A toolkit for teachers of academic writing
According to a May 2023 survey, about a third of college students used ChatGPT for their coursework during the 2022-2023 school year. The most popular subject for ChatGPT assistance? English, at 49%. If you’re reading this, you probably agree that conversational agents are part of higher education now, for better or for worse. The disruption is particularly acute for English and academic writing classes, as instructors and administrators wonder how to meet current student learning objectives around critical thinking and how to prepare students for the employment landscape that will exist when they graduate. These big-picture questions will require complex and multi-disciplinary interventions over the course of years. But what about your next semester’s syllabus?
This resource is designed to help writing instructors meet near-term, pragmatic needs around AI guidelines, assignment design, and assessment. I invite you to navigate the site to:
Get inspiration on how to craft personalized AI policies that match your institutional context through Ink & Algorithms, an interactive choose-your-own-adventure in generative AI.
Browse the toolkit to learn about global assignment trends and get ideas about how to develop your policy and modify your assignments to match.
A Rhetorician’s Case for AI Optimism
There are plenty of reasons to dread the coming disruptions of ChatGPT and other conversational agents in higher education. Teachers of writing in particular stand to have their classroom practices changed and challenged by these tools. As rhetoricians, however, there is also cause for hope, optimism, and seizing the kairotic moment. The rhetorical canon of invention continues to provide a model for knowledge-making that does not rely upon novel discovery or factual information that can be replicated by AI conversational agents.
The necklace is a useful visual metaphor for the process of rhetorical invention based upon what Eric Hayot would term “a materialist theory of writing.” That is, the philosophy that ideas are not separable from language and that the reader is your idea’s home. This theory of language resonates with a long history of rhetorical and literary scholarship. Because language works through the combination and recombination of existing linguistic elements – not through uncovering novel phonemes – knowledge-making is a communal and dialectic enterprise. Our discipline’s DNA prioritizes audience analysis and the arrangement of apt arguments. Moreover, writing, in our rhetorical framework, is material and collaborative. Because of this, we are uniquely poised to help students gain crucial post-ChatGPT skills. We should continue to prioritize finding and asking good (audience-matching, timely) questions over the final “answer” or product. Most of all, we must lean into the embodied aspects of our discipline to conceive of writing and communication as kairotic and interpersonal.
Acknowledgements
This project was supported through the resources of Ivan Allen College’s Digital Interactive Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
References
Hayot, Eric. Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities. Columbia University Press, 2014.
Intelligent, “One-Third of College Students Used ChatGPT for Schoolwork During the 2022-2023 Academic Year,” last update June 9, 2023.
Kinneavy, James and Catherine Eskin. “Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” Written Communication, 17(3). 2000: 432-444.
Lauer, Janice. Invention in Rhetoric and Composition. Eds. Patricia Sullivan and Catherine Hobbs. Parlor Press, The WAC Clearinghouse, 2004.
Miller, Carolyn R. “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing,” College English, 40(6). 1979: 610-617.
Price, Margaret. Mad At School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. University of Michigan Press, 2011.