When Colette Reilly Bozek was the assistant principal at Pioneer Junior High in Upland Unified School District in California, she worked to help educators integrate AI into their teaching. She found it facilitated differentiation and saw student grades improve as a result. But one group of teachers was not having any of it.
“The English department absolutely hates it. They say it’s cheating and it’s bad,” says Bozek, who stepped down from her school position at the end of the recent school year and is now Director of U.S. Strategic Education Partnerships for Knowledgehook.
Lisa Weber, who recently retired as the assistant superintendent for instruction at Suffern Central School District, encountered similar AI reluctance.
“English teachers are the most resistant,” she says, adding that some social studies and history teachers in her district were also wary of the tools, with variations of, “Yeah, we’re not doing that.”
As a college writing instructor myself, I understand this reaction to AI. Regardless of what level we teach at, those of us in English departments, or who teach in the humanities in general, hear regularly about the benefits of AI from colleagues and media reports. However, all too often, our experience with AI is a negative one and comes courtesy of students using AI to cheat.
My sense from my own experiences and conversations with other classroom educators is that the percentage of AI-generated work students is higher than is regularly acknowledged publicly, and many institutions have not come to grips with the scope of this problem.
On the other hand, as a journalist covering technology, I often get the chance to try new education-focused AI tools and speak with educators who are using AI in innovative ways. This has made me aware of what I see as a growing gap between English and humanities departments and AI use in education more broadly.
To close these gaps, some change in focus is needed both from AI enthusiasts and those of us in the English department.
Writing And AI Is Different Than Other Subjects
To start with, I think educators need to realize that English departments and classes that teach writing overall have been more disrupted by AI than other departments. On top of that, integrating AI into these classes can come with serious negatives, even when it is well-meaning.
Wanda Sullivan, an associate faculty lead at Post University, where I also teach, says there is a huge divide between the English department and other departments when it comes to AI.
“I was on an AI task force with different subject areas, and they have no idea what we are faced with in our classes,” she says. “Statistics vs. a basic English class—there is no comparison of learning objectives as they are so different.”
Acknowledging these difficulties and the challenges facing AI integration in English and other writing classes should be the start of the conversation around AI. Doing so, I believe, will cut back on resistance to AI from English teachers, and can help educators develop better methods for exploring the technology in a more critical manner going forward.
It’s Okay For Writing To Evolve
Once educators are in firm agreement that protecting human writing in some form is vital, there are larger conversations to be had about how writing instruction can evolve. AI can be a part of that evolution as long as we’re clear-eyed about the extent of its misuse by students for writing.
At Bozek’s former school, for instance, after English teachers got over their initial reluctance to engage with AI, they found some features quite helpful. Nonfiction texts had traditionally not done well; students regularly struggled to complete or comprehend these.
“The English department really dove into NotebookLM and loved the podcast features,” she says. This AI tool from Google creates casual-sounding AI-generated podcasts based on submitted texts with the goal of summarizing their key points in an easily digestible way.
Weber’s former district experienced something similar. Educators across departments learned that AI could be used to translate texts and simplify any when appropriate, thereby enhancing equity and access. While simplifying a complex story with AI might offend some purists and would not be appropriate at all levels of instruction, most educators support aiding access and accessibility whenever and wherever possible.
“We have plenty of stories that kids read that are not the originals; they’re abridged versions,” Weber says. “Any time you take a literary work and adjust it, you’re no longer reading that [original] work, but if it makes it accessible to kids in the class, who might not have access to it written in its original form, then there can still be benefits to that.”
Ron Samul, an author and Director of Thames at Mitchell College, tells me that students tend to see many of the benefits of AI use, and not teaching them appropriate use is a missed opportunity.
“Students are undoubtedly going to explore these tools in their academic careers, and they will likely be encouraged to use them in the professional world,” he says. “Therefore, creating a space for this learning is crucial.”
Samul adds, “The challenge lies in distinguishing between AI’s constructive applications for studying and its potential misuse. The line between the two can easily be misunderstood by both students and faculty.”