Human-in-the-Loop Pedagogy: Reframing Technical Communication Education in the Age of AI

Generative AI is becoming part of technical communication workflows, but programs still need a grounded way to teach students how to use it while preserving rhetorical judgment, editorial responsibility, and audience awareness. This article proposes a human-in-the-loop pedagogy that treats AI as a system whose outputs must be defined, guided, evaluated, and constrained by human writers. It offers a heuristic for integrating AI into writing instruction while reinforcing the field’s core competencies.