Our current responses to AI run the gamut: from switching essays to in-class writing only, to tweaking assignment to (somehow?) discourage academic dishonesty, to using this moment to talk with students about authorship, research, and ethics, and to experimenting with ways to incorporate AI that (somehow?) preserve critical thinking. Most of us are feeling a smidge overwhelmed.
As we all make sense of new challenges and opportunities, here are a few resources from specialists in writing studies:
Writing the Class Policy
If you’re looking for guidance for writing a policy statement for your syllabus, we found this post helpful. Annette Vee, Writing Program Administrator at the University of Pittsburgh and specialist in digital pedagogy, discusses some trends and provides a few resources. One of the links she points us to is this growing collection of syllabi statements, with 150 examples (and counting) from different disciplines.
A Collection of Assignments
If you’re interested to see examples of how teachers are experimenting with AI in their writing assignments, browse this searchable collection maintained by the MLA and CCC Joint Task Force on AI and Writing. Each post describes a classroom “experiment,” and includes a bit of reflection from the teacher who tried it.
Research in Writing Studies
If you’d like to browse recent scholarship, the journal Computers and Composition has published some nice classroom-based studies, although this early wave of research seems to focus mainly on teacher interviews and student reflections. See their two special issues: Composing with AI (May 2024) and Digital and Multimodal Composition in the Era of Artificial Intelligence (November 2024). Rhetoricians are also responding to the challenge in a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2024), in writing that tends to lean more toward theory. The WAC Clearinghouse has published an open-access edited collection Teaching with Text Generation Technologies, that examines AI through the different lenses of creativity, ethics, rhetoric, professional and workplace writing, and the intersection of technical with information literacy.