Volume 25  Issue 1   [2025]

This study examined how discourses surrounding Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools in K-12 English language arts (ELA) classrooms construct relationships between teachers, students, and digital platforms. Drawing upon critical literacy theory and teaching as a sociocultural practice, researchers analyzed qualitative data from 10 in-depth interviews with early-career ELA teachers and 74 digital artifacts, including blog posts, news articles, and organizational statements. The study revealed that teachers are often positioned as objects of AI discourse rather than active participants in decision-making processes, with the dominant narrative largely shaped by tech firms, policymakers, and administrators. Findings point toward GenAI’s transformative potential in education, the importance of human-centered learning, and the changing roles of ELA teachers in the age of AI. Recommendations highlight ways teacher educators can prepare preservice teachers to critically evaluate and engage with GenAI platforms while maintaining pedagogical autonomy. Examples include incorporating AI literacies into curricula, fostering adaptability, promoting collaboration, addressing equity concerns, and developing strategies for teacher autonomy. By empowering teachers with the necessary skills and resources, teacher educators can ensure GenAI integration prioritizes student learning and teacher agency while leveraging AI’s potential to transform education.

This conceptual article makes the argument that the fields of English language arts and composition studies require a more robustly elaborated theoretical perspective on the identity development of preservice teachers as teachers of writing due to the rapid proliferation of AI-assisted technologies in learning spaces. Thus, the authors utilized the conceptual frames of activity theory and dilemmatic spaces to consider how personal epistemologies and dimensions of writing theory interrelate to inform the ways teachers of writing construct and conceptualize their writing pedagogies related to AI chatbot platforms and AI-assisted applications. By including dilemmatic space as a component within a teacher’s construction of self as teacher of writing, the authors highlight their belief that in a landscape cluttered with generative AI aimed at and sold to teachers as measures of efficiency and consistency, the dilemma to use or not to use is no longer a singular event. Instead, the concept of dilemmatic space provisions the opportunity to consider the dynamic spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal conditions that shape the positions individuals take toward themselves, others, and the tools they use in day-to-day learning and teaching interactions. Teacher educators should forward technocritical inquiry opportunities and conversations with preservice teachers, such that they all develop technoskeptical dispositions toward AI platform technologies and writing instruction. Ideally, decisions to integrate AI platforms into writing instruction will become increasingly thoughtful, intentional, well-reasoned, and student-centered rather than driven by presentist concerns to maximize productivity.