One of my core beliefs about working in this world where generative AI has the potential to intrude on teaching and learning is that we need maximum collaboration among the stakeholders in that work. In the concluding chapters of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, I discuss a general process of coming together as a community, surfacing values and goals, and developing a framework that allows for those things to be pursued by individuals working within a system.
But I don’t have any specific experience as part of an institution doing that, so I’m incredibly grateful to today’s guest authors, Crystal Fodrey and Kristi Girdharry, who do have this experience and can share that experience with others who are facing this challenge. —JW
It started, like many academic stories do these days, with an inbox full of emails about generative AI. Some were excited (“You have to try this!”), some worried (“How do we stop this?”) and some baffled (“What even is this?”). If you work in writing instruction, you probably got some version of them, too.
What we didn’t see coming was how quickly these conversations would shift from AI itself to something harder: how to bring people with wildly different comfort levels, teaching styles and institutional priorities into the same room—literal and metaphorical—and still walk out with shared guidance.
Writing Across the Curriculum folks have been in this business for decades. Even if your institution doesn’t have a formal WAC program, you might have WAC faculty around you working as directors of writing centers or as colleagues eager to talk about your assignments during Senate meetings. Our job is to bridge academic worlds: chemistry to art history, first-year seminars to senior capstones. Pamela Flash, founding director of WAC at the University of Minnesota, once called the WAC leader a “curious and facilitative interlocutor,” which is an academic way of saying we’re the ones who ask hard questions, listen with genuine curiosity and help colleagues connect—often, but not only, over the role writing plays in student learning across the curriculum.
(If you just realized you are that colleague, welcome. You’re in good company.)
So when generative AI swept onto the scene, the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum wanted to issue a position. In January 2023, we released one of the first higher ed statements on writing and AI. In August 2025, we published the updated AWAC Statement on AI and Writing Across the Curriculum: a far more robust document that represents the complicated nature of this moment from one organization’s perspective.
But what we think is just as important as the statement itself is how we got there.
Who We Are and Why We Stepped Up
Compared to disciplinary giants like the Modern Language Association or the Conference on College Composition and Communication, AWAC is the new kid on the block—founded in 2018—but WAC itself is no fad. Since the late 1960s, it’s been one of higher ed’s most enduring reform movements, adapting to new pedagogical trends while staying grounded in one idea: Students learn better when writing is part of how they engage with a subject.
Our mission is to help faculty across disciplines integrate writing into teaching in intentional, context-specific ways. That means we already spend a lot of time on the things AI now forces everyone to consider: what we value in student work, how we design assignments, how we assess those assignments and how to adapt to new tools without losing sight of the learning we care about most.
Our original statement, published just two months after the public release of ChatGPT, underscored WAC’s belief that writing is a mode of learning central to student engagement and cannot be replaced by AI text generators. It encouraged critical engagement with these tools while reaffirming best practices like designing meaningful assignments, emphasizing process and connecting writing to disciplinary practices. The statement was timely but also critiqued as too abstract.
That critique hit home in summer 2024, when AWAC ran an “Issues and Energies” survey of WAC leaders worldwide. One of us, Kristi, was then a member at large on the AWAC executive committee; the other, Crystal, had just been elected incoming chair. We suspected AI would be an issue, but we didn’t anticipate just how wide-ranging the concerns would be.
In what follows, we explain the steps we took to create an expanded statement with input from more than 50 collaborators. Rather than acting as an exact map to follow, the guide might empower institutions to develop their own community-driven statement-making processes. While our group began with shared disciplinary ground that made some parts of the work easier, in more heterogeneous settings the work may be slower and more complex. That very process, though, can surface a richer range of perspectives and help participants develop shared understandings of values, making the resulting product more meaningful and relevant.
- Listening
The “Issues and Energies” survey made the scope clear. Academic integrity, pedagogy and institutional policy topped the list of AI concerns, alongside thornier issues—AI literacy, ideological tension, surveillance, environmental impact—that cut across disciplines and politics.
Lesson one: Don’t guess what your community needs. Asking, “What matters most to your community members right now?” is the best place to begin. Then step back and listen. Let what you hear set the agenda.
- Inclusive Leadership
By fall 2024, we were steering what became the “AI 2.0” project. With the survey data in hand, we called Doug Hesse, a senior colleague and former AWAC chair. He confirmed our instinct to keep the process open and transparent, but added a reminder every academic project needs: “Keep it moving.”
We issued broad calls for participation, sorted respondents into working groups based on interest in particular issues that arose in the survey and appointed two co-facilitators for each, representing diverse WAC experience, institutional types and regions. Inclusivity was nonnegotiable—but without boundaries, inclusivity becomes chaos. Some groups gelled immediately; others shifted focus or dropped out entirely.
Lesson two: Be inclusive, but ensure clear leadership and flexibility.
- Working Groups
By late fall, the groups were deep in the messy business of collaborative writing. If you’ve ever co-written a policy statement, multiply that by several strangers across multiple time zones and you get the picture.
Our job, as facilitators, was to check in, keep the timeline visible and resist the urge to micromanage. The reward was a set of rich, research-informed drafts. Not every sentence survived to the final version, but every contributor left fingerprints on the statement.
Lesson three: Provide structure, then trust colleagues to do the work.
- Drafting and Synthesis
By spring 2025, we had multiple documents of varying lengths developed around key concerns at the intersection of AI and writing. We needed one cohesive document. We used ChatGPT-4 as a sorting tool to spot overlaps, gaps and redundancies and to assist with reorganization, but we edited by hand, line by line, to preserve nuance and language from the original documents. Until the document was finalized for publication, each sentence was attributed to one or more of the working groups or marked as “new” for transparency.
During this part of the process we also made a structural choice: organize the statement by stakeholders—educators, students, administrators—so anyone could find what mattered to them.
Negotiation was constant, as we balanced fidelity to contributors’ drafts with overall clarity.
Lesson four: Use the tools available—even AI—but make sure the human voice leads.
- Community Testing
Our field’s major conference—the International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference—was our turning point. About 50 people joined our half-day workshop in July 2025 to work on the statement. Caitlin Martin of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University made a comment that stuck: “You need to speak to students, not just about them.” That reshaped the statement, prompting us to address each stakeholder directly.
Hundreds of comments poured into a shared Google Doc. We worked through them all, making changes where they strengthened the piece and explaining when they didn’t.
Lesson five: Share the work widely; dialogue will make it stronger.
- Publication
On Aug. 25, 2025, AWAC released the expanded AI Statement: guiding principles, audience-specific guidance and appendices with activities, policy templates and a glossary.
We see it as more than a statement. It’s a dynamic tool kit that complements values-driven statements from other organizations, like the MLA/CCCC joint statement, by offering adaptable strategies and resources faculty can use immediately. We imagine it will continue to be altered officially in the future by AWAC members but also soon as colleagues use it for their own purposes.
Lesson six: Treat publication as the middle of the story, not the end.
Takeaways for Writing High-Stakes Statements
- Listen first. Start by asking what matters most to your community.
- Balance the table. Ensure diverse perspectives, but keep the group small enough to act.
- Iterate with care. Use tools—even AI—but let the human voice lead.
- Test in public. Dialogue with your community strengthens the final product.
- Make it usable. A statement should function as a resource, not just a position.
These lessons aren’t new, but they’re worth repeating—especially now, when AI is testing our capacity to adapt without losing what matters most. For AWAC members, that is our shared understanding of “writing as a human-centered activity grounded in rhetorical judgment and critical thinking,” an idea at the heart of our extended statement.
Consensus-building, like teaching writing, is a process, not a product. With patience, curiosity and a willingness to revise, we can create guidance that speaks for us and evolves with the communities we serve.
