Cognition, creativity and rhetorical intelligence in the age of generative AI: a framework for teaching writing and critical AI literacy

Purpose This study aims to respond to the rapid transformation of writing instruction amidst the relentless spread of generative AI tools into our and our students’ everyday lives. The study is aimed at writing teachers of secondary education through college. It offers them a conceptual framework for responsibly integrating AI into their teaching and for simultaneously cultivating a critical AI literacy in their students. Such a critical literacy is designed to enable students to better understand how large language models work, how to use them effectively and selectively and how to critically evaluate the implications of their uses. Design/methodology/approach The study takes the form of a theoretical/conceptual essay, one intentionally broad in scope, written for teachers invested in writing pedagogies across a wide spectrum of educational levels and disciplinary formations. The essay draws primarily on scholarship by experts in composition studies to provide a summative overview of abstract foundational skills integral to process-based writing instruction and the threat AI poses to the continued cultivation of such skills, a conceptual framework for revising pedagogy accordingly and facilitating a critical AI literacy and an extended example of that framework’s potential application within a concrete, specific educational context. Findings The conceptual framework that is constructed here is illustrated through an infographic, one that teachers can use in developing their own critical approaches to writing instruction in the context of generative AI. The framework’s potential is modeled through a discussion of its application within a sample setting – specifically that of writing instruction at the author’s own educational institution. Such a discussion demonstrates that any application of this framework will need to attend to the social, cultural and ideological conditions of each writing teacher’s institutional context, including its particular policies and established procedures and hierarchies. Originality/value The framework proposed is new, particularly in its focus on composition studies’ core transferable skills and their integral relation to process-based writing pedagogies in the context of generative AI.