The Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) invites you to join us at the next webinar in our 2025-26 series, led by Stacy Wittstock, N. Claire Jackson, and Jennifer Burke Reifman:
"Critically Responding to Institutional GenAI Mandates in Online and Offline Writing Programs: A Heuristic for WPAs and WCDs"
The event is November 10, 2025, 12:00-1:00 pm EDT and is free for GSOLE members and $15 for non-members.
Webinar Description
Since November 2022, the landscape around Generative AI, particularly in educational contexts, has evolved in a number of directions. Currently, many of our institutions are investing heavily in GenAI technologies and mandating AI literacy curricula; at the same time intense debates about the ethics and consequences of these products are challenging both the morality of their use and raising serious questions about their potential impact on student learning. Given this context, Writing Program and Writing Center Administrators may question how to respond ethically, efficiently, and responsibly to institutional mandates related to these technologies.
In this workshop, three new and untenured WPAs/WCDs will discuss how they have taken up these efforts. The presenters will discuss emerging understandings of what “AI Literacy” is, including McIntyre, Fernandes, and Sano-Franchini’s (2025) “critical digital cultural literacies”; Söken and Nygreen’s (2024) situating of AI literacy in a broader framework of critical media literacy; Thornley and Rosenberg’s (2024) bridging of AI literacy and information literacy; among others. Presenters will also consider Presenters will also consider how to balance the documented “learning loss” from the use of GenAI tools (Gerlich, 2025; Kosmyna et al., 2025) with the the imperative to teach AI literacy, and explore pathways for instructor and student agency that do not assume, as we’ve been told, that resistance is futile.
After engaging in emerging work in this area, we will describe each of our contexts where we have been mandated to integrate GenAI and must navigate doing so. We describe our efforts to meet the mandates by focusing on how GenAI integration may or may not align with course learning outcomes and course modalities at our institutions, considering issues of professional development and overall fit of GenAI products with already established curriculum. We then invite participants to discuss institutional mandates that may be impacting their own programs and consider how the information presented in this webinar might help them think through potential approaches. More specifically, we’ll provide a heuristic aimed at encouraging participants to examine their own programmatic outcomes and consider the extent to which AI literacy does/does not align with the existing outcomes and/or course modalities, discuss what it would mean to integrate AI literacy into these outcomes and courses, and develop materials for teaching AI literacy tied to their own outcomes. We will also provide a space for participants to strategize ways to respond critically to institutional hype while ensuring your continued place in the conversation.
This webinar explores how data students generate is used to train GAI without informed consent, which allows Big Technology (BigTech) companies and Educational Technology (EdTech) companies to profit off student data and labor. By discussing AI through a lens of surveillance and privacy, students are shown that the content they ask AI generators, upload, and share is monitored and often not attributed as their own intellectual property. Intellectual property is a global topic that is important for educators and students to address within and beyond the classroom space. Such conversations within the classroom can create space for discussions to happen outside of the classroom, impacting how public discourse surrounding GAI can and should include intellectual property concerns.
Whether or not instructors decide to implement GAI in the classroom, instructors should still have conversations with students about topics such as intellectual property and surveillance.
Learning Outcomes
- Define Strategies for connecting learning outcomes with GenAI Literacy as a concept
- Approaches to responding critically to institutional hype
- Materials and assessments developed from the SLO for students
- Approaches for considering integration of GenAI across course modalities
You can learn about GSOLE, become a member, and register for the event here. We look forward to seeing you there!
Cydney Alexis
Mary Lourdes Silva
GSOLE Webinar Committee Co-Chairs
Cydney Alexis, J.D./Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Kansas State University