Artificial Intelligence in English Education: Challenges and Opportunities for Teachers and Teacher Educators

ELATE Commission on Digital Literacies and Teacher Education

Heralded by claims ranging from the "death" of high school English (Herman, 2022) to the inevitable integration of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our lives as a "coauthor" of nearly all text, ChatGPT entered the popular discourse in November 2022 when it both excited and terrified educators, journalists, and students who began sharing its output in tweets, media reports, and, of course, school assignments.

In the intervening months, the hype around AI has only increased, though many scholars are providing critical lenses through which we ask technoskeptical questions of such tools (Krutka & Heath, 2023; Selwyn, 2022), especially related to the teaching of writing. Still, we recognize that the day-to-day reality for many English teachers now means that AI has begun to permeate their classrooms, department meetings, and school board policy decisions, as if they didn't have enough to worry about.

While beyond the scope of what we can summarize here, the technologies that undergird AI are worthy of critique. Large Language Models (LLMs) are built around language scraped from existing human writing and communication online and thus draw from dominant language patterns. This writing includes the racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination manifested in the data from which it is pulled. Also, the output of these models is likely to include inaccurate or outright false information or "hallucitations," as the term has been coined by author and AI researcher Kate Crawford (2023).

In short, we as English educators have deep concerns about the rapid expansion of AI, especially without guidelines for the ethical use of these tools.

And yet, AI is here.

In thinking about the ways that AI can inform English language arts (ELA) curriculum, instruction, and assessment, we turn to the 2018 policy statement crafted by the ELATE Commission on Digital Literacies and Teacher Education (D-LITE) to provide a few additional insights meant to inform the work of both K-12 English teachers and English teacher educators. While focusing mostly on ChatGPT and similar writing-focused tools, we remain cognizant that generative AI extends beyond written text and that these technologies will continue to change.

Literacy Means Literacies

ELA educators have an established history of integrating new literacy practices as they emerge, including the multiple...