Like many schools and places of learning, IWT is a community with a wide range of opinions and feelings about generative AI. As a community that cares deeply about teachers and believes in writing as a mode of collaboration and connection, we are responding in a variety of ways.
While the discourse around AI seems to be hardening into polarized camps, we hope to make room for nuanced conversation. We hold space for believing and doubting, in the spirit of one of our foundational writing practices. Here are some of the ways we are grappling with AI.
On pen and paper and AI-free spaces:
Founded in 1982, IWT is grounded in the process movement in writing studies (and Peter Elbow’s practices in particular), which challenged traditional approaches to teaching academic writing—especially its focus on correctness, its attention to static forms like the five-paragraph essay, and its assumptions about teacher expertise. The process movement instead emphasized writing as a process of discovery through which students can develop agency and voice.
Early proponents of the process movement could not have had AI chatbots in mind. But it’s hard to imagine a more apt framework for writing in a moment when chatbots that can churn out grammatically correct, syntactically tight writing in seconds. Focusing on the writing process shifts attention to curiosity, personal connection, and the communal experience of making meaning.
Generative AI is upending the day-to-day realities of teaching. For IWT, this points us back to our roots and core values. We believe writing can cultivate classroom communities where shared writing makes possible new readings and meanings; where writing by hand can slow down thinking and provide a mode of focus; where profound insights can emerge haltingly and recursively. By sharing our writing in all its stages of production, we create space for the struggle and joy of writing.
For all these reasons, we believe it is crucial to preserve AI-free classroom spaces, where students can engage in “productive struggle”—a term from math education research that has radiated into other fields—and experience writing as a rich, cognitively demanding task and a site where learning unfolds.
For IWT, this is what we’ve been not-so-quietly doing all along by centering pen-and-paper writing practices. For over 40 years, through the advent of word processors, Internet search engines, and laptops in classrooms, we’ve been stubbornly committed to exploring what happens when we write together—by hand whenever possible, experiencing writing as an embodied practice, and sharing our writing in all its imperfection. All of our workshops model this commitment to communal, informal, exploratory writing.
On experimenting with AI:
Teachers often ask how IWT is responding to Generative AI. It raises fundamental questions about why we write and why students should learn to write. Given IWT’s philosophy and pedagogy, it comes naturally to us to “believe” in low-tech, AI-free spaces where student voices are centered.
What might we be willing to believe about the value of AI for thinking and learning?
We see this moment as an invitation to clarify purpose, not just defend practice. We are collectively confronting, with new immediacy, the central question in education: what is learning, and how do we know when it has happened?
Teachers and administrators are wrestling with these questions, sometimes settling into camps across fault lines. At IWT, we aim to provide a space for teachers to reflect on these questions alongside colleagues, guided by these considerations:
First, we know we can’t avoid responding to AI. As long as schools and colleges function on an incentive system of grades and credentials, AI tools are irresistibly low-hanging fruit. Students are using AI. Teachers are overconfident in their ability to detect it. Well-documented tools and strategies for “laundering” AI-generated writing abound.
But we also believe that cheating is the wrong starting point for how we respond to AI. Our priority is to protect thinking and learning, not our assessments. Policing AI use creates cultures of suspicion that many teachers deeply lament. If there is a culture of judgment, shame, or silence around AI, students will likely still use it—and hide it.
Instead of focusing on circumventing AI, our Writing with AI workshops consider AI in a spirit of curiosity and experimentation. As in all our workshops, we invite faculty to adopt the posture of students as they write both with pen and paper and in conversation with AI tools. We experiment with AI as a reader, challenger, and collaborator. We also consider how literacies may evolve, grapple with what may be lost, and reflect on our own experience of writing and thinking alongside AI tools—in hopes that this helps us listen with openness to student testimonies about how AI is impeding or helping their learning. We also consider the profound dilemmas of assessment in the age of AI.
Our AI workshops don’t have a product to sell or an agenda to promote—except to safeguard writing as a space for joy and learning. We believe that writing in community can help us sit with uncertainty, hope, and skepticism about AI, and that we can experiment with new tools and classroom practices in a thoughtful community of practice. We’ll keep returning to the questions that writing raises, and we invite others to join us in this work.
Drafted in November 2025