Applying the human-centric AI pedagogy framework: a collaborative self-study on a writing chatbot design in literacy education

Guided by the Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence Pedagogy framework, two literacy teacher educators conducted a collaborative self-study of their experiences and co-created a writing chatbot on PlayLab that aligns with the Self-Regulated Strategy Development framework. Serving as critical friends, they documented and reflected on how their AI literacy grew iteratively throughout the design process. Findings show that, through individual reflection and collaborative dialogue, each educator deepened her understanding of how to align chatbot functionality with instructional purposes while keeping teachers’ and students’ writing agency at the center of the design. In this iterative, human-led process, AI prompted ongoing pedagogical inquiry rather than serving merely as a technological tool. The authors also surface ethical tensions between the chatbot’s capabilities and their instructional values. A pivotal episode, in which they redesigned the chatbot to stop generating full paragraphs, illustrates how pedagogical and ethical reasoning directly shaped the tool’s functionality. The authors suggest that pedagogical knowledge plays a critical role in human-centered AI design and that educators’ professional expertise is an essential foundation for designing AI tools for literacy education.