Exploring, Incorporating, and Questioning Generative Artificial Intelligence in English Teacher Education
Citation
Nash, Brady L; Garcia, Merideth; Young, Carl A; Turner, Kristen Hawley; Rice, Mary; Piotrowski, Amy; O'Byrne, W. Ian; McBride, Cherise; McGrail, Ewa; Moran, Clarice. (2025) Exploring, incorporating, and questioning generative artificial intelligence in English teacher education. English Education, 57(2), 158–165.
Abstract
In this ELATE position statement, issued on November 21, 2024, the authors contextualize GenAI as an issue of literacy, offering specific considerations for incorporating, addressing, and exploring this technology in ELA teacher education. More broadly, the authors encourage us to question how teacher education can navigate these increasingly complex technologies and the attendant literacies while responding to the political implications of both.
Notes
This came out of two years of work with the D-LITE AI working group — 14 members of the NCTE Commission on Digital Literacies and Teacher Education, all of us trying to think carefully about what it means to bring generative AI into ELA teacher preparation. Position statements are a particular kind of document. They're not research reports. They're not op-eds. They sit somewhere between scholarly argument and professional guidance, and getting the tone right across 10 co-authors with genuinely different perspectives took real work.
The framing we kept coming back to is that GenAI is a literacy technology. That's not a small claim. It means the questions we should be asking aren't primarily technical — they're the same questions ELA educators have always asked about any reading and writing tool: Who benefits? Who's left out? What does it mean to be a skilled, critical user? What power structures does this technology reinforce or disrupt?
The ten recommendations we offer aren't a checklist. They're meant as starting points for ongoing conversation, and we were careful to say so. The landscape is shifting fast enough that any specific guidance risks being outdated before the ink dries. What doesn't change is the obligation to stay curious, stay critical, and keep students at the center.