How can posthumanism help us reframe AI-mediated literacy practices? And what implications does such reframing have for cultivating AI literacy in language and literacy education? This article explores these two imperative questions through a case study analyzing two multilingual undergraduate students’ meaning-making and meaning-negotiation intra-actions with AI technologies in a writing classroom. The case study reveals a productive tension between these students’ experiments with posthumanist literacy and their entrenched humanistic assumptions. Ultimately, through the case study, the authors hope to demonstrate that reframing and re-engaging with AI literacy through a posthumanist lens may offer students and educators a relational approach to developing and cultivating AI literacy.

This case study investigates how two ESL graduate students, Ian and Sam, use ChatGPT in their research writing after receiving a comprehensive tutorial based on Warschauer et al.’s (2023) AI literacy framework. We analyzed their engagement with ChatGPT across prompt categories including genre, content, language use, documentation, coherence, and clarity. Data were collected from research paper drafts, ChatGPT chat histories, and interviews. Data analyses included coding ChatGPT prompts, textual analysis of drafts, and thematic analysis of interview transcripts . Results show that while both participants utilized ChatGPT for understanding genre conventions and content development, they developed distinct approaches reflecting their individual backgrounds. Ian selectively used ChatGPT for specific assistance needs, while Sam engaged more systematically, particularly for APA style and coherence checks. Both approaches maintained academic integrity and scholarly voice, demonstrating that Generative AI tools can be effectively tailored to individual needs without compromising ethical standards. This study highlights how advanced ESL writers can adapt GenAI tools to their unique writing processes, offering insights into the diverse ways AI can enhance academic writing while preserving individual agency. The findings suggest that AI integration in academic writing can be customized to support diverse writing goals and backgrounds.

This article describes five first-year writing instructors’ experiences with personalizing shared curriculum across three different course delivery formats (face-to-face, hybrid, online). The data is drawn from teaching journals that the co-authors, a non-tenure track, part-time Lecturer and a tenured Writing Program Administrator, and three Graduate Student Teaching Associates completed throughout Fall 2022. The findings illustrate both benefits and drawbacks related to shared curriculum: discussing and troubleshooting curriculum in a community of practice is highly valuable, but separating course delivery from course design is challenging. In our study, those challenges manifested as disconnects between course content and disciplinary identity, as well as personal feelings of failure. On the other hand, the need to personalize shared curriculum across multiple delivery formats proved productive, especially when instructors used asynchronous online materials as a starting point to develop hybrid and face-to-face lesson plans. Ultimately, we advocate for more conversations about how writing programs can support contingent faculty as they personalize shared curriculum through both course delivery and design, and we offer an example of a successful community of practice that revises shared curriculum in response to community members’ experiences with teaching in multiple modalities.

This article examines the potential uses—and limits—of so-called “distraction-free” writing software, especially in academic writing contexts. It does so by presenting findings from two different qualitative studies, one in which graduate students experimented with such tools and reflected on their experiences, and another study in which undergraduate students composed reflective essays about their writing processes. Taken together, these findings indicate that distraction-free writing may only prove useful within a relatively narrow band of composing activity. Moreover, they suggest that participants’ beliefs and understandings of what constitutes writing activity—and distraction from it—are both broader and more fluid than tacit assumptions embedded in distraction-free writing software. Ultimately, the point is not necessarily to critique this class of software, but instead to use it as an occasion to better understand phenomena related to composing processes, such as attention, distraction, and motivation.

As a component of the Community of Inquiry Framework, social presence is typically defined as students “feeling real” enough to interact with and learn from peers online. This article complicates social presence for an online writing instruction (OWI) context, differentiating between social presence, social comfort, attitudes about online learning, and social learning. The study was initially designed to examine graduate students’ perceptions of social presence as an element of online teaching and learning in two sections of an Online Composition Pedagogy course offered in Spring 2020 and Summer 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the project, since students were now learning about hybrid and online pedagogy against the backdrop of their own experiences as emergency remote students and teachers. Analysis of 21 students’ reflections written during the courses indicates that distinguishing between social presence per se and social comfort, attitudes, and learning helps to account for the individual and social contexts of course participants. Ultimately, this article argues that simply inviting students to “feel real” or positioning yourself as a “real” instructor is not sufficient for establishing the types of social interactions that composition studies values.