There exist plenty of conversations about the use and/or misuse of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) in teaching language, literature, and writing. Nevertheless, with the growing use of AI tools, one of the major concerns in higher education pedagogy is the loss of students’ embodied voices and experiential knowledge in their writing. In this context, this panel will engage the audience by exploring the possibilities of designing counterstory as an innovative pedagogical approach in the age of Gen AI, thereby showing how AI tools can be embraced to articulate students' unique voices as emancipatory narratives in their writings. This panel will present counterstory as an emancipatory pedagogy by demonstrating how instructors across literary studies, digital multimodal composition, first-year writing, and assessment will use narrative, lived experience, and critical engagement with AI to challenge dominant norms, resist linguistic and racial marginalization, and foster student agency and voice.

This panel will engage and advance important scholarly conversations evident in MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI Working Paper: Overview of the Issues, Statement of Principles, and Recommendations (2023), Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (2020) by Aja Y. Martinez, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy by April Baker-Bell, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2023) Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Large Language Models: A Deep Dive: Bridging Theory and Practice (2024) by Kamath et al., Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018) by Safiya Umoja Noble, Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (2024) by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, Generative AI for Dummies (2025) by Pam Baker, Fraser, N. (1997) and many others. Thus, this panel responds to the AI-hyped pedagogical approaches by advancing counterstory as an emancipatory pedagogical framework to recenter writing as a site of agency, justice, and human meaning-making.

The panel features four presenters, each presenting for 12 minutes, with the remainder of the time reserved for questions and answers (QnA). First, Purna Chandra Bhusal will introduce the panel and its speakers.

Then, the first speaker, Crystal S. Rudds, will show how she uses Lillian Yvonne Bertram’s work in an online African American literature course to help students question definitions of Black literature through generative AI. Amid the 2024 anti-CRT and DEI backlash, sharing assignments and providing examples of student results, she will demonstrate how her counterstory-informed course addresses surveillance and racial erasure through Bertram’s digital texts, which foreground algorithmic Blackness and literary voice. Rudds will also share her own counterstory, illustrating how AI tools and anonymized teaching served as protective and potentially emancipatory strategies for a Black instructor.

Building on this emphasis on voice, resistance, and digital mediation, the second speaker, Sanjeev Niraula, will propose digital multimodal counterstory (DMC) as an emancipatory pedagogical tool to address AI challenges and narrativize students’ voices. Then, he will share his pedagogical innovations from his first-year writing classroom. After that, drawing on a social semiotic approach, he will theorize how DMC can enable students to articulate diverse linguistic, cultural, and lived experiences, challenge dominant narratives, and envision emancipatory futures of teaching writing in the age of Gen AI.

Extending these emancipatory concerns, the third speaker, Phatik Poudyal, will show how scaffolded writing assignments—a personal narrative and a profile essay—can foster student agency and authentic voice amid the growing use of generative AI. By emphasizing process, interpretation, and lived experience, he will share how his assignments offer opportunities to automate counter-narrative models and encourage ownership and rhetorical awareness in students.

Finally, connecting pedagogy to assessment, the fourth speaker, Ananta Khanal, will argue that traditional grading practices marginalize student voices through standardized, product-oriented norms. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, linguistic justice, and labor-based grading, he will share the strategies to redefine the assessment framework from a counterstory-driven, justice-oriented approach that resists AI-driven homogenization and recognizes students’ lived experiences as legitimate intellectual work.

Finally, the presider will briefly review the three presentations and open the floor for a question-and-answer session. The audience will be requested to pose questions, comments, concerns, and criticisms. They will also be asked to share whether their pedagogical innovations address some of the issues discussed. The audience will pose queries to all four speakers in the order they present.