On July 22,2025, the U.S. Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague Letter promoting the responsible use of artificial intelligence in schools, encouraging institutions to explore AI as a tool for equity, access, and innovation. Yet within weeks, schools and colleges across the United States responded in strikingly different ways. Townsend Harris High School (Queens, NY) banned typed, take-home essays in favor of handwritten, in-class assignments to deter AI use (New York Post). Other institutions adopted similar measures: requiring students to produce first drafts on distinctive blue paper, or embedding writing center tutors directly in classrooms to provide an added layer of support that might keep students from turning to AI.
Writing instructors find themselves navigating contradictory pressures to either adopt or restrict AI usage. This just-in-time session responds to an urgent need within writing studies to reflect on these tensions and develop strategies that are responsive, not reactionary, by exploring the rhetorical implications of the widening gap between federal encouragement and local pedagogical retrenchment. In line with the MLA 2026 presidential theme, Family Resemblances, the session considers how AI tools are rhetorically positioned within writing instruction: as helpful siblings,untrustworthy cousins, or disruptive in-laws. By juxtaposing policy initiatives with on-the-ground responses, this session proposal invites participants from across institution types and theoretical fields, covering perspectives in transgender studies, feminist rhetorics,and cultural rhetorics,to reflect on writing pedagogy at a moment of both kinship and fracture.
The session takes up questions that scholars of composition and rhetoric have already begun to raise: How does generative AI alters invention and authorship (Aguilar 2024),how do institutions frame technology in ways that constrain or empower students (Wu 2024; Hall 2025),and how must writing pedagogy evolve to sustain critical literacy in a digital age (Saddhono 2024).By engaging these conversations, the panel brings together new empirical research, critical theoretical perspectives, and practical classroom strategies to offer productive strategies for navigating these resemblances, and resistances, in our teaching. This session will feature three, 15-minute presentations followed by at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion and Q&A.
Also, it brings together scholars whose distinct perspectives highlight the diversity of voices shaping current debates on AI and writing pedagogy. Al-Drous, based at a liberal arts college, draws on her experience as a writing program administrator and teacher-scholar of cultural rhetorics. Flanagan and Quinones bring complementary perspectives: Flanagan through feminist rhetoric and post-truth studies, and Quinones through critical AI literacy and transgender studies, situating classroom practice within broader sociopolitical contexts. Together,the panel balances institutional settings, career stages, and methodologies to foster an inclusive dialogue.
Al-Drous, “Prompting Rhetorical Inquiry: Assignment Design in the AI Age”
As federal initiatives urge schools to experiment with AI while many classrooms respond with bans or restrictions, writing instructors find themselves caught between policy enthusiasm and pedagogical caution. Al-Drous demonstrates how carefully designed assignments position AI at the planning stage, not to generate text but to support rhetorical choices. By prompting within the rhetorical situation, students retain ownership of their arguments and use AI as a resource for invention and reflection rather than as a shortcut (Aguilar 2024). This approach emphasizes that what matters is not simply whether students use AI, but how they engage it rhetorically, as part of a structured process of inquiry into their choices.
Flanagan, “Beyond Pedagogical Surveillance: Rhetorical Listening as a Response to AI”
Responding to the Trump Administration’s advancement of AI in education, students have lamented AI’s impact on their learning (Rosario 2025), while professors have turned back to blue books and in-class writing (Good 2025) to curtail AI’s impact in their classrooms. Flanagan takes up the question of pedagogical trust, asking how instructors can foster student curiosity in an era where surveillance-driven teaching practices often dominate responses to AI. Drawing on original data from surveys of first-year writing students and scholarship on trust-building (Pleschová 2025), she proposes rhetorical listening as an alternative, inviting instructors to work alongside students rather than police them.
Quinones, “Subverting Colonial (A)Imperatives Through Critical AI Literacy”
Quinones situates AI writing pedagogy within broader structures of race, gender, and power.They note how federal policy frames the social biases embedded in AI systems as objective truths, and present acceptance of those biased technologies as integral to America’s utopic capitalist futures.They argue that critical AI literacy is a form of malicious compliance that allows writing classrooms to subvert these logics by exposing AI’s sociopolitical functions and empowering students to evaluate when AI tools are valuable to their work.