For me, being critical goes beyond critique and scepticism: it includes subscribing to critical theory and critical pedagogy – developing awareness of social justice issues and cultivating in learners a disposition to redress them.
How do we support student writers with developing critical AI literacy?
As learning does not happen in one instance, one course, or one program, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) supports learners across their educational journeys in building writing processes and skills. Similarly, we encourage supporting students to develop critical AI literacy throughout to help transfer and affirm their past experiences with AI, understand the implications of AI with our HSI and land-grant missions, and transfer learning across courses.
What is critical AI literacy?
Critical AI Literacy combines a range of topics that help students interrogate AI at every stage of their work: prompts, outputs, revisions, media, etc. Franzetti & Ou (opens in a new tab) (2026) identify three main areas that help us address critical AI literacy:
- Interaction with GenAI: Effective strategies to interact with GenAI with an emphasis on writer agency and critical evaluation of GenAI results
- GenAI ethics in Academic Writing: Awareness and critical reflection on major ethical issues of GenAI in academic and societal contexts, which vary across disciplines
- Technical value and limitations of GenAI: Knowledge of how GenAI works and the ability to critically evaluate GenAI functions and usefulness in writing and problem-solve for situations due to GenAI limitations.
At the University of Arizona, we value critical AI literacy as a commitment to the learning process and to empowering students to make choices that are informed, human-reasoned, and aligned with their goals and purposes. In order to engage in these processes, students must be invited to think critically about AI and what it means for themselves and the communities they are in.
How do we help students transfer critical AI literacy skills across courses?
- Ask about past experiences with AI that affirm their funds of knowledge
- Connect to disciplinary values and methods to contextualize literacy
- Tie to their larger home and place communities and the impact AI has on it
- Evaluate different tools, inputs and outputs, and activities related to certain types of courses (e.g. general education, online, different LLM outputs, their writing v. AI)
Discussion Questions with Students
- What does critical thinking around AI look like to you? Why does it matter to you, your discipline, and your community?
- What are examples of AI you've seen where it has been wrong? What were the impacts or consequences of that?
- What skills do you anticipate needing in the workplace around AI literacy? What do those suggest about your disciplines' values?
- Can you describe a time when you decided not to use AI for a task? Why did you make that choice?
Activities
Activity 1
🗂️ Feedback Triage
Goal: Practice evaluating feedback rather than automatically following it and thinking critically about its suggestions.
Students bring a paragraph or short section of a draft and ask an AI tool for feedback related to one or two specific goals.
Instead of asking the tool to “improve this paragraph,” students might ask it to identify places where a reader may need more explanation or where the relationship between two ideas is unclear, without rewriting the passage. They could also connect to specific disciplinary audiences or community contexts.
Students then sort the feedback into three categories:
- Keep: This feedback identifies something I want to revise.
- Question: I need to think about this or ask another reader.
- Reject: This suggestion does not fit my purpose, audience, assignment, or voice.
Students choose one useful suggestion and revise the draft themselves.
Afterward, discuss which feedback was useful, what they rejected, what the tool misunderstood, what bias, stereotypes and/or misinformation is included, and how their own knowledge of the assignment helped them evaluate the feedback.
Activity 2
🌱 Resource Annotation
Goal: Have students annotate their final draft of an assignment or reading for that course that used AI and identify the resources used to create the output or work.
Step 1: Students identify a reading or writing assignment in which they used AI.
Step 2: Students create a video or text annotations within their assignments. They are tasked with thinking through which parts of their assignment or reading used “resources” and what types of resources (e.g. human labor, water, data, tools etc.).
Step 3: Students create an action plan or reflection for their next assignment and the resources they will use to create it. This connects to transfer and future action, which helps continue to build critical AI literacy.
Overall, these steps help identify the many resources used within GenAI but also the labor students are doing to complete assignments and why. It also helps reinforce that individual action is important and supports the resources students bring to the table too, and how that is impacted by AI.
Activity 3
📓 AI Process Log
Goal: Make students' writing decisions visible.
For an assignment in which AI use is permitted, ask students to keep a short record of significant AI interactions where they can discern how they verified information, used the tools transparently, and acknowledged the labor and work.
Students document:
- What did I ask the tool to do?
- Why did I use it at this point in my process?
- What did it give me?
- What did I accept, change, combine, or reject?
- Why?
- How did the interaction affect my thinking or writing?
- Would I use AI in the same way next time?
The log does not need to record every prompt. Instead, it should capture moments when AI influenced a meaningful writing decision. At the end of the assignment, students can use the log for a short reflection on when AI supported their writing and when it did not.
An example (opens in a new tab) from UNIV Instructor and Assessment Coordinator, Laurie Sheldon, illustrates how students can document and reflect on this work, adapting it for different writing scenarios.