As generative AI reshapes writing, many English Composition students feel disengaged with their own words. Educators and students alike echo the same concerns. In a world where machines can draft essays, we are left wondering: do our words matter? 

This interactive workshop argues yes, and participants will help demonstrate how and why. 

Through this session, we return English Composition to its oldest foundation: storytelling in a community. Long before formal essays, humans made meaning through story. Our memory and observation became shared experience. Public Writing in a Post-AI World builds on that inheritance. Writing begins with presence as students compose through storytelling and creative risk. They enter communities. They observe and listen. They remember. 

Writing then becomes an act of witnessing. 

Students learn everything is writing, and everything is community. Technology does not replace their work but becomes the vehicle that reveals why the humanity within their work matters, especially now. Their words carry weight because they come from a life only they have lived.

Participants will engage in a live public-writing experiment drawn directly from the course. Together, we will move from an impersonal paragraph into human revision and collaborative meaning-making through memory, sensory detail, and participative reflection.

Attendees will leave with adaptable, human-centered assignments that help students reclaim their own voices as they connect to their work again. This session demonstrates how public writing assignments can restore agency and curiosity, but most importantly, joy while teaching critical AI literacy.

Presenters

• Kimiko Lumsden kimikolumsden@gmail.com, United Stated Sports University