Catalyst not Threat: English Teachers Perspectives on AI

Abstract

This study challenges dominant narratives that frame AI as a threat to authorship and creativity by showing that teachers largely position it as a catalyst for ideation and linguistic support rather than a replacement for writing. Findings indicate that AI is pedagogically accepted when it functions as an auxiliary tool that scaffolds thinking and expands access to ideas, but remains subject to regulation to preserve visible and traceable student intellectual labor. Teachers consistently require transformation of AI-generated outputs through paraphrasing, rewriting, and in-class writing, thereby maintaining human cognitive engagement as the basis of authorship. Across narratives, authorship shifts from origination to transformation, where creative agency is assessed through the extent of student reworking of AI-generated content. Teachers neither fully embrace nor reject AI but condition its use on sustained human interpretive and compositional effort. The study concludes that generative AI operates as a catalyst for creative writing when it enhances rather than replaces student intellectual participation, with pedagogical legitimacy grounded in the persistence of discernible human agency.