Billy Gerchick

Billy teaches English part-time for CISA at ASU's Downtown Phoenix campus and full-time for Central Arizona College (CAC) to serve Pinal County. 

A curious learner who’s grown from paperbacks, floppy disks, and GPTs, Billy values classic and contemporary scholarship. A lifelong education advocate, Spanish‑proficient, and parent of dual-citizen ESL learners, one of whom with Level 2 Autism (ASD) and ADHD, Billy cares about diverse students’ upward social mobility through English. For twenty years in metro Phoenix Title 1 high schools, he mentored at intersections of critical literacies, languages, cultures, and technologies. 

Billy hopes, in Fall 2026, to begin ASU English's "Writing, Rhetorics, and Literacies" PhD program with the following focus: Research human-AI dialectic practices to develop a framework for first-year composition (FYC) professors to design Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) and other educational AI (AIED) tools as individualized, professor-agentic literacy coaches, and teach students to grow through purposeful, innovative, responsible convergences of non-AI and AI-enhanced learning. What can emerging human-AI dialectic practices teach us about designing and mentoring students to use AIED "literacy coaches" to support individualized education, career, and life literacy skill needs?  

Research interests: generative AI (GenAI), educational AI (AIED), human-AI dialectic practices, contextualized learning, whole-student needs, whole-family education, bilingualism, sports literacies, & curriculum design.