Transnational Perspectives on Teaching Voice and Agency in the GenAI Era

Abstract Multilingual writing classrooms are key sites of socialization where students encounter dominant discourses of writer identity and academic voice, often negotiating tensions between individual agency and structural constraints. For multilingual writers, developing a writerly voice involves reconciling academic discursive practices with diverse linguistic and cultural repertoires. However, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-generated texts risk homogenizing these expressions and reinforcing culturally narrow notions of voice, potentially constraining writer identity by limiting both representation and agency. In this context, instructors, particularly transnational L2 writing instructors, are not passive mediators of GenAI but active negotiators of its pedagogical and ideological implications. Drawing on narrative inquiry, the study explores prompted personal narratives and stimulated interviews with three transnational L2 writing instructors at a southwestern U.S. university. The findings conceptualize GenAI as a double-edged tool. While it offers linguistic support and efficiency, it also risks producing homogenized texts and creating an “illusion of agency” by obscuring writers’ decision-making processes. Rather than rejecting GenAI, the instructors reposition it as an object of critical engagement. Their pedagogical approaches emphasize reflective practice, intentional use, and critical AI literacy to sustain authorial presence and support the development of writer identity in AI-mediated writing contexts.