Introduction

Dr. David M. Grant

This collection is a digital project of dedicated teacher-scholars who met in the summer of 2025 as part of the University of Northern Iowa’s graduate program in Teaching English in the Secondary Schools (TESS). Using the theoretical lens of multiliteracies, developed by the New London Group in the 1990s, students examined the impacts of several electronic and digital technologies on their students and their teaching, especially Artificial Intelligence, or A.I. Through fiction, nonfiction, and discussion, students considered the changes, the challenges, and the opportunities these technologies held. Most importantly, they investigated what these developments meant for their teaching, their districts, and their students at a time of great change.

        Multiliteracies understands two major aspects of literacy learning: technology and culture. Stereotypes to the contrary, Iowa is a diverse state with both established cultural communities and many recent immigrants hoping for a better life. While wanting to preserve their heritage, these community members are also eager to learn how to fit into American culture and Iowa’s place within that. The teachers represented here are in contact with young people from these and other communities and nurture and support them in their encounter with both print and digital texts and tools. Multiliteracies helps all students see how technologies reflect  and affect community values, assumptions, and goals. Multiliteracies also presents honest messages about literacy to students by focusing on visual, textual, audial, and spatial modes in real world situations. A fancy way of saying this is that using a pedagogy of situated learning, critical framing, overt instruction, and transformed practice, multiliteracies engages students with their own worlds which we know is increasingly electronic in its medium and global in its scope. Overall, this approach focuses on learning about information itself, not just deciphering meaning. As such, multiliteracies remains a potent means to make English Language Arts (ELA) subject matter relevant and useful for young people.

As ELA practitioners, the authors collected here are best positioned to offer insights to other teachers both in the state of Iowa and elsewhere. They know who is making a home in their communities, who is struggling, and how everyone can enrich both the school and the state through expression, critical analysis, and camaraderie. Because the writers here bring several decades of combined experience, each section is grounded in a sense of audience, not guided by any specific overview or theoretical construct. The authors write from a sense of praxis, or reflective practice as they move through UNI’s unique program for supporting, mentoring, and teaching secondary educators. This webtext, then, is intended for secondary teachers foremost, both in and outside of Iowa. These are not cookie-cutter teaching recipes, but reflective engagement with the tough questions about how literacy and ELA educators might respond to a profound technological development – the ease and widespread use of generative A.I. trained upon Large Language Models (LLMs). If a student can submit a teacher’s question about themes in Shakespeare and receive an answer in a few seconds without having themselves read Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet, how can ELA teachers ensure that the student is meeting the learning objectives, not the A.I.? There is no definitive answer here, but many different responses depending on instructor, lesson goals, and district support.

Because teachers do not teach in a vacuum, this collection is also intended for school administrators, parents, and students earning their degree in secondary language arts. Given the wide array of A.I. tools from Google Search terms to their inclusion in many electronic Learning Management Systems (LMS), their ubiquity seems inescapable. It is almost impossible for a single teacher to create an A.I.-free zone amidst the plethora of available devices. While many school districts and buildings are opting to create phone-free schools during instructional time, some still work within the legacy of 1:1 computing and Chromebooks. Even further, simply banning digital tools deprives students of critically thinking about what they see and hear in an age when so much is computer generated, yet passed along as real. There needs to be some balance between allowing secondary students the freedom to explore their world electronically and critical guidance on misinformation, conspiracy theories, untruths, and the very real dangers posed by online actors. That balance may not be the same for all, but it is a facet of modern education and life.

These issues and more come up in the following sections. We hear voices advocating for humanity among machines, the work of going beyond A.I. detection tools, how A.I. is affecting student ability to read critically, the value of writing by hand, and how decades of research from composition studies can help teachers focus on the learning A.I. cannot do within the writing process. We also hear about social-emotional learning (SEL) and health issues in the face of excessive attachment to screens. We hear about teaching research strategies in an age when Google prioritizes its own A.I. responses. And we hear about the community effects of A.I. tools and the drastic effect they have on our environment. We are reminded that A.I. is not just affecting what happens in the ELA classroom, but everything. Yet as these teachers will tell you, the ELA classroom is a special place that is not easily separated from community. What happens in the world is what ELA students bring to their creative expressions, their reading strategies, and their passionate arguments for the world they are about to venture ever further into.

Coda

What you will find here is not meant to be read in any particular order. It does not follow a linear sequence, but covers various topics of interest and of design by the ELA teachers in the class. It also offers many different writing styles rather than just a thesis-driven argumentative form. Some sections overlap or share similar concerns and the reader is invited to work through these as they see meaningful to them. We looked at similar texts as models for this work, such as Bad Ideas About Writing and Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies. These helpful guides informed the design of this collection and how we hope it might be of use to ELA teachers. As the professor, I did not design this class to contain any sort of golden rule or transcendent answer, but to be like ELA classrooms across the state and nation: a place to share perspectives and collaboratively inquire about our world. I often described the course as "Where are we all doing about A.I.?” not “Here’s what to do.” I hope that spirit carries through to you, the reader.