11 Guidance for Developing a GenAI/LLM Policy in Your PWR, PWAC, or TPC course 

Guidance for Developing a GenAI/LLM Policy in Your PWR, PWAC, or TPC Course

Rev. Summer 2026

Given the dynamic presence and availability of a wide range of GenAI/LLM interfaces in everyday life, it is essential to talk with your students about GenAI/LLMs as part of your writing pedagogy. We use the term GenAI/LLM to refer to the use of AI to generate text, visuals, or other content.

In your courses, students need space to think with you and with their peers critically and ethically as well as to be supported in making decisions that best support their learning and skill development in the writing class. They also benefit from clear communication about your classroom context and approaches. You will therefore need to engage with the salient pedagogical and ethical issues associated with GenAI/LLMs to design (or co-design with students) an AI policy and practice aligned with your philosophies, course goals, writing studies’ disciplinary knowledge, and students’ needs.

Below we offer

  • a suggested Writing Programs GenAI/LLM Policy as a starting point—we encourage you to adapt this to best fit your pedagogy or co-develop a policy with your students
  • various campus and other resources as a starting point for thinking about GenAI and/or talking about it with your students

Suggested GenAI/LLM Policy for your Syllabus

Generative AI and Large Language Model tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and more are ubiquitous and constantly changing. Their presence raises numerous ethical issues, including inaccuracies in adjudicating knowledge, environmental harms, social and language biases, and negative impacts on learning. These are not incidental concerns to this class.

This course focuses on the how and why of writing and learning about your own learning. Given this focus, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), the Program for Writing Across Campus (PWAC), and the Program in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) strongly discourage the indiscriminate and undisclosed use of GenAI/LLMs in Composition and Writing courses. There is already evidence of negative impacts on learning and students’ sense of authorship when they offload parts of their writing process to GenAI/LLMs. Our goal is for you to further develop these capacities, not short-cut them.

We will ask you to put your critical literacy skills to work in your interactions with GenAI/LLMs (just as we would with any purported source) to better understand their uses, risks, and consequences. Consequently, your GenAI/LLM use should be appropriately recognized in reflections or supplements to any activity or assignment.

It is never OK to prompt GenAI/LLMs to generate large chunks of text and pass it off as your own. This may constitute plagiarism and a violation of the UW student code of academic conduct. It can result in being asked to re-do an assignment or not receiving credit for that assignment.

Instructor Policies for Use of GenAI/LLM Tools

  • You need to have an AI policy in your syllabus and you need to talk with your students about that policy.
  • Instructors in PWR, PWAC, and TPC are not permitted to use GenAI/LLM tools for any aspect of the grading and/or assessment process. At no point should you outsource your professional expertise and writing knowledge to these tools in giving feedback, responding to or engaging student texts, or assessing their work.
  • When facing questions about students’ AI use, please do not use any kind of “AI-checking” tool. Not only are these checkers inconsistent and inaccurate given the many ways that GenAI/LLM tools are constantly changing, they can do damage to your professional credibility and relationship-building with students, especially if students deny using AI. We think it is more productive to create space for honest and open conversation about GenAI use and what you and your students can learn from those encounters.
  • Allow students to refuse AI. While we advocate for openly talking about AI tools and critical AI literacy as a regular part of writing instruction, instructors should not require students to sign up for or use GenAI/LLM tools as part of an assignment or class activity. If doing such activities with your class, be sure to have a meaningful way for students to complete the activity without using or signing up for a GenAI/LLM tool.

AI Activities

Reflecting on Quotes about AI (Jonathan)

  1. Rationale: This quick, first-day-of-class activity makes more transparent how I am approaching the idea of AI in the classroom. It also leads into conversations around what skills and habits of mind we are consciously trying to develop in the class. (Some also chuckle a little with the Steely Dan quote.)
  2. Background: On the first day of class, I go through the syllabus. When we get to the AI policy, I have three sections:
    1. Quotes that presently inform my thoughts about AI usage
    2. Background
    3. Policies
  3. The quotes section is where I get students talking. These are the quotes I currently use:
    1. “Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess, and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.” – Iris Murdoch
    2. “There are people who benefit greatly from convincing you…that you can’t make decisions on your own, and I think maybe we owe it to ourselves to at the very least say, “Wait, you know what? I can do this on my own.” – Hanif Abdurraqib
    3. “Attention is just another name for the contact the mind makes with the world. If it is sufficiently attenuated [reduced], our capacity and inclination to care, desire, love, and act also suffer.” – L.M. Sacasas
    4. “Times are hard.” – Steely Dan
  4. After we read through them, I ask students to turn to the person next to them and reflect on which quote stands out to them and why.
  5. After a minute or two of discussion, I ask students to share out to the large class. I might let the silence linger for 20 seconds if no one talks, and then call on one group.
  6. After hearing students reflecting on these quotes, we move on to discussing further Background and Policies.

Unacceptable < —- > Acceptable Uses of AI

In this activity, students are presented with a page (projected on the screen/whiteboard or distributed as a handout) showing a spectrum from Unacceptable to Acceptable as well as a number of things people can do with AI during the writing process. Put students into groups and ask them to place each of those items along the Unacceptable-Acceptable spectrum and to talk through where there is disagreement.

One version of this activity is at this link. This exercise was shared as part of the CCCC Virtual Institute on AI and Writing in 2024 and some of the boxes might merit some updating. It is best if the activity is customized to particular assignments and/or stages of the writing process (rather than treated as general guidelines or principles to follow, and may be a way to explore with students different perspectives and understandings around situational contexts/occasions around AI.

Supplements/Reflections for Assignments

Writer’s Memo

You can use a Writers Memo prompt at any stage of an assignment, but it may perhaps most useful as a culminating step just prior to submission or as an in-class activity the day an assignment is due. As part of your prompt, you might ask students to reflect on how they chose to use/not use GenAI. Here is the language Jonathan uses:

If applicable, how did you engage with GenAI/LLM during your brainstorming/idea generation process (for example, prompting an LLM to help you identify weak points in your essay or counterarguments to your main idea)? This is not a question meant to “trick” you, and you will not be penalized for its use in the brainstorming/idea generation process, if you chose to engage with it.

Multimodal Remix Assignment

On the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, Jainab Tabassum Banu shares a “Multimodal Remix Project” that resonates with the approach many PWR instructors take to genre translation, and may be useful to adapt in a variety of writing courses.

Additional Resources for Building Your Capacities for Talking about AI with Your Students

License

2025-26 PWR Instructor Sourcebook Copyright © by kersch. All Rights Reserved.

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