Researching Secondary English Teachers' Views on the Pedagogical Affordances of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping the practices of L1 English teachers (Riser, 2025). However, little research explores how teachers think with and about AI. Therefore, this study responds to the following questions: What do English teachers believe to be the pedagogical affordances of AI in the context of the secondary school English classroom? How can a ‘stacking stories’ approach illuminate the complexity of teachers’ views on AI’s pedagogical affordances? Considering pedagogies and practices as assemblages of relations (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003) between entangled human and non-human materials (Barad, 2007), this study attends to the intra-action possibilities for AI – the ways in which it affects and relates to other elements within assemblages of research and practice. Inspired by the ‘stacking stories’ approach taken by Burnett and Merchant (2019), I produced first-person, written accounts of eight semi-structured interviews with practising English teachers from the Southeast of England. By ‘stacking’ a selection of these accounts together and considering how they affect one another, I explore the ways in which teachers and researchers can relate to AI and its role in the classroom. I identify noteworthy metaphors and tensions, offering ways of thinking about our changing educational landscape. While some feel anxious about AI’s ‘creeping’ influence, others are excited by the ‘bouncy’ role it can play in the classroom. Such attitudes are constituted by differing sociomaterial relations and produce various approaches to existing practices, such as the modelling and discussion of writing.