What the AI Literacies extension addresses
Generative AI has changed what it means to ask students to write. Faculty in every discipline are rethinking assignment design, academic integrity policies, and what "authorship" requires in their fields. The WOLF AI Literacies extension gives you time and structure to work through those questions. It offers frameworks, discussion prompts, and design tools grounded in communication pedagogy, and leaves the answers to you.
The extension rests on one idea. AI literacy is three different acts: describing a system, analyzing what is built into it, and deciding what to do. Most AI literacy programs teach the first and skip to the third. The extension works all three, and the framework page sets them out, runs them on one decision, and gives you a tool for running them on yours.
The extension takes no single position on students' use of AI. It serves faculty who want to name what they value in student writing and speaking. You then build assignments that state those values plainly, whether your course permits AI tools, restricts them, or sets a middle course. On one instrument the program does take a position: CWSP does not use AI-writing detectors, and the reasons are on the record.
Who this is for
The AI Literacies extension suits faculty who are:
- revising course policies in response to generative AI tools
- redesigning assignments so they assess disciplinary communication, which AI output does not supply
- trying to explain to students (and themselves) what writing and speaking are for in their courses
- interested in teaching AI literacies as a transferable skill within their discipline
You take it as a standalone engagement or as an extension of an ongoing WOLF partnership.
How it works
The extension centers on a faculty workbook in three clusters. The first works all three levels on your discipline: what AI means for how your field makes, communicates, and assesses knowledge, and where refusal is warranted. The second reads your course or program policy, or its absence, at the three levels and drafts revised language. The third maps where AI literacy appears across a program, in which courses and at which level, and what the gaps show. Work through all three in sequence, or start with the cluster closest to your current teaching.
CWSP facilitates the extension on the WOLF model: sustained conversation, design work in rounds, and a written record of each decision and its rationale.
Working independently?
The AI Literacies workbook works best with a liaison, and you are welcome to complete it on your own. Write to us when you want to connect that work to a full WOLF engagement.
Relationship to WOLF
The AI Literacies extension rests on the same foundations as WOLF. It asks what communication is for, whom it serves, and what taking part in a discipline requires. It treats AI as a condition of writing instruction. That condition calls for more explicit and deliberate teaching, which WOLF has argued for from the start.
The extension is designed to run alongside a WOLF engagement, during the Inquiry and Design phases. The questions AI raises about authorship and assessment bring unstated assumptions about communication into view.
The scholarship behind the extension is on the Research and Presentations page. Questions about the AI Literacies extension? Contact Kirsti Cole at CWSP.