Daehyun Won
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
Due to the accelerating adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) across higher education, writing instructors face everyday challenges in developing academic writing skills while integrating GenAI to enhance digital literacy, critical AI literacy, and prompt engineering. Not to undermine students’ authorial agency, authentic voice, and ownership in their production, but to provide them with a deliberate initial contact with an authorial use of new meaning-making technology, the activity suggests a hybrid approach to personal narrative prewriting that promotes creative and critical thinking with GenAI as an assistive yet authorial tool, rather than as an impersonator or replacement of student writing. Through the ordered sequence of initial contact, from 1) inventing a personal narrative title, 2) planning potential content, 3) articulating personal narrative project’s purpose, 4) entering the qualitative data to interact with GenAI for prompt engineering practice, 5) critical diagnosing and analyzing the result, students can (re)discover their lives as narratable qualitative data which only they can generate and have control to extend for the further academic, professional communication and meaning-making activities. Applying the authorial, intentional, and critical lens to using GenAI, it functions as an assistive tool for testing (evaluating) and troubleshooting initial ideas and potential content that capture authentic voices from students’ lives. Furthermore, by witnessing where GenAI fails to represent their lives and personalities, students paradoxically gain confidence in their own narratives as genuine stories, liberated from prewriting-stage writing anxiety, and reclaim ownership beyond the dependable routine of algorithm-generated texts, in developing powerful metacognitive, critical AI literacy skills. In this activity, students are never alone with a novel tool they do not understand. With synchronous, instant support from the instructor and collaborative peers, they learn to experiment, question, and reflect together in class in dynamic relationships among themselves, their peers, their instructor, and even GenAI, using it assertively yet agentially. This activity is applicable to any institution where the personal narrative serves as an entry point of an academic writing course.