Pedagogical Approaches to Integrating Generative AI in the Undergraduate Writing Classroom

For many teachers, the recent proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI)writing tools has ushered in a wave of fears about the consequences for students’ writingdevelopment. In undergraduate writing courses, which often focus on preparing their students forthe communication expectations of their future professions, educators need to make challengingdecisions about how to responsibly introduce their students to generative AI withoutcompromising opportunities for students to develop their own writing skills. This NationalScience Foundation-funded study investigates the diverse pedagogical approaches employed byfour upper-division engineering writing instructors toward integrating AI in their classrooms.Through qualitative analysis of teacher interviews and classroom observations conducted overthe course of two academic quarters, we shed light on instructors’ perceptions of the role of AI inwriting and their approaches to integrating AI in scaffolding students’ writing development. Inparticular, we observe that instructors’ views of how students develop agency in their writingwere primary drivers of their choices about how to integrate AI into their courses. These viewswere pivotal in instructors’ decision-making at all stages of implementation, including theirchoices about the extent to which they integrated generative AI into instruction as well as thetopics they chose to focus on in their instruction about AI use. We conclude by highlightingpromising strategies for incorporating generative AI to support the teaching and learning ofwriting.