Teacher agency in GenAI-mediated writing assessment: a duoethnography in Vietnamese higher education

As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) becomes increasingly embedded in writing assessment, teachers are asked not only to use new tools but also to negotiate what counts as valid judgment, meaningful feedback, and professional authority in AI-mediated workflows. This study examines teacher agency in GenAI-mediated writing assessment through a duoethnographic inquiry situated in Vietnamese higher education English as a foreign language (EFL) writing courses. Drawing on four months of reflective writing, dialogic response threads, assessment artifacts, and prompt records, we analyze how two teacher-researchers encountered and interpreted friction across AI-assisted scoring, feedback drafting, and platform-based assessment workflows. Conceptually, the study defines teacher agency as an ecological and temporal achievement enacted through situated judgment, disrupted by sociotechnical constraints, and reimagined through teachers’ efforts to reconfigure their roles in relation to AI output. The findings show that agency was enacted through rubric-based interpretation, disrupted when AI outputs narrowed assessment evidence or repositioned teachers as confirmers of machine judgment, and reimagined through re-voicing, contestation, and ethical mediation. The study argues that GenAI did not simply reduce assessment labor, but it redistributed it into new forms of criterial verification, feedback calibration, data-sensitive decision-making, and workflow resistance.