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Artificial Intelligence Across the Writing Curriculum

AI Across the Writing Curriculum

CSU AI Educational Innovations Challenge Grant

Sacramento State | 2025–2026

Overview

AI Across the Writing Curriculum: Collaborative Interventions for Student Success is a CSU AI Educational Innovations Challenge grant project at Sacramento State. This cross-disciplinary initiative explores how generative AI can be thoughtfully integrated into writing instruction to foster ethical use, critical thinking, and student agency.

Project Goals

  • Support students in developing AI literacy—including ethical use, rhetorical awareness, and critical evaluation of AI-generated content
  • Assist faculty in designing AI-integrated writing instruction
  • Prepare tutors to support students in using genAI
  • Create scalable, research-informed interventions that can be adapted across the CSU system

Project Components

  1. AI Literacy Tutorial

Designed by library faculty, this interactive tutorial introduces students to the affordances and limitations of generative AI. It emphasizes ethical prompting, bias awareness, and critical reading of AI-generated content.

  1. Al Gorithm: A Custom AI Writing Tutor Bot

Developed locally, Al Gorithm helps student writers through reflective, question-driven feedback. Rather than generating text, the bot encourages students to clarify goals, revise critically, and think metacognitively about their writing.

Implementation Sites

This project is being piloted in three interconnected instructional settings at Sacramento State:

  • The University Reading and Writing Center
    Peer tutors introduce and support the AI tools during tutoring sessions and embedded classroom visits.
  • First-Year Writing Courses
    Students engage with the AI literacy tutorial and Al Gorithm to develop foundational skills in writing, revision, and metacognition.
  • Writing-Intensive Disciplinary Courses
    Faculty across the curriculum pilot AI-integrated assignments designed to support reflective, ethical use of generative AI in field-specific writing.

Faculty Learning Community (FLC)

A year-long Faculty Learning Community supports writing intensive instructors as they explore, design, implement, and reflect on AI-integrated assignments in their courses.

FLC activities include:

  • Tool orientation and pedagogical framing
  • Assignment design and peer feedback
  • Classroom implementation
  • Reflection and a culminating campus showcase in Spring 2026

Tutor Training

Peer tutors are being trained to support both AI interventions in the writing classroom and the University Reading and Writing Center. Tutors guide students in:

  • One-on-one tutoring sessions
  • Embedded instruction and in-class support
  • Peer learning around prompting, revision, and ethical use

Tutor training emphasizes AI literacy, rhetorical questioning, and student agency, ensuring AI enhances, rather than replaces, the writing process.

Research Questions

This project investigates:

  • How does an interactive AI literacy tutorial improve students’ ability to evaluate and engage critically with AI in academic writing?
  • How does a locally designed writing tutor bot support rhetorical awareness and deeper engagement with AI-generated content?
  • How does a structured tutor-faculty training model influence faculty and peer tutors’ ability to teach with AI tools ethically and effectively across diverse writing contexts?

Impact

This project will directly support:

  • 300–400 students in the University Reading & Writing Center, first year writing course, and writing-intensive courses
  • Peer tutors in the University Reading and Writing Center
  • Faculty from across campus

Scalability and Sharing

All interventions, instructional guides, and training materials are being developed with scalability in mind. Upon completion, all project resources will be made publicly available to other CSU campuses.

Project Team

Angela Clark-Oates, PhD, Department of English – Project Director

Angela Laflen, PhD, Department of English – Tutor Bot Designer

Carolyn Pickrel, Department of English – AI Tutor Coordinator

Emily Merrifield, University Library – Tutorial Co-Designer

Samantha McClellan, University Library– Tutorial Co-Designer

For questions about adaptation or collaboration, contact:
clark-oates@csus.edu