AI-AWARE TEACHING FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
SUSAN RAY, PhD
I help faculty, administrators, and students move from AI anxiety toward AI-aware classrooms. Teaching with AI in my own courses has shown me what the debate keeps missing: learning is still messy, human work, and students need colleges willing to teach through that complexity.Faculty do not all need to use AI. But none of us can teach as though it does not exist.
Speaking & Workshops
• Keynotes & presentations — tailored AI sessions built around an institution's goals, disciplines, and audience, whether that's a single department, an entire faculty, a room of administrators, or students themselves.• Faculty workshops — hands-on training in the method: scaffolding AI-integrated assignments, building no-code classroom chatbots, and designing for transparency rather than surveillance.• Assignment redesign labs — working sessions where faculty leave with finished assignments and assessments, AI-integrated or AI-free, built to keep student reasoning visible on the page.• Program & campus consulting — helping institutions build sustainable AI-literacy initiatives from the ground up.
ABOUT ME
For more than twenty years, I've taught literature and composition, the last seven as a tenured English professor at Delaware County Community College, outside Philadelphia. In 2026 I received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching and now serve as the college's AI Faculty Fellow. When AI arrived in my students' lives, I didn't ban it. I built Bridging the AI Gap, a grant-funded pilot that teaches students to use AI transparently, keeping their thinking visible on the page.It became the foundation of the work I do now: keynotes and workshops, a Faculty Mentor for the AAC&U, an AI-Aware Faculty Fellow for W. W. Norton, and publications including "The Fourth Literacy." Whether I'm with my own students or another campus's faculty, the goal is the same: helping people do their most human thinking in a moment that keeps telling them a machine can do it for them.
Sample Slide Deck
AI-AWARE TEACHING
Consider this partial deck from a session I lead on rethinking assessment in the AI era. The keynote and workshop show faculty how to make student thinking visible, use AI openly, and design assignments that require judgment rather than simple output. These slides offer an opening glimpse of a larger, hands-on session.
