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Dr. Rashad Ahmed, 2026 TESOL Teacher of the Year 
Saturday, 21 November, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. ET

Teacher Agency in the Age of AI: Critical Literacies for the Multilingual Classroom

Generative artificial intelligence is reshaping language education at a pace that has outrun the conceptual frameworks used to make sense of it. Two framings dominate the discourse: AI as the replacement of teachers, and AI as the democratization of language learning. Both position teachers as objects of technological change rather than as agents within it. This keynote argues that the central professional question for TESOL educators is not whether to integrate generative AI but what kind of agency teachers will exercise in shaping how it does. Drawing on the ecological model of teacher agency and recent applied linguistics scholarship on AI-mediated classrooms, the talk develops a framework of five critical literacies (technical, sociolinguistic, evaluative, ethical, and pedagogical) through which teacher agency becomes visible as classroom practice. Vignettes from collaborative research across multilingual classrooms in diverse global contexts illustrate how the framework operates differently across settings. The session closes with a call to TESOL as a community of consequential mediators in the future of AI in language education.

About the Speaker

Dr. Rashad Ahmed is the 2026 TESOL International Teacher of the Year and Associate Professor of Linguistics and TESOL in the Department of English at Jacksonville State University. He is a Fulbright alumnus and holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Memphis. His research and teaching address applied linguistics, TESOL, corpus linguistics, AI in language education, multilingual writing assessment, and Arabic-English literary translation. He served as Past Chair of the TESOL International Association's Applied Linguistics Interest Section from 2021 to 2024 and leads international research collaborations across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistics, composition, speech, and communication. His recent publications include "Generative AI and redefining scope of language curriculum: TESOL educators' voices," "Inclusivity and learner engagement through multimodal approaches in English language learning," and "AI-based processing of poetic language and human translation in literary contexts.

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