrooms, and new forms of collaboration between teachers and intelligent systems. These activities encourage experimentation with narrative forms while prompting reflection on ethical questions, the risks of technological overreliance, and the importance of maintaining human creativity and agency in higher education. Designed as low-stakes, exploratory tasks, speculative writing invites students to combine storytelling with reflective commentary, connecting personal experiences with broader technological and educational developments. Through this process, students engage in creative risk-taking while articulating their perspectives on the evolving relationship between higher education, technology, and teaching practice. The presentation will share practical strategies for designing speculative prompts, scaffolding creative experimentation, and facilitating reflective discussions that link students’ ideas to wider debates about AI and higher education. Examples of classroom activities and student responses will illustrate how speculative writing can support inclusive participation, critical engagement, and learner empowerment. By positioning students as co-creators of possible educational futures, speculative writing offers an innovative approach to EFL pedagogy that fosters creativity, critical awareness of AI, and stronger connections between learners, technologies, and the future of higher education.
Creating Space For Writing Conferences: Reflections On A Student-Centered Instructional Model (Casey Manogue)
Writing conferences, defined as one-on-one instructor-student interactions focused on student writing, have often been described as an effective pedagogical practice in college writing courses. Instructors and students have reported positive perceptions of writing conferences (Kaufka, 2010; Maliborska & You, 2016; Yeh, 2016) and instructors have also detailed how writing conferences serve as a space for rapport building with students (Boynton, 2002; Dokko, 2023). As a form of response to student writing, conferences have also been shown to positively influence student revisions (Evans & Ferris, 2019; Goldstein & Conrad, 1990). One downside of writing conferences is that they are difficult to implement due to their time-intensive nature (Lerner, 2005; Eckstein, 2013; Ferris, 2014). This presentation will showcase an instructional model that creates curricular space for writing conferences to reconcile this problem of time. Looking at older literature on conferencing, various instructors have proposed instructional models where students use class time to work on their writing while instructors conference with students one-on-one (Douglas, 1924; Stauffer, 1925; Garrison, 1974). Taking inspiration from these accounts, the featured instructional model proposes a format for a college writing course where the second class meeting each week is student-centered and dedicated solely to writing conferences, peer response workshops, and collaborative writing activities. First, the presentation will begin with a brief literature review on writing conferences. Second, the presenter will describe how they developed and implemented this instructional model for a developmental writing course over the 2025-2026 academic year, and share victories, challenges, and surprises they encountered in the implementation. Third, the instructor will share student perceptions of the instructional model as collected during the Spring 2026 quarter. Last but not least, the presenter will solicit attendees for comments and feedback for how this instructional model might be improved or translated to other instructional contexts.
AI Voice and Contract Grading
When Writing Moves Forward: AI, Voice, and Innovative Writing Pedagogy Across Secondary and College Classrooms (Seth Tendler)
Innovation in writing instruction is often framed as a question of tools, but the deeper pedagogical challenge is how teachers decide when generative AI should reduce barriers and when learning requires productive friction. This workshop explores an access-oriented framework for helping students transfer writing practices, voice, and agency across changing educational contexts as AI becomes part of the composing process.
Focusing on the transition from secondary writing classrooms to first-year composition, the session considers how neurodivergent (ADHD and LD), multilingual, and otherwise underserved writers experience AI differently across contexts. Rather than positioning AI as either a shortcut or a threat, the workshop asks under what instructional conditions AI supports access, initiation, organization, and multimodal meaning-making, and when it risks reducing struggle that is essential for rhetorical decision-making, revision, and writerly ownership. Participants will engage with adaptable classroom practices that foster innovation through scaffolded AI-supported drafting, multimodal rehearsal before formal drafting, transfer reflection checkpoints, and revision activities that invite students to “bring themselves back into” AI-generated prose. These strategies model how access-oriented pedagogy can preserve student voice while still protecting the cognitive and rhetorical work necessary for learning. By centering the relationship between access and friction, this workshop responds directly to the conference theme, Fostering Innovation. It offers a practical framework for integrating AI and digital tools in ways that empower rather than overwhelm students, while helping educators across grade levels design more inclusive, sustainable, and intellectually rigorous writing classrooms.
Beyond the Grade: Contract Grading, Critical Language Awareness, and Generative AI in Multilingual Writing Instruction (Andrea Hernandez)
Assessment practices significantly influence how international students understand their writing abilities and construct their identities as multilingual writers. Traditional grading models often reinforce linguistic hierarchies that conflict with students’ lived language practices. Building on recent research advocating for equitable and process-oriented assessment in multilingual writing instruction (Sims, 2023; Larson, 2024; Gabor, 2024), this project extends these discussions to an Entry Level Writing Requirement (ELRW) course for multilingual/international writers, where questions of identity and self-perception are particularly relevant. This presentation examines contract grading (Elbow, 1997; Danielewicz & Elbow, 2009; Inoue, 2019) as an alternative assessment model in courses for multilingual students that promotes students’ Critical Language Awareness (Fairclough, 1992) and seeks to nurture students’ multilingual repertoire and identity. Furthermore, this study examines whether reducing grade pressure influences students' reliance on generative AI in their writing process. Drawing on a study conducted in an ELRW course during the Winter 2026 and using a qualitative mixed-methods design—including pre- and post-course surveys, reflective journals, and semi-structured interviews—the study illustrates both the opportunities and challenges of shifting from traditional assessment to contract grading. The analysis focuses on pedagogical design decisions, instructor mediation of linguistic ideologies, and the ways un-grading can foster a more equitable classroom ecology. Findings show that students reported greater confidence experimenting with voice, register, and translanguaging, and relied less on generative AI. This presentation will discuss specific strategies that supported students’ engagement and agency, such as clearly defined effort- and revision-based expectations, structured opportunities for reflection on writing choices, and explicit discussion of linguistic norms and ideologies toward the use of generative AI.
Navigating Generative AI in Graduate Education: Agency, Ethics, and Language Development among International EAL Students (Kara Mac Donald)
Drawing on two linked inquiries, a semester-long classroom action research project with 30 English as an Additional Language (EAL) graduate writers and a mixed methods survey of 101 international graduate students, the presenters trace how participants incorporate AI into drafting, revising, and professional communication. The analysis triangulates students’ written reflections, reported usage patterns, and articulated ethical concerns. Across both data sets, students describe adopting AI strategically to increase efficiency, scaffold language, and spark ideas, while simultaneously worrying about overreliance, loss of creativity, and threats to academic integrity. These tensions are interpreted through an Agency–Transparency–Accountability–Reflection (ATAR) framework that foregrounds students’ active decision making amid uneven and sometimes conflicting instructional messages about AI. The study culminates in ATAR aligned pedagogical principles and concrete classroom strategies, such as structured AI supported drafting tasks, guided reflection on tool dependence, and explicit discussion of disclosure norms, designed to cultivate ethical, reflective, and learning oriented AI use in graduate programs. This fosters dialogue among on how writing intensive courses can recognize AI as part of EAL students’ linguistic repertoires while safeguarding critical thinking and integrity.
Connecting Writing to Specific Contexts
What Makes a Major Pedagogical Intervention Worth it? Encouraging Short-term Buy in, Long-term Learning, and Continual Adaptation (Jessica McCaughey, Shyam Patel)
In some ways, the questions and uncertainties we face when refining and reshaping our courses resemble the very challenges we guide our students through as they revise their writing: balancing ‘big picture’ concerns with local and technical issues, openly courting and utilizing outside perspectives, determining where to start and strategically prioritizing goals, and treating revision as a continuous, iterative, and open-ended process. By walking attendees through two major writing course renovations for college classrooms, this panel offers tools and insights for instructors navigating these sticking points at all grade levels. The first talk will explore community-engaged learning as a mechanism for promoting writing transfer and allowing students to develop more adaptable skills, knowledge, and processes around writing. Through insights gleaned from an ongoing community-institutional partnership between a private U.S. research university and a growing healthcare organization based in West Africa, this talk will examine the ways in which such partnerships can provide authentic, meaningful, and nuanced writing experiences to support student writing transfer. The second talk will equip attendees with a pair of tools for diagnosing and responding to potential cases of 'busywork' in their writing courses, including 1) a flowchart for tracing complaints of busywork to issues of workload, instructional yield, and grade penalties, along with 2) a checklist for determining how AI integration in an assignment or activity could either facilitate or obstruct the genuinely iterative, process-based learning that increasingly sets writing classrooms apart in our post-AI present. By unpacking the complex process of course reform from the inside out, these talks will leave participants with a more concrete and practical vision for turning nagging suspicions about what’s not working in the classroom into clear-cut actions toward change. These talks will also illustrate how these same revisions can be leveraged to address broader, disciplinary concerns within writing instruction (such as writing transfer and process-based pedagogy) as well as broader societal debates about education (including civic engagement and professionalization). In doing so, these talks will address the changing nature of the teaching profession and how we can make strategic decisions addressing our own teaching goals and our workloads, while also emphasizing pedagogical transparency with students.
Innovation, Games, and Podcasting
Writing and Rolling: D&D meets FYC (Hailey Murphy, Haleigh Payne)
We have designed a first-year composition course that explores rhetoric and identity formation through the lens of the popular tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. For this course, we utilize the idea of procedural rhetoric, connecting tabletop games to argument-making and persuasive storytelling that students can interact with through play. Our presentation will focus on how we designed our course and implemented play in the classroom. We will share lesson plans, structured assignments, and techniques for fostering community within the classroom, as well as semester scaffolding that prepares students for play. The course’s primary goal is to encourage students to develop their identity as writers and academics in an understanding and creative environment. Using D&D as a model allows them to participate in and analyze the process of identity formation in a social world rife with rhetoric and magic. Additionally, through an exploration of the game’s history, students are invited to consider current issues of representation. Over the course of the semester, students complete a variety of assignments, ranging from a personal narrative to a rhetorical analysis paper. They are encouraged to use various multimodalities, including essays, posters, dungeon design, or comic strips. In the second half of the semester, students, with the help of their instructor and embedded mentor, are given the chance to play through a Dungeons & Dragons module, using characters that they created and analyzed in the class's first two units. Along with game theory, students also read texts in various genres and practice a wide range of drafting techniques, including brainstorming activities, journal entries, and larger-scale writing assignments.
Innovative strategy for strengthening learning through educational podcasting (Zehlia Babaci-Wilhite, Aleysa Petty)
This proposal examines reflections on both the successes and challenges encountered while investigating students’ perspectives on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) as a tool in learning environments in higher education. As generative AI tools become increasingly present in academic contexts, instructors are compelled to reassess teaching and evaluation practices. This proposed strategy offers valuable insight into how educators can include A.I. in writing, creativity, and critical thinking. Adopting A.I. can be a valuable collaborative tool to support learning and strengthen family relations through educational podcasting. Faculty-led podcasts can invite students to reflect on their experiences with A.I. while simultaneously extending this innovative learning to families. By including family in discussions about digital tools such as podcasting becomes a medium for shared understanding and student well-being. Such dialogue encourages supportive environments beyond the classroom and fosters intergenerational awareness of how technology shapes learning. Through reflective teaching practices and inclusive communication, educators can promote well-being, mutual understanding, and collaborative learning that contribute to a more peaceful community which can avoid loneliness, anxiety and emphasizes common good.
Teacher Learning and Collaboration (Roundtable)
Centering Multilingual Students as Writers: How Teacher Learning and Collaboration is Making a Difference (Hannah Hohle, Brianna Dupper, Malcolm Williams)
For the past five years, secondary teacher teams at diverse middle and high school sites in Bay Area districts have engaged in ongoing professional learning through the Teachers of Writing and Language Instruction Project (TWLIP). The TWLIP project is expansive, but at its center is the Writing Project philosophy that "teachers are the best teachers of other teachers". Teachers participated in (and led) workshops on topics like translanguaging, civic engagement and multimedia texts, and argument writing across disciplines. Teachers spent time writing for themselves, and deepened their practice of collectively looking at student writing across disciplines and across time. As this project comes to a close, TWLIP is re-convening participants to discuss challenges and successes, examine data across the project, and consider broader implications for teacher leadership. This proposed roundtable session is an exciting moment to center the agency of TWLIP teachers, including their stories of learning together, the growth of their students as writers, and outcomes for their Long-Term English Learners (LTELs). So much of what happens in multiyear projects becomes institutional and localized knowledge. Thus, this session is in service of sharing what we’ve learned together with a broader audience. Session participants will get to write, discuss student work, and share – guided by TWLIP teachers. This session offers two direct connections to the conference theme of innovation. 1) Teaching multilingual students necessitates teachers’ ongoing learning and innovation; student writers are linguistically rich individuals, with a range of text types, languages, and experiences they are drawing from. It is incumbent upon teachers to shape and re-shape their teaching approaches to meet the students in front of them. 2) Teachers learning together, especially in a “third place” like the TWLIP project, makes it possible for new ideas, experiences, and practices to contribute to the shaping of these approaches.