One way that educators can adapt to our continuously shifting educational landscape is to lean into interactions with Generative AI in the form of new assignments and in-depth reflection activities. In this presentation, I demonstrate ways that I have adapted Generative AI tools into my first-year technical communication classes at my institution. I showcase how Generative AI tools can be used to assist in lesson planning and assignment building to alleviate the burden of overworked and underpaid educators, while simultaneously enriching our understanding of these tools.
By experimenting with these tools in our own work, we can discover what it means to responsibly and irresponsibly utilize Generative AI in our classrooms, which will in turn help us articulate these same responsible and irresponsible uses to our students. Additionally, direct use of these tools can help us more candidly contend with the educational, data and copyright infringement, and environmental concerns posed by an overreliance on these tools. It is imperative that we instructors, rather than serve as AI police, help our students develop a critical literacy about Generative AI tools and their place in the technical communication classroom while also developing our own critical literacy about these same tools.