Between policy and pedagogy: writing teachers' perspectives on institutional AI policies and expectations

Despite the growing interest and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) within higher education, English language teachers remain in a constant state of interpreting, implementing, and negotiating institutional policies and expectations. While rapidly developed AI policies have started to emerge and evolve, little is known about how writing teachers understand, evaluate, and negotiate these policies, especially in relation to their everyday pedagogical practices. This qualitative study is set to explore how 10 writing teachers viewed and navigated their institutional AI policies in Saudi Arabia. Utilizing a case-study design, data were collected from narrative frames and semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that the teachers expressed a lack of clear institutional guidance, leading them at times to navigate AI-related issues on their own. Additionally, the teachers underlined their partial exclusion from AI policy design, which mainly followed a top-down institutional approach. Despite that, teachers perceived AI adoption as an inevitable development within higher education and a necessity that they need to adapt to in the future. The study underscores the importance of designing clear AI policies, tailored specifically to help writing teachers working in higher education settings. It also highlights how a bottom-up approach, where teachers are involved in the policy-drafting and implementation phases, could have a fundamental and constructive effect on their pedagogical practices.