What the AI Policy Lab does
Most faculty arrive at AI policy decisions alone — working from a draft syllabus statement, a department memo, or institutional guidance that was written under pressure and may not reflect what anyone actually believes. The AI Policy Lab creates a structured space to do that work differently: with an analytic method, a comparative corpus, and other faculty from across the university.
The workshop uses a corpus of 80 AI governance documents from 24 institutions — produced between 2023 and 2026 — as primary texts. Participants read those documents not to find models to copy but to understand the governance problems they reveal: what institutions said when they did not yet know what to say, and what those moments expose about institutional values, authority, and the limits of policy.
By the end of the workshop, participants leave with a policy draft — at whatever level is most urgent for them — grounded in their own disciplinary commitments and written to survive the next product cycle.
The analytical framework
The workshop is built on two tools. The first is a four-step analytical procedure: identify the document's genre, locate the glitch (the moment when the document strains against itself), read what the glitch reveals about institutional values, and name the abstraction — the general claim about AI governance or authorship that the document makes legible. The second is a three-level literacy framework (Cole 2026) that asks, of any policy document, what it demands from readers at the levels of conceptual recognition, structural understanding, and operative judgment.
Together, these tools turn policy reading into a teachable skill — one participants can bring back to their departments and apply to new documents as they continue to emerge.
Workshop length
3 hours
Can be split into two 90-minute sessions. Facilitated by CWSP liaisons.
Who it is for
Individual faculty, departments, curriculum committees
Works best with 6–18 participants from the same disciplinary context.
What you leave with
A policy draft and analytical skills
Course-, program-, or department-level language grounded in your own disciplinary reasoning.
Workshop structure
The workshop runs in four modules. Module 1 introduces the policy corpus and establishes why AI governance documents are worth reading carefully — not for their prescriptions but for what they reveal under pressure. Module 2 applies the four-step analytical procedure to selected corpus entries, including a detailed examination of NC State's own governance record. Module 3 is a facilitated policy design activity: participants draft or revise policy language at the level most relevant to their situation, using adaptable templates calibrated to the four principles of functional AI policy. Module 4 closes with a process for institutionalizing review — so the policy participants leave with is not just a product but a practice.
Workshop materials
All three documents below are designed to work together. The slide deck supports facilitation; the facilitation guide is for workshop leaders; the policy repository workbook is the participant document used during and after the workshop.
Relationship to AI Literacies and WOLF
The AI Policy Lab is a standalone workshop, but it is designed to fit within the broader WOLF ecosystem. Faculty who have worked through the AI Literacies extension bring a developed vocabulary for what AI tools do to writing instruction — the Policy Lab puts that vocabulary to work at the institutional level. Faculty who have not yet engaged with AI Literacies will find the Policy Lab a useful entry point, particularly if their immediate concern is policy language rather than assignment design.
The analytical procedure at the center of the Policy Lab — read for the genre, locate the glitch, read the reveal, name the abstraction — is also the core literacy practice of the AI Literacies extension. Faculty who complete both workshops will find that the skills transfer in both directions.
To request an AI Policy Lab workshop for your department or curriculum committee, contact Kirsti Cole at CWSP.