Student Perspectives on Integrating AI Language Models in Writing Instruction w/Yasmine Telwana

Episode Summary:

In this episode, Yasmine Telwana, a first-year writing lecturer at the University of Minnesota, discusses her insights on integrating AI into academic writing courses. Telwana, a multilingual educator with experience both in Egypt and the US, shares her research on student perspectives towards AI, highlighting both its benefits and challenges. The conversation covers the development of classroom strategies for ethical AI use, differences in AI adoption between native and non-native English speakers, and the importance of involving students in shaping AI policies. Additionally, the episode touches on Telwana's other contributions at the TESOL Convention, including her work on multimodal assignments and digital literacy. If you want to gain valuable insights on how to effectively incorporate AI tools in educational settings to enhance students' learning experiences, this is a must-listen!! 

00:00 Introduction and Host Welcome

01:17 Guest Introduction and Background

02:26 AI in Academic Writing: Benefits and Challenges

04:19 Teaching in Egypt vs. the US

06:16 Inspiration and Impact of Teaching

07:42 TESOL Presentation: Student Perspectives on AI

12:05 Ethical AI Use in the Classroom

29:46 Poster Sessions and Multimodal Assignments

33:57 Upcoming Work and Final Thoughts

RBERNing Questions for this Episode:

1- What were the results of your research on student perspectives with regard to using AI in academic writing instruction? 

2- What are some good classroom strategies for ethical AI use?

3- What are the implications for curriculum development based on the results of your research in this area of AI?

Guest BIO:

Yasmine Telwana is a Writing Studies Lecturer at the University of Minnesota with over seven years of experience teaching college-level and adult learners. Her teaching and research focus on multimodality and the intersection of writing, language learning, and technology; especially how AI tools can support student writers. She’s passionate about helping multilingual students find their voice through writing.

Ms. Telwana is currently in the process of finalizing a manuscript titled "Students’ Perspectives on Integrating AI Language Models in Writing Instruction," which explores how student writers perceive and engage with AI tools in the classroom. 

Resources:

Websites/Social Media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasmine-telwana-010644127/ 

Mentioned in this episode:

Upcoming manuscript titled "Students’ Perspectives on Integrating AI Language Models in Writing Instruction," which explores how student writers perceive and engage with AI tools in the classroom.

To find out more about Mid-State RBERN at OCM BOCES' services, listen to season 1 of the show with host Collette Farone-Goodwin, or to receive CTLE credit for listening to episodes, click here: https://midstaterbern.org/

Transcript

Yasmeen: 0:00

I take it obviously that you are 100% in favor of students using AI to assist them in their academic writing endeavors, but what do you say to those who are concerned about student integrity when it comes to admitting that they've used AI?

Yasmine: 0:18

Yeah, that's a very interesting point, honestly, and I've been also thinking about it lately. Cause if we started to like completely prohibit using it in class, they're gonna use it anyway and they're not gonna tell us, or they'll try to use it in a way that we cannot actually detect.

Yasmeen: 0:43

Welcome to RBERNing Questions, a professional learning podcast where we answer your most compelling questions about teaching, serving, and supporting multilingual learners. I'm your host, Yasmeen Coaxum, and through our talks, I look forward to bringing the methods, philosophies, and stories behind teaching multilingual learners to light. Let's get into the show. Welcome to another episode of the RBERNing Questions podcast. Today we have one of the wonderful presenters from the TESOL Convention 2025 with us today. Her name is Yasmine Telwana, and, she did this fantastic presentation about AI and writing, and so I thought I, I definitely need to have her on this show. So welcome Yasmine.

Yasmine: 1:40

Thank you Yasmine, for having me.

Yasmeen: 1:43

This is gonna be interesting. Okay. Alright. So. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your role in education currently?

Yasmine: 1:53

All right, so far I'm working as a first year writing lecturer at the University of Minnesota, and I've been teaching for seven years now. I wrote in different universities. I wrote in Egypt at the American University in Cairo. And here in the US I taught at Minnesota State University of Mankato. Then I switched to University of Minnesota Twin Cities. And mainly I was teaching English for Academic Purposes courses, composition courses in Mankato, and currently I'm teaching composition classes, mainly first year writing courses for freshmen at the University of Minnesota.

Yasmeen: 2:26

Okay, and as I mentioned, you have a focus on AI right? So in general, is this kind of like your specialty that you've honed in on? And so what made you decide to do that?

Yasmine: 2:42

So mainly as a multilingual student myself, I'd grown up actually in Egypt. Then I moved to the US to study then to teach for a while, and I noticed how the students really struggle with writing specifically, but then with the wide spread of AI, things changed'cause everyone started to count on AI in order to polish their writings in order to hone their skills when it comes to writing. So I thought about, okay, there are many concerns among educators about how students really use AI and everyone becomes very skeptical about how to integrate it in classroom. So I thought how about talking about how students perceive the tools and how do they effectively use it in class.'Cause we know that it's not actually going anywhere, something that's gonna continue with us for a long time. So I thought about maybe having students invite them to be part of the conversation and see what can they contribute to ongoing discussion about using AI in classes. That's why I became interested in navigating this part.

Yasmeen: 3:38

Okay. and I really like what you said about inviting them to be part of the conversation. Because this is often not something that we do as educators until, like the last minute, really. Okay. So really, getting their perspective, understanding exactly how they're using it, how they are feeling about using it is definitely a piece that I feel was for sure missing in the beginning of the big, Chat, GPT or like generative AI boom. So that's why I was really excited about your presentation. So why don't we go. Well, I don't wanna go back yet'cause I'm really curious about Egypt. Like, how would you describe your, I guess I wanna say the teaching atmosphere there or, the culture in terms of university instruction, EFL, it would be in that case, in Cairo? How would you, explain that?

Yasmine: 4:38

I would say it's really different in terms of the pedagogical methodologies that are like being followed at the universities over there compared to the one here in the US and mainly here I'm talking about the writing classes.'Cause I feel like writing is not something that we tend to focus on really in the Middle East. We focus more on getting good accent or speaking the English in a specific way, but when it comes to writing, I feel like this component is neglected. So that's why when I came here to the US I really started to teach a few writing classes and I noticed how completely different it is compared to what I was doing in Egypt. And I liked how we focus more on writing as a process more than a product.'Cause in Egypt we care so much about the final product. Did you meet the requirements that would help you to get the grade or not? It's not about the scaffolded activities that we do along the way to prepare students to hone their writing skills and to get them ready before they work on the polished draft. So that's something that I really liked here and I really hope at some point I can transfer what I gained here and in terms of teaching the writing classes to the universities back in Egypt'cause I feel like this is a component that we really need to focus on over there.

Yasmeen: 5:45

Okay, fantastic. I totally agree with it being a very important component, the process, right? And so that's where we are in terms of your presentation as well, because you spoke a lot about the process, how students are integrating AI into their process. Okay. Before we get into that, I would like to now go back a bit and understand how you ended up entering this field. What really inspired you to want to be a lecturer?

Yasmine: 6:22

I would say, since I've been teaching for seven years now, before joining the teaching, I was working as a translator and it was more about just translating documents and talking to a laptop every day. So I was like missing that human interaction component of dealing with the students and leaving really an impact on their life. So what I really love about teaching at that point, when you finish the course and then a student comes and tells you, oh, really? I learned how to do so and so, and now I'm happy that I can apply to my major, or I'm happy that I got the job finally. I was able to write the resume on a structured way, or I was able to write a thesis or I learned how to write a research paper. So I feel like that point about reaching out to students and see actually the level of the impact that you leave on them, that's really what makes me enjoy what I'm doing.

Yasmeen: 7:08

Wow. And when you were saying that, it was taking me back in my mind to various conversations with students who come back and that's just really the best students who come back or even if it's just a WhatsApp text and they say, Hey, I got into such and such program. Yeah. University, and thank you for everything. Yes. okay. So that definitely is a very gratifying, part of this job, right? Part of this profession. So let's go ahead and dive into your work at TESOL International. So you presented research that you'd done on student perspectives, as we said with regard to using AI for academic writing. So your main research question was what are the students' perceived advantages and challenges of utilizing AI language models in academic writing? Can you sum up the results of this research?

Yasmine: 8:07

Yep, definitely. So we were focusing on both the challenges and the advantages that students gain as they start incorporating AI in their work. And we noticed that they focused on how AI can be beneficial in terms of simplifying the complex readings, as sometimes in the writing classes we have mainstream classes, and we have multilingual classes. In the multilingual classes, the students don't have English as their first language, so they struggle with comprehending complex scholarly sources. So something that you found beneficial is how can they prompt, Chat GPT or Co-pilot or other AI tools in order to simplify the content for them? So they started maybe prompt Chat GPT to turn this article into bullet points that are simplified just to gain the general idea of what the source is talking about. So for summary and simplification purposes, that was like a thing that students really liked when it comes to using AI or prompting AI to do. They also found it really beneficial for idea generation. Multilingual students, usually we struggled with writer's block, but they reach a point of the writing process where they can't generate any more ideas. They hit a wall, they can't come up with anything new. So prompting Chat GPT to generate more ideas or maybe inspire them with maybe different directions or different perspectives besides the one they, think about was also beneficial to them. And I think also it was beneficial for multilingual students especially for learning how can these structure or learning about the conventions for specific writing genres. So students here as freshmen, it's like the first time learning how to write a research paper, how to work on a rhetorical analysis. So they have no idea how would they structure the writing or the piece of writing that they're working on. So they found it really beneficial to prompt Chat GPT and Co-pilot about, okay, what are the. key conventions that they really need to keep in mind as I'm working on the genre. Like for example, what are the key aspects of the research paper? How would I structure an abstract, how would I work in ensis? So they find it really beneficial to guide them regarding the structure of the writing genres. This is for the key advantages that students highlighted the, yeah,

Yasmeen: 10:14

No, continue. Go ahead.

Yasmine: 10:16

Alright, now for the drawbacks that we talked about, it was, that was the most surprising part to me,'cause I wasn't really aware that students are really aware of what we're talking about as educators, so we keep like talking about plagiarism, ethical concerns, views in it. So it was surprising to me that the students, they know actually these ethical concerns that we're talking about all the time as educators. And it was surprising to me that they highlighted in their, reflections the reflective writing that they were doing after every single project in the course. They were talking about how they're afraid of being accused of plagiarism by their professors and how they were so skeptical about the content that was generated by AI and just use it as it is in their writing. So they were like afraid about that point. Also, another thing that was very interesting is that they highlighted the fear of over-reliance on AI because they know that if they have a tool that can get the work done for them and they don't bother thinking about it. Over the time, this is actually gonna impede their critical thinking process and it's gonna actually impede their ability to generate something. At any point, if they are prompted to do something, they will automatically refer to AI.'cause their mind is not ready enough to do the job or even to get the task done. So it was like interesting, honestly, to see how they are like aware of these points and they think about it. Yeah.

Yasmeen: 11:29

Now, definitely this goes back to what we said about making students a part of the conversation, because again, as educators we constantly talk about these things, but you know, it's like, understanding that the students also can realize this is something that obviously would not happen if we didn't take the time to, to make them part of this conversation and understand how all of us educators, students, and AI can work together, to make sure that, it's just a better learning experience overall. Speaking of those ethical issues, what are some of the classroom strategies, because you did introduce in your presentation some strategies for ethical AI use in the classroom. So can you just take us through some of those strategies?

Yasmine: 12:21

Yep, sure. one of the things that we talked about in our presentation that you attended was to have transparency in class regarding the AI policy that professors would like students to follow. And the most important part about it is to have students, co-authors for the AI policy. So it's not like me as a professor tell them, okay, this is my policy, this is what you need to do, and that's it. No, it's again about inviting them to be part of the discussion and have them share what do you think should be the policy that we need to follow in class. So it's like a co-author, the policy in class. So we gotta really specify or ask students when do they think AI can be allowed to be used in the writing process, and when it's discouraged to be used in the writing process. So we wanna make sure that they're like invited to share this point. Also we, one of these strategies that I believe we can have it applied in class is more about having specific activity or scaffolded introduction to AI. So instead of telling students, yeah, you're permitted to use it without specifying how can we use it exactly, I think that's risky. So one of the things that as educators we can do is to have scaffolded activities at the beginning, like introducing AI through brainstorming stage. So have students generate some ideas. Then we tell them, okay, now, since you generated maybe five or seven ideas, now return to AI, and prompt Chat GPT to generate more ideas besides the one that you already generated, and see if you can maybe borrow some of these ideas and have them integrated in your own work. So it's not that you fully even have AI generate the ideas, but it's more like it completes or builds on what they started. Okay. Another thing also, it has to do with having students compare their human generated text to the AI generated text. So we might have the students at some point maybe generate a specific, or work in a specific paragraph, let's say the introduction to their project. Then we can have them refer to AI and have it generate maybe a similar paragraph. Then we can have students compare and contrast their work with the AI generated work, and this somehow is gonna actually enhance their critical thinking and also their metacognition'cause they're gonna reflect on the missing parts that they missed in their work and how AI was able to fill in these gaps. And then they can restructure everything and rewrite it using their own words. So using AI this way is also gonna enhance their like sense of ownership that they know that actually I should be the one who's owning the idea and I should express it in my own way instead of just having Chat GPT or Copilot do it from me. So these were like some of the activities that we talked about. I think also another important thing, and this is what I'm trying to integrate this semester and in the upcoming semesters, is the peer response stage. I feel like many of my students, they struggle with providing effective feedback to each other in the peer response stage'cause they feel like they tend to provide very generic comments to their group members. Like, Yeah, you did a great job, or I like your work, but that's not sufficient to enhance their writing skills. So I was thinking about maybe having Chat GPT, provide feedback on their work, and then they use this feedback and then they reflect on it. Then they get in groups and they start providing feedback to their group members. So they have an idea of what are the things or the components that we need to focus on, especially the high order concerns, like focusing on clarity, focusing on the organization of the ideas having central idea in each paragraph instead of mainly like just focusing on, yeah, there's a grammatical mistake here or there's a spelling mistake here'cause for me, this actually does not develop you as a writer. It might at the literary stages, but I care so much about the clarity of your content and the well development of your ideas.

Yasmeen: 15:54

Okay, so I'm just gonna recap. Alright. In order to address the ethical concerns, mm-hmm, of using AI and in order to partner with students in the classroom when you're using it, one is to actually have the students co-author whatever your policy is for using AI in your course. Two was use it as a brainstorming partner, so begin by generating your own ideas on the topic, put that into the AI, whichever one you're using, okay, uh, and then, have it just help you with more, even more ideas. Third, to compare their actual writing to what the AI puts out. I really like that one a lot for them to work on something and then be able to see what the gaps in that might have been, and then, so this last one is something that you're developing, right? That you're starting to work on. Yeah. Which I think is really excellent, having Chat GPT help with peer feedback, because so often, as you said, that's where students, they, and it's even like a confidence thing, right? They sometimes feel like, who am I to give feedback to my peer, right? or, they don't wanna maybe hurt their peers feelings, so they're just like, oh yeah, it's great, you know? Um, so I really, like that idea that you are, considering, implementing into your use of AI in the classroom. So I take it obviously that you are 100% in favor of students using AI to assist them in their academic writing endeavors, but what do you say to those who are concerned about student integrity when it comes to admitting that they've used AI? Now we're moving away from when it's integrated, because some people haven't reached that stage yet, right? Where they are actually integrating the use of it, monitoring the entire process this way. And so a lot of educators are still concerned that students will use it and just not admit it. Yeah, and this whole over-reliance, just capping creativity and autonomy, like you said. What do you say to those educators to kind of, I don't know, give them hope or just make that situation a bit more manageable?

Yasmine: 18:29

Yeah, that's a very interesting point, honestly, and I've been also thinking about it lately and I think part of our discussion in the presentation that we did in the TESOL when I asked you this question, if we should, train students on how can they effectively prompt Chat GPT, I noticed that everyone in the room, they were like, no, we shouldn't do this. We should not teach them how can they prompt Chat GPT because we don't want them to use it. So, I've been really thinking about this and it's really interesting idea'cause I think that we should really have a safe space for students in our classes where they can come and tell us,"Hey, I used Chat GPT to do so and so.'Cause if we started to like completely prohibit using it in class, they're gonna use it anyway and they're not gonna tell us, or they'll try to use it in a way that we cannot actually detect. So I think the most important thing is that really create the safe space where we can tell them, yes, you're permitted to use it, but also we gotta make them aware of the ethical concerns about using it. So I think if we have an open discussion in class about, okay, we can use it that way. That's actually provides you with ethical use or actually protects you ethically from falling in the pitfall of plagiarism, and we can somehow prepare them how can they effectively use it. So I would say maybe the solution to this is really like introducing this through a scaffolded way. So you really have to tell the students like, or you really need to show them how can they use it effectively in class. So I think maybe using it for brainstorming is not really gonna harm you as an educator if you have students brainstorm some ideas. Then have them refer back to AI and see if there could be additional ideas added to what they already generated. And I think another thing that we can also apply, not precisely in the writing classes, but also for the intensive English programs, and that was a question that was asked by one of our attendees in the presentation at the TESOL, we talked about how can we use it as educators in classes with our intensive English program students.'Cause they're like in a lower level compared to those who attend the composition classes. And we said that students, somehow, they have great linguistic knowledge, but they don't know how to use it. So maybe we can do something like having them generate some ideas or think about some vocabulary that they can use in a specific topic. Then they can refer to Chat GPT and have Chat GPT maybe suggest more vocabulary or suggest more sentence structure that they can use. And actually, they themselves, they will be surprised that they know many of the vocabulary suggested by Chat GPT. So it's more like, I know it, I know this vocabulary. It just doesn't come to my mind. So Chat GPT can be more like really like an assistant instead of something that really does the job for students. It's more just like helping them to do it. So I think really educators need to be like open for this idea to have a student use this in class. I think also like the idea that we mentioned of comparing the AI generated content with the human, writing, I think this is a very critical point because it can get the students really to understand what has been missing in the AI generated content. The tone, the personalized,'cause we want students to bring their own identity into the writing, and I think the way really we can do this is to show them what is missing in the AI generated tasks that actually it cannot replicate your own voice or it cannot actually effectively deliver the ideas the way you want. So maybe just showing them how to do this in class and being open for this is honestly like a key and I think people should really be more open for it.

Yasmeen: 21:45

Okay, great. I really feel like right there in your answer was the fact that we should just be more open to, again, including them in the conversation. And in creating this process in the classroom, and then that's gonna alleviate all of this oh, undercover secret type of yeah, using it, I can't think of anything myself, so I think that really the entire approach is the answer, right? So I just wanna talk a little bit about your participants. So some of them were native English speakers. You had 23 first year students, right? Some were native, some were non-native, speakers of English. So did you find that there were any differences between the perceptions of using AI in the non-native versus the native speakers?

Yasmine: 22:34

Yeah, I would say, I like to use this phrase that AI for multilingual students, those who were participant in the research, somehow it was like level the playing field for them. So it puts them like in equal possessions with mainstream, because we know of multilingual, they struggle with language barriers. So AI alleviated this point and put them in a position where they can fairly compete with other people,'cause mainstream students, they can easily navigate scholary sources while multilingual they struggle because of maybe coming across vocabulary that they are being seen for the first time. So AI supported them to overcome this issue. So they both now have like close comprehension of the articles and now they can't discuss it equally. So I feel like multilingual students, they mainly relied on it for like preparation stages before we navigate the content, just to simplify the idea for them and facilitating the comprehension process for them. And then it gets them in a point that, okay, now we are all in the same level. So I understand the article. You understand the article. Now let's analyze it effectively, but of course for the mainstream, I feel like they don't suffer from writer's block like multilingual students because they have like more actually linguistic knowledge that they can incorporate and they can use to develop ideas compared to multilingual students. But I feel like at some point, like most of them need it, especially when they navigate a project that they haven't worked on before, like a research project that's complicated for both of them. This could be the first time or the first experience for some mainstream students also to do it in college level. So I feel like they're requiring some support using AI when it comes to using it to work on the project, but definitely it's not as intense as it is for the multilingual students, but it's still like both of them need it.

Yasmeen: 24:16

That's a really, interesting comparison to make in terms of if there's new, information or basically like a new project, et cetera, there's more of a level playing field, in terms of trying to generate ideas and understand how they should go about this. Alright, and then you identified some themes, which you basically just took us through themes in terms of the student perceptions, but, in the writing and language enhancement section, you mentioned the idea of boosting confidence, so can you unpack this idea a little bit? I really like this idea of the confidence boosting, because sometimes I think students need this. It could really motivate them, but at the same time, there's the feeling of maybe getting addicted to it. So how do you think that this can maybe be tackled?

Yasmine: 25:11

Yeah, so for the language enhancement and the writing enhancement specifically, after using AI that was one of the thing that students highlighted, especially multilingual students,'cause they were like skeptical about how would they address a specific topic or what sort of vocabulary do they need to use.'Cause, like for them, for the college level writing projects, they are required to use academic vocabulary and academic, actually academic context. So it's different than writing a story or writing a personalized thing. So students are skeptical about what sort of vocabulary do I need to include there? Or what sort of sophisticated structures of the sentences do I need to integrate there? So using AI as a way of proofreading their work and making suggestions for stronger vocabulary, and somehow tweaking the structure a little bit. Somehow it boosted their confidence'cause now they know that, okay, I'm using vocabulary that can be like impressive for my peers during the peer response, or it can be even impressive for my professors when they review my work. So this somehow fosters their self-confidence about the content that they are using. And I noticed that this, honestly, yeah, it happens more for multilingual, but I feel also like my mainstream students, at some point they also need this.'cause I mean like this semester I'm teaching many mainstream and they also encounter the same issue, that they feel like they're not actually confident enough about using their own words. So they feel like tying everything back or resorting to Chat GPT or to Copilot to generate more sophisticated or more advanced vocabulary is something that makes them feel like, yeah, I have something polished that they can share with my peers or my professors.

Yasmeen: 26:39

Yeah, for sure. As a native speaker of English still, you're like, wait, the language is so vast, right? Yeah. Languages are so vast. So choosing words that can make you sound more sophisticated when you're trying to bring your message across is something that both sets really deal with. Yep. So what do you think are the implications for curriculum development based on the results of this research that you did?

Yasmine: 27:11

Yeah, I think a key implication is transparency. I always say transparency is a key. You wanna make sure that your students in class, they know exactly what are your expectations for using AI in classroom, and you wanna make sure that you have guided discussion with them about how can we use it effectively. Also, I feel like an important implication is maybe designing co-pilot studies and workshops for educators. Educators really need to know how can they effectively permit students to use this in classrooms and how can they be prepared to navigate issues that somehow raises due to overreliance on Chat GPT.'Cause some professors, they know that students using it and they're like worried about how should I navigate this issue? Or how can I deal with a student who I get a spotted like using Chat GPT in the classroom or even to work on the assignments. And there has been actually so many conflicting points of view about, oh, we should actually accuse the students of academic dishonesty, or we should actually like give them a failing grade. Others were talking about, no, we should embrace it and we need to talk more about it and give the students maybe a chance to resubmit their work. So I think there is a need for workshops, guided workshops for educators on how can they effectively integrate AI in their classrooms. At the same time, I feel like there's also a need for guided workshops to prompt students how can they ethically use it in the classrooms. I'm not sure honestly if we have like sufficient studies going on nowadays that are talking more about, like the needed workshops for educators and students, but I feel like there could be really a need for this in the foreseeable future to tackle these points.

Yasmeen: 28:46

I think that sounds like a great idea. Now I'm like picturing how that would be implemented. So I'm thinking, before the start of a school year, of a semester, really getting together. Just the faculty getting together and being educated. It could be that, or it could be, there's several courses that could be offered Mm-hmm that would in fact end up shaping the curriculum, shaping how things are added into the curriculum to be able to have this scaffolding situation go on. And I love that you said on both ends, right? Like further educating the students about this,'cause obviously they are concerned based on your results, right? And also, of course, educators'cause there are a lot of educators who still are just like,"We don't really wanna touch this thing." It just, yeah. It's true. Alright. So, this wasn't all you did at the TESOL convention. You also participated in a couple of poster sessions. One was called, Enhancing Students' Language and Digital Literacy through Task-Based Learning. Yep. And then another one was, Unlocking Digital Literacy: Multimodal Assignments for Multilingual First Year Writers. Okay. So can you just give us a little summary of each of those?

Yasmine: 30:11

Yeah, sure. Both posters, they were connected to the courses I'm teaching currently at the University of Minnesota, and we mainly structure the assignments in a way that enhances the students' multimodal skills and digital literacy. And also, this is more about taking the students or starting the course with something very personalized, like having the students work in a review or work in a literacy narrative, very personal story that they shared about themselves, and then we somehow prepare them to the academic writing through more sophisticated projects like working on a research paper. So I was talking about how both projects integrate multimodal aspects because the students are not minimally writing essays and submit it. We need to turn this work into something more creative or into something digital. So for the review projects, students need to record a podcast and they need to integrate background sounds and background music in their podcast for the review. And also working on the review, we prepared them for a very academic thing, which is how can we integrate research from different sources and have it integrated with our personal story, and this somehow prepares them for the upcoming projects that are mainly research based, and then when we get to the point of the research based project, students are required to come up with at least three scholarly sources. They have it integrated while they navigate a specific topic. And we focus on enhancing students' skills to integrate citations effectively'cause as most high schools all over the US, they use MLA citation format, not APA citation format. So when they go to college, they get surprised that professors require them to use APA citation, not MLA. So we also practice or train them on how can they effectively integrate sources outside them. Then again, we turn the whole project into a multimodal thing. So for the research based project, after they work on synthesis and integrate ideas and compare the sources together, you need to turn the projects into either a website or a podcast, or a presentation. And we get surprised by how students connect what we do in our writing classes to their majors. So we had a student who was really interested in anatomy classes and he ended up working on a podcast connected to tennis elbow, and he introduced us to a mini session or a mini podcast on anatomy, on tennis elbow specifically. And I was surprised on who, sorry, tennis elbow. It's oh, on tennis elbow. Okay. Yeah. So it was very surprising to see how student turn it, like what we learned in the project into something connected back to their project. Also, we had a student who was studying computer science and he was really into cybersecurity and he ended up doing also our project connected to this major. So I love to see how students connect everything we're doing and everything we're learning in our writing classes into something that they can transfer to their own majors through a multimodal project. So that's something that we're doing for the multimodality poster. The other one was mainly focusing on task based language, teaching and learning, the approaches that we use within the class and how we focus more on the writing process within the product.'Cause again, this is something I'm really interested in. I don't want students to mainly focus on the final polished draft that they need to submit and they ignore all the stages that comes before this, which is brainstorming and working on the first draft, getting feedback from their peers and from me. Then working on the upcoming drafts, then polish the draft at the very end. So I was talking about how the different tasks and the different assignments that we assign to students throughout the writing process, how it supports their writing skills, and also it supports them to navigate other skills besides writing like the digital literacy skills by checking different platforms and different ideas that they can have integrated in their work.

Yasmeen: 33:50

Those sound like really fantastic poster sessions actually. So Thank you. Yeah. I'm sorry I missed those. So finally, and where can people find information about your work? I know that you mentioned you have something upcoming. You're in the process of finalizing a manuscript, which sounds very exciting. So, uh, tell us just a little bit about that and then of course where people can follow you in order to keep up with all of this really interesting AI work that you're doing.

Yasmine: 34:24

Oh, thank you. So I'm currently working on a manuscript connected to the students' perspectives of using AI while working on the writing assignments. And hopefully I'll be finalizing this summer and I'll be sending out the manuscript to journals. So thumbs up and really hope things will go fine and I can have it published somewhere this summer. And I'm also presenting next week at the Four C. This is a conference in Baltimore and this one is mainly for college level composition and communications. So it's mainly for students who study in technical communication program and students who study in the writing studies programs all over the US. So educators go there to share their work about the writing classes and how effectively they integrate students in the writing process and develop different writing assignments. So I'll be also presenting in this conference next week. I have two sessions over there. And, yeah, just to reach out to me, I mainly use LinkedIn. So far I don't have any websites. People can just access me or they can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Yasmeen: 35:21

Okay, great. And you said it's four C? Yeah. I think I heard something about that too but, but I'm not really that familiar with. It sounds really good. not really that familiar with that particular conference.

Yasmine: 35:33

Yeah. It's mainly for writing, writing classes and composition rhetoric classes.

Yasmeen: 35:37

Okay, so now we've reached the final question that I always ask the guests on this podcast. What burning question should today's educators consider in order to improve their service to the ELL and ML community?

Yasmine: 35:53

Yeah, that's a very interesting point. And thinking about it, I was thinking about how can we as educators turn or move our multilingual students from being like knowledge receiver or passive knowledge receivers to knowledge creators or knowledge authors.'Cause I feel like with the wider spread right now of AI, students are being told, yeah, these are the tools and you can use them to get the work for you, but actually they're not being invited to the conversation where they think about, okay. What can I do with this tool? Or how can you use it in a different way than what everyone is telling me that this is the way I can use it. So I think like having students or giving them the chance to critique the work that's being generated by AI or by any other tool, and have students think about how can they generate their own ideas or how can they reflect on the content generated by AI and focus more on how can they own their own voices and bring their own identities to writing. This is something I really care about. So turning students from being passive knowledge receivers to knowledge creators, I feel like this is something hopefully we really need to think about and focus on moving forward.

Yasmeen: 37:04

Okay. Yasmine, thank you so much for joining us today on the RBERNing Questions podcast. And we look forward to that manuscript showing up in, in, in one of the very good journals. Okay, and we look forward to following the work that you are continuing to do with AI so thank you so much.

Yasmine: 37:25

Thank you, Yasmeen, for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Yasmeen: 37:40

Thank you for tuning in to RBERNing Questions, produced by Mid-State RBERN at OCM BOCES. If you would like to learn more about today's guest or any of the resources we discussed, please visit Mid-State RBERN's webpage at ocmboces.org. That's OCM. boces.org. Join us next time where we hope to answer more of your burning questions.