It is fair to say that AI could re-negotiate the landscape of teaching writing as well as the act and the practice of writing for college-level students. For our specific purposes as WAC Fellows, we suggest that this is perhaps a time of self-reflection for WAC. Based on what we have written here, there are a few questions that concern us. Is it necessary for WAC to reformulate its basic tenets and principles? Is it necessary to have these conversations about the use (or the barring of use) of AI in the college classroom? Answers to these questions extend beyond the scope of the suggestions that WAC Fellows can provide here and rest in the hands of legislators as well as administrators and trustees not only at CUNY but also at other universities. However, the need for resources is apparent and crucial at a time when these overarching final decisions about the use and efficacy of generative AI are being circumvented by those with decision-making power. As such, it is a community effort at CUNY to have these difficult conversations as well as to support one another by providing resources like those provided here by Louise, Andréa, Weiheng, and Dohyun. 

Beyond this post, perhaps you might be interested in learning more about generative AI and teaching more generally. We suggest contacting your university’s Center for Teaching & Learning if it has one available. These Centers are working to provide resources like those that we are providing here, confronting topics such as talking to students about AI, our fears about AI, and the questionable relationship between AI and academic labor. Baruch College’s Center for Teaching and Learning, for example, is holding monthly AI conversations through a program entitled “Baruch in the Age of AI,” which you can learn more about here: https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ctl/ctl-conversations-baruch-in-the-age-of-ai/. 

However, for the purposes of WAC, the Fellows at City Tech have determined that there are particular WAC principles that remain relevant in the age of generative AI, such as those related to active learning and writing as a process. In addition to maintaining that these principles remain relevant, the Fellows have above provided resources that faculty can use in their classrooms. We suggest that, if you do choose to implement these exercises in your class, that you talk with your students openly about using AI in the classroom. What are the affordances of AI in the writing process for your students? What are their fears of using AI for writing-based assignments? Asking your students these questions might bring you some surprising answers, which might complicate your understanding, your fears, and your insights about the use of generative AI. 

Thank you for reading and engaging with our blog post, and please be in touch with us if you would like to comment, provide feedback, or have questions about any of our posts. 

Revising a WAC Informal Assignment Using Generative AI

In the previous blog posts, we explored how WAC principles—in particular, active learning through writing and writing as a process—can facilitate students’ learning and deepen their engagement in class. In addition, WAC fellows also introduced competing perspectives on using generative AI for writing assignments, acknowledging its transformative aspect as an educational tool and, at the same time, suggesting its inherent limits and the need for redesign. In this section, we will explore specific exhibits suggesting possibilities of how professors can use generative AI as an educational tool to develop a WAC informal assignment. Here is one of the most common scaffolding assignments of Writing Intensive courses: 

———————————————————————————————-

Exhibit 1. A module of a WAC informal assignment

Suppose you are an emerging scholar applying for a conference. The call for proposals states that you should submit an abstract of 250 words.

In your abstract, you will walk the readers (in this case, the conference committee) through your 1) premise (essential information your readers should know about your object of study), 2) topic (what interests you from the object of study), 3) tentative thesis (your own argument which will be supported by your analysis and observations of the object of study), and 4) blueprint (a roadmap of your essay).  

In order to brainstorm and develop your abstract, follow the following steps:

1. Freewrite what you want to write in your conference paper.
   • For ten minutes, write down what comes to your mind regarding your object of study. Do not worry about mistakes, grammar, or spelling errors. Do not reread your writing or edit it. If you are a multilingual speaker, feel free to write words in a language you find more comfortable if you cannot think of a word in English. The point of this exercise is to let your thinking flow so you can use this time to brainstorm your thoughts.
2. Based on your freewritten draft, write your tentative thesis (one core sentence that can summarize the main argument of your paper) and abstract. 

Make sure your abstract includes 1) premise, 2) topic, 3) tentative thesis, and 4) blueprint. 

———————————————————————————————-

The case of Exhibit 1 is helpful when students are not familiar with writing an abstract. It specifically outlines what a professor expects from students’ abstracts: 1) premise, 2) topic, 3) tentative thesis, and 4) blueprint. Yet, it is designed as an assignment with top-down instructions, which can confuse students if they are not engaged in a thorough conversation regarding the definitions and significances of these elements. Therefore, professors often prepare an in-class session to explain what these elements are and why they are needed in this piece of writing. They might also give detailed handouts to students.

In this process, what makes both professors and students frustrated is that some students do not grasp the definitions and significances of these elements even after conversations in and out of class which, from the professors’ point of view, seemed thorough. However, this situation can happen since these elements are often entirely new concepts to students, even though they are familiar to professors who have already written multiple abstracts during their academic journey. Some students might understand the definitions but have not yet grasped the significances (i.e., why they should include these elements and write them in a particular order). In contrast, other students might understand both definitions and significances but struggle to apply the concepts in their own writings. 

Here, WAC fellows suggest a module of a WAC informal assignment that uses generative AI as an educational tool. This assignment is designed to supplement assignments like Exhibit 1. For instance, you can assign this assignment only to students needing help writing an abstract. Another option is to assign this module as an in-class activity that you will reflect on with students as a group. In either case, we recommend doing this module after finishing Exhibit 1 or its equivalent in that this is a module designed for students’ reflection on their writings. 

———————————————————————————————-

Exhibit 2. A module of a WAC informal assignment that uses generative AI

Instructions for students

1. Ask Chat GPT 1) to generate an abstract based on your freewritten draft and 2) to summarize your freewritten draft in one sentence (which will be your tentative thesis). Make sure to provide specific details about your target audience. (e.g., “I will submit this abstract to a journal that focuses on modern American drama.”) 
2. Compare and contrast two abstracts (an AI-generated abstract and your own).
3. Write a one-paragraph reflection, considering the following questions:
   • Did two abstracts look similar? Did the AI-generated abstract include the main point of your tentative thesis? Did it miss any details you think are important and necessary in your abstract draft? 
   • If so, how can you make your abstract clearer—so your revised abstract can include your main theme and thesis as well as a blueprint of your paper? 
   • Did you take any advice from the AI-generated abstract? If so, what was it? What did your own abstract miss to include?
   • Are there any changes you want to make further based on this comparison?
4. Revise your abstract according to your one-paragraph reflection.

Submit 1) an AI-generated abstract, 2) your revised abstract, and 3) your one-paragraph reflection.

———————————————————————————————-

Using generative AI as a tool, students can revise their own abstracts, comparing and contrasting them with an AI-generated abstract, a product of AI’s machine learning algorithm based on the numerous abstracts it collected. This act of self-revision is helpful in that students often find it hard to revise their own writings, and many of them end up editing their work instead of revising it. In this context, this exercise provides them with an accessible AI reader—who will not judge them or whom they will not feel bad asking to read their work—while students themselves can be critical readers of this model writing produced by AI. 

Possible concern 1: What if AI’s model writing is a bad example?

Some model writings of AI can be really bad. They might have overly decorative rhetoric and/or a structure not addressing scholarly conventions. Yet, this WAC module is designed to help students with WAC principles (active learning through writing and writing as a process). Writing a one-paragraph reflection, students will have a chance to independently think about whether the AI-generated abstract is well-written. In other words, it gives them a chance to think critically about 1) whether the AI-generated work is fully credible and 2) how they can make use of this technology as a writer. In doing so, they can identify points of confusion and develop their ideas regarding their abstract. Through this metacognitive process, students will have a chance to think about their target audience and their own thinking process both as a reader and a writer. 

Possible concern 2: More writing means more grading!

Some professors might share a concern that this new module burdens them with two extra assignments to be read and graded (an AI-generated abstract and students’ one-paragraph reflection). Considering professors’ heavy workload, here are three possible suggestions based on WAC principles:

1. Minimal marking: Instead of changing sentence level errors or giving line edit comments, give a few comments highlighting strengths and encouraging students to identify their patterns of errors. 
2. Exploratory writing: One-paragraph reflection is designed to be an exploratory writing assignment that guides students to discover, develop, and clarify ideas. In other words, reading this short paragraph will allow professors to follow students’ trajectories of thoughts. Therefore, this exploratory writing assignment can lessen professors’ time used to find (or sometimes guess) what students might have wanted to write in their assignments and, in doing so, assist professors in giving students more pinpointed feedback.
3. Low-stake in-class activity: Instead of grading them, professors can consider making this an in-class freewriting activity, which will also improve class preparation and discussion. 

In this section, we explored a sample exhibit of the WAC informal writing assignment (Exhibit 1) and another exhibit that uses generative AI as an educational tool to supplement the WAC informal writing assignment (Exhibit 2). Acknowledging some inherent limits of generative AI, this section suggested some possible uses of generative AI based on WAC principles, focusing on how professors can encourage students to learn through reflective and metacognitive writing.

Writing as a process in an era when students are using generative AI to produce writing

“Writing as a process” is a WAC principle that notably acknowledges the interactive and iterative components of writing. Taking into consideration the different steps in the act of writing, it’s an aspect of academic writing that implies a view of knowledge as tentative and dialogic. Interactive activities situate writing as a process of inquiry and discovery. Activities promoting this kind of development involve productive talk about the writer’s emerging ideas and encourage multiple drafts and global revision. In WAC, an assignment’s interactive components provide students with the opportunity to brainstorm ideas before drafting, get feedback on drafts from peers, or visit a campus writing center.

One of the key methods of « writing as an iterative process » advocated by Bean is revision. The writing theorist Peter Elbow has argued, “meaning is not what you start out with but what you end up with… Think of writing then not as a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message”. In that sense, revision offers the possibility to strengthen the process of meaning-making by acknowledging how a finished product evolves from a lengthy process of drafting and redrafting through an iterative process.

Not only does asking students to follow a step-by-step writing process prevent them from overusing AI since it usually only offers final products, but it also allows students to deepen their thoughts. In considering writing as an interactive process ’s WAC principle, students are given the opportunity to enhance their writing through continuous feedback, whether revision occurs as a result of a peer’s review, the instructor’s mid-term feedback, or their own reader’s perspective on their first drafts. In other words, this pedagogy emphasizes writing as an interactive exchange between writers and readers. Expert writers experiment with the recursive process of thinking itself whenever new ideas emerge during the drafting process. As a matter of fact, final products are often substantially different from the first drafts. An across-the-curriculum emphasis on multiple drafts encourages the dialogic process, whereby writers become engaged with a question and, once engaged, develop, complicate, or clarify their own ideas.

Bean’s Engaging Ideas offers suggestions for promoting revision by building interactive elements into an assignment, among which :

• Assigning debate-driven models and problem-focused writing tasks. The author advises demonstrating the connection between writing and inquiry to encourage students to ask questions and investigate them. He believes that students are more willing to modify their essays when they are responding to genuine paradoxes or issues, whether presented by the teacher or posed by the student.
• Encouraging students to engage in active learning activities that develop their question-posing skills. Students should be enthralled by questions and understand that the impulse to write stems from the writer’s wish to offer a fresh perspective on a problem, contradiction, or query. Students practice the thinking strategies that underpin revision through classroom activities that allow them to explore their own answers to questions.
• Facilitating talk times and writing center conferences. Students ought to communicate their ideas with classmates, peers, or writing center advisors or tutors. An instructor can provide students with the opportunity to discuss their ideas during the initial stages of drafting by including a writing center’s visit into the writing process.
• Promoting peer review of drafts, either in class or out of class.It can be a beneficial tactic to have students prepare a rough draft far in advance of the final due date and then swap drafts to serve as readers for one another.
• Have writing conferences with students, particularly if they are struggling with the assignment.  According to the author, teachers in American institutions spend more time writing comments on finished products than holding conferences earlier in the writing process. This could be an opportunity to demonstrate and confirm that the assignment instructions are understood.
• Providing edits or revision-focused remarks on nearly finished versions.  If students have the opportunity to revise an essay after the instructor’s comments, it can be an opportunity to improve their grade. There are various choices, such as self-assessment, peer reviews, portfolios that greatly ensure revised work, and alternating grading methods to encourage revision.
• Giving students samples of the instructor’s ongoing projects will help them understand how a professional writer approaches the writing process. It would help students to realize that teachers have writing difficulties on occasion as well. According to Bean, students’ self-images can be improved to a greater extent if they are able to recognize the professor’s personal struggles as a writer. It may also be an opportunity to provide an example of a writing process.

These briefly selected suggestions could supplement an instructor’s agenda  by focusing on process-oriented tasks to assign to students. While developing different skills ranging from interactive components of revising to deepening critical thinking, methods promoting revision underline the importance of the process in the act of writing.

Active learning through writing in an era when students are using generative AI to produce writing

“Active learning through writing” is a WAC principle that emphasizes the role of writing as not merely a mode of communication or assessment but also as a valuable tool for enhancing the learning process. Before delving into the details of this pedagogical principle, we first clarify the concept of active learning itself.

Active learning is an instructional approach that actively engages students in the learning process, typically through activities such as problem-solving, group discussions, or hands-on experiments. The main idea is to shift from a passive lecture mode where students are mere recipients of information to one where they play a participatory role in constructing knowledge.

WAC advocates use writing as a tool to actively engage students in their learning process. Writing requires students to put words and symbols down on a piece of paper, either digitally or physically. This process, even in the most informal form such as freewriting, asks for students to actively internalize information, reorganize and synthesize various pieces of information, and articulate their understanding. This act enhances comprehension. Additionally, putting words on paper (physically or digitally) also offers a chance to revisit, revise and reflect on them afterwards. Pausing, thinking, and reflecting on their understanding and making cross connections facilitate active learning and critical thinking.

There are various ways of promoting active learning through writing, such as informal writing activities (e.g., journaling, free-writing), formal writing assignments (e.g., essays, papers, abstracts), and collaborative writing (e.g., peer reviews, group writing projects).Formal writing assignments benefit from these smaller, informal writings, which act as scaffolding for these major assignments in their breakdown of work into smaller, more manageable pieces. 

With generative AI, instructors may be worried that students are using these tools to generate writing for the writing assignments. Students who heavily rely on generative AI to produce their assignment answers miss out on the cognitive benefits that come with the process of writing. If students use generative AI to do the bulk of their writing, they bypass the critical thinking, active learning and reflection that writing can foster. With the current technology, most students can easily access generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, and it is sometimes hard to accurately detect whether students are using these tools or not. Therefore, instructors may be reluctant to assign writing assignments to students.

Given the current circumstances, I argue that the WAC principle of using writing as a tool to actively engage students in their learning process is still valid and helpful to promote active learning and critical thinking, but to implement the principle well in our classrooms, we need to cultivate and learn AI literacy for ourselves and for our students and rethink our approaches to writing assignments. We need to understand the advantages and limitations of using these tools, have open conversations with students, and make students understand the goals and methods of the writing assignments so that they understand why they are doing the assignment (and less likely to have shortcuts by using the generative AI tools).

Assignment design ideas that encourage genuine engagement, making it difficult or unnecessary to lean on generative AI:

1. Have students keep a journal of their thoughts, questions, and reflections on a topic. Encourage them to write about their emotions, confusions, and epiphanies. Create writing assignments that relate to their personal experiences and feelings.

2. Conduct in-class peer reviews with specific guiding questions. The feedback process requires students’ active engagement.

3. In-class essays: In a monitored environment, students are less likely to write with the help of the AI tools.

4. Interactive group discussions and writings such as collaboratively working on a Google Doc, or assigning a text and asking students to co-create resources by platforms such as hypothes.is: students can annotate a text collaboratively as a low-stake assignment. By doing so, they learn from each other and contribute to annotations together. The dynamic nature of such platforms would make it harder for AI to be seamlessly integrated.

5. Scaffolding formal assignments into smaller pieces (outlines, multiple drafts and revisions) and asking students to reflect on the process and comment on what decisions they make through multiple drafts.

6. Multimodal works: Students may present their work in a non-text way, such as delivering their essays through videos/oral presentations. The process of delivering the text in other modals makes it hard to use AI to complete the task, and it requires students’ active engagement.

Assignment design ideas that creatively integrate generative AI to facilitate active learning through writing (adapted from AI Assignment Flip – 10 Examples):

1. Students use a generative AI tool to draft a paper based on specific guidelines. Then analyze and detail the strengths and weaknesses, focusing on aspects like flow, structure, references, and overall argument. Conclude by reflecting on the evaluation/review process.

2. Present students with a problem and instruct them to use a generative AI for coming up with 2-3 potential solutions. They should then prioritize these solutions, explaining their reasons for each ranking. Furthermore, students should present their own solution, elucidating their choice after considering all the AI-generated options.

3. Students first write a paper and then use AI to review it, exploring feedback in areas such as flow, structure, grammar, clarity, argument, and the overall tone. Based on the AI feedback, students refine their work. Students need to submit their initial draft, AI’s recommendations, the revised paper, and a brief reflection on what advice they take or not and why.

4. In the AI Debate assignment, students choose a topic open to interpretation and use AI to formulate pros and cons. They then examine the soundness and depth of the AI-generated debates, determining which side appears more convincing. Then students challenge the AI’s arguments, pinpointing any logical fallacies, inconsistencies or uncited statements.

“Active learning through writing” emphasizes the instrumental role of writing in facilitating deeper understanding and engagement with the teaching materials. In the era of generative AI, writing can still be a transformative tool in the educational process, promoting critical thinking, reflection, and active participation in one’s learning, but it requires some shift in perspectives and redesigns. 

Bringing Consciousness to AI Use

If you want to move beyond the moral panic and fear that students are “cheating” by using AI, here are two assignments that look critically at AI’s construction, use, and implications. These assignments give us an opportunity to interrogate how a natural language processor works and some important voices in the AI conversation that often go overlooked.

Assignment 1: What even is ChatGPT

Cool, so. ChatGPT, the enemy of English professors and probably all professors everywhere, right? 

I actually think the premise of ChatGPT is great and if it’s a useful tool for you to get started in the writing process, then I fully support it.

But, if you haven’t already realized, ChatGPT also has the potential to create a sophisticated word salad without much meaning underneath what it produces. I guess all of this is to say that if you are going to use it, make sure you can back up your claims with real research.

I found this video (Can Computers Really Talk? Or Are They Faking It? | Season 1 | Episode 3 | PBS) from 2021 that explains how ChatGPT works (in case you don’t already know) which is a great starting point for understanding the benefits and limitations of this technology.

TLDR: ChatGPT puts sentences together based on statistical analysis, not word comprehension.

For this week, please

1) Watch the video

2) Ask ChatGPT questions to intentionally trick it

3) Record your questions and ChatGPT’s answers 

4) Give a brief explanation of how the ChatGPT generated text goes in a different direction than what you were prompting it to say

Happy generating!

Assignment 2: Learn Their Names: Dr. Joy Buolamwini, Sasha Costanza Chock, Timnit Gebru, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Erin Reddick

Behind the scenes of the AI explosion, there are researchers who are tirelessly sounding alarms of racial biases in AI and offering opportunities to create an inclusive and expansive experience for everyone. Since CUNY students represent the global majority, it is crucial that we hear from experts who understand and uplift that positionality. Over the next four weeks we’ll be moving away from whiteness and diving into the work of researchers who represent communities that are not historically centered and are crucial voices nonetheless.

Week 1: Pick one of these researchers and learn about their work either through a primary article, TEDTalk, video, website. Write a brief summary of who this researcher is in relation to other contemporary voices on AI, what you learned from this researcher’s work, and if what they presented has changed your view of the mainstream conversation around AI. 

Week 2: Pick a different researcher and learn about their work through the same method as last week. Write the same brief for this researcher.

Week 3: Pick one last researcher and learn about their work through the same methods as Week 1 and Week 2. Write the same brief for this researcher.

Week 4: Now with three different voices, write a piece that discusses the intersections of their work and what a better future of AI would look like for you and the people you love.

Dr. Joy Buolamwini: The Coded Gaze: Bias in Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Sasha Costanza Chock: Design Justice

Dr. Timnit Gebru: Data for Change

Dr. Ruha Benjamin: Race After Technology

Erin Reddick: ChatBlackGPT™️

It has been just over a year since ChatGPT, the game-changing generative A.I. [artificial intelligence] tool – stormed onto the scene of the internet and into the lives of nearly everyone who interfaces with the internet in their life and work. From its release on November 30th 2022, it has overwhelmed and forced changes to work patterns and methods across fields and disciplines, and has brought to the fore particularly fraught questions about the tool – a large language-based model chatbot – and its use in the classroom for educators. 

Significantly and fascinatingly, the edicts of OER [open educational resources] and OA [open access] are in mission and terms deeply related to the concept – and, indeed, the kinds of resources created and shared – openly – are those which have been used to train and create this mighty tool. OpenAI describes itself as, “Creating safe AGI [artificial general intelligence] that benefits all of humanity.” Unesco describes OER as: “Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.” The philosophies of both of these share a commitment to openly and freely sharing resources – without withholding access to information and technology from the world through paywalls and seeking to escape the confines of publishing and technological access historically as well as contemporaneously. 

But how can we square the situations that many notable published authors have found themselves in, when learning that their works have been used to train and develop this software – that some see as eliminating the need for attention to writing itself? Thousands of authors’ pirated books have been used to train the tool – from which there is no going back. How can we square the rights of published – and, in particular, living – authors with the reality that accessible texts – be they legally or illegally findable and usable on the world wide web – are used to train tools that completely change how we must think about writing in the contemporary world? 

Prompted by the urgency of generative AI both within and outside of our classrooms, we WAC fellows at City Tech, will examine the tool and how we might use it in the classroom in a series of blog posts. We aim to provide a realistic and thoughtful engagement with the tool and to take into account how significant this is for those of us weeking to incorporate the methods of WAC [Writing Across the Curriculum] into our classrooms for the benefit of our students and to improve and bolster their learning outcomes through the incorporation of writing in diverse and disparate fields and disciplines. 

This forthcoming series will reflect upon the continuing relevance of WAC principles in the age of AI, and will provide some practical examples of how to incorporate the principles into our teaching methods, ranging from how to encourage active learning through writing and fostering writing as a process in the age of AI. 

The most memorable lecture I ever attended was in an Economics class in my first year of undergrad. It was the last day of class before the final and the professor was delivering his “end of the year wrap up” — essentially covering a semester’s worth of materials in 75 minutes. He paced up and down the aisles of the large lecture hall, his words keeping cadence with hundreds of keyboards furiously typing in time. Towards the end of the class period, he grew quiet. The note taking slowed and we all settled into our seats as he stood at the front of the room, rubbing his suddenly-stopped jaw. He looked around and told us he had one last lesson to teach us, then he repeated a phrase that had been a staple of our semester in the class: “sunk costs are sunk.”

In terms of economics, sunk costs are those which have been incurred and are unrecoverable. We were taught in the class, from the very beginning of the semester, to ignore these losses when conducting any kind of future cost/ benefit analysis. The professor had used the infamous example of the Concorde as illustration, explaining how even after the supersonic airplane project was predicted to never cover its own losses, interested parties were blinded by their investments and continued working until it was completed, ultimately spending millions of dollars on a plane no longer in use.

When my Economics professor repeated this phrase, “sunk costs are sunk,” I assumed he was just reminding us of this ever-important rule for the final exam. He continued, however, to outline the greater fallacy at play. When we consider sunk costs, he explained, we are thinking irrationally. We are considering the past rather than the present or the future. “Just because we lost something in the past — time, money, happiness — does not mean we have to continue losing.” He used a range of examples to underscore his point, everything from putting down a book we haven’t finished because we find it boring; to ending a years-long relationship that no longer makes us happy. Just because we have invested in something, he said, does not mean we have to continue investing in it. We can never get back what we lost —  sunk costs are, after all, sunk — but we can lay claim to our future.

Before this lecture I’d struggled with he concept of sunk costs. I couldn’t necessarily understand why you wouldn’t include them in a financial analysis, but I accepted the rule as an obscure economic truth.  This personal application of the concept, this humanization of what I’d thought was an abstract principle, suddenly made the rule seem so obvious. It became easy to understand because I could see its application to reality, to my own life. WAC pedagogy, at its foundation, seeks to increase opportunities for this kind of more intimate student engagement and, while there are several researched and proven-effective ways of doing so, my favorite methods are those which specific encourage students to make learning personal in the way this professor did for me.

Writing Intensive curriculums are heavily centered around assignments and course designs which foster critical thinking. This is because critical thinking promotes, among other things, self-reflection, which then leads to “personally meaningful learning.” And when learning becomes personally meaningful, it sticks. The practice of improving engagement through writing and personalization has even been studied and proven effective. The Meaningful Writing Project (2016) was a landmark study which focused on students’ and instructors’ thoughts regarding what made a writing assignment impactful. The researchers, Michelle Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner, surveyed and interviewed graduating seniors at three institutions of higher education, asking them about the qualities of their most meaningful college writing experience. From the more than seven hundred student survey responses collected and over two-dozen instructors interviewed there emerged clear patterns in the kinds of writing tasks that students found most meaningful:

1. “The assignment gave students agency to pursue a topic that they were passionate about or that they found especially relevant.”
2. “The assignment required students to engage with the instructor, peers, and the disciplinary content of the course.”
3. “The assignment made a connection for students: connecting to previous experiences, connecting to a student’s passion, connecting to future aspirations and identities” (Bean 65).

As you can see, two of the three emergent patterns reference the students’ personal passion for or connection to the writing project, making it clear that this personalization is what engages students most. But how does one actually do this? How can instructors effectively integrate personal learning into courses that aren’t necessarily designed to include the kinds of creative writing assignments that inherently encourage more intimate writing? Engaging Ideas, the primary book used in WAC curriculum and the WI certification process, references exploratory writing and “open-form genre” assignments as means of encouraging personal connection and, therefore, more engaged learning among students. “These assignments can help us get to know our students better. We learn characteristic ways that different students think and study. We learn about their backgrounds and values and get insights into how we might engage them more fully or coach them more effectively. […] exploratory writing gives students a safe and easy way to disclose personal problems that may be affecting their studying or class performance” (Bean 95). These assignments can be something as simple as a daily journal writing task that asks students to relate a topic to their own life. An art history course might ask students to look for certain design principles in the architecture where they live; while a physical science course might tell students to keep track of all the laws of physics they witness at work in their day to day life. Exploratory writing can also be a creative assignment that asks students to write out an imagined debate-dialogue about a course concept between them and a friend. Such an assignment allows a student to defend a thesis from their own point of view, highlighting how they think and what their influences might be, while also forcing them to think critically and present an opposing point of view. The exploratory tasks can look any way you want them to, the point is for them to humanize the material in a way that makes it accessible — to “immerse students in complexity without being threatening.”

Within exploratory writing, the concept of “open-form” genres invites a kind of flexibility in student writing than can be really empowering. Open-form genres, such as literary nonfiction, “often celebrate playfulness, digressions, personal voice, […] or other characteristics that resist the smoothly mapped structure, predictability, and argumentative confidence of closed‐form prose. These open‐form genres often have a reflective, personal, exploratory, or inquiring stance; they often try to heighten or deepen a problem or show its human significance…” (Bean 48). Open-form assignments differ from thesis-driven assignments because they given students the freedom of both abstraction and personalization. Students are empowered to take a concept and extrapolate it outside of the context of the course and into their own lives.

One example of the way WAC pedagogy redefines writing assignments to encourage personal connection to course materials is by reimagining the materials as dialogical rather than just informational. “In addition to creating cognitive dissonance for our students, we need to show them that our course readings, textbooks, and lectures are not simply “information‐to‐be‐remembered,” as if nothing were at stake, but contingent perspectives embedded in a field of inquiry, analysis, and argument” (Bean 28, emphasis added). By redefining course materials in this way — as perspectival and subjective — students feel empowered to enter in a conversation with them, to interpret them through their own lens and take into consideration their own personal experiences. Students should be encouraged to view course concepts not as untouchable, informational realities outside their realm of influence, but rather as jumping-off points for their own critical thinking exercises. The example given in John Bean’s Engaging Ideas reads as follows: “Suppose a history textbook enumerates the “five causes of the Civil War.” Novice students are apt to regard these five causes as facts or “right answers” to be memorized for a test. To grow as critical thinkers, they need to see these causes as interpretations by historians—as meaning‐making analyses open to revision and debate” (28). To elaborate, making this lesson personal could mean challenging students to consider how this historical reality relates to them. While a “fact” of the Civil War is that it started over slavery, students might be asked to consider what non-negotiable civil rights issues might lead them to go to war. Their responses will be influenced by their own personal values: their upbringings, religions, personal experiences, etc., and this personal engagement will go farther than just exposure to the surface facts of a historical event, it will deepen their understanding of a human concept. Rather than just learning how the Civil War started, they’ll come to understand the complexities of organized violence within humanity. Furthermore, they’ll recognize that these histories are interpreted and reiterated by human-beings with their own unique perceptions, perhaps even seeing themselves as existing within this process of meaning-making.

It’s this freedom of relation to self that makes learning personally-meaningful and powerful. It’s what will get students engaged in learning and retaining information, maybe even decades later — while I have completely forgotten how to calculate a cost/benefit analysis, the concept of a sunk cost has never left me. If we want to achieve this kind of retainment, we have to allow and encourage a personal engagement with what we teach or it will always feel distant, unattainable, and, in the worst cases, uninteresting. WAC pedagogy and WI curriculums are designed to improve student engagement through this kind of humanization. There are tools to help make any discipline feel accessible and relatable to its students, to help them engage with materials and, hopefully, take responsibility for their own learning. If this is the true goal of our instruction, to get students to process and understand great concepts and complexities, not just remember information long enough to be tested, then we have to make it personal.

Bean, John C., and Dan Melzer. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. Jossey-Bass, 2021.

Last semester, I taught a 200-level English course called “Genre,” which I themed “Changing Natures, the Nature of Change.” We roamed through centuries and continents to explore how writers’ relationships to “nature” and the environment have shifted. We began by reading lyric poetry, moved to drama, and ended with science fiction. Along the way, I assigned scholarly articles that might help students more clearly understand the rules and abilities of each genre. But, at times, during our discussions, I could see that students weren’t quite grasping what made science fiction different from, say, fantasy or the domestic novel. What, they kept asking me, was lyric poetry again?

I began to reflect on my own knowledge of genre. When I was assigned to teach the course, I’d read almost no genre scholarship. My own dissertation was a genre study—the personal essay—and I was catching up on that conversation, but that, it seemed to me, was different. I felt I knew the essay inside and out not through reading about it but through reading it and through writing it. I have a career as a public-facing creative nonfiction writer and science writer—I published a book on the history and culture impact of air conditioning—and what knowledge I claim about the genre comes from contributing to it.

So why was I trying to get students to write about a genre they’d never attempted to write? Halfway through the semester, I transformed the final assignment into a creative writing task, and not without deep anxiety. How would I grade it? What was I doing, assigning creative writing when this was a literature seminar? Would the less writerly students rebel? Again, how would I grade it?

As it turned out, it worked better than almost any assignment I’ve designed, and I think, in reflecting on it, I might press out a few suggestions for instructors in other disciplines—in the humanities, certainly, but also in the natural sciences.

The assignment was simple. I tasked students with choosing one reading from the semester as an inspirational model. After studying it, the student would then write their own version. It would have a different plot, different characters, different voice, etc. But the genre would remain the same. Perhaps they would re-write the story from a different perspective. Or perhaps they would write their own micro-fiction about planetary exploration. I scaffolded the assignment by having students brainstorm an idea, write several drafts, review drafts with classmates, meet with me one-on-one about the idea, and, all along, write about the process, particularly its challenges.

When the students were well on their way to a final draft of their genre piece, I introduced the final part—and, actually, the true component—of the assignment. I wanted them to write a 3–4 page reflection that explained how their creation was representative of the genre, how it drew inspiration from one of the course readings, and how it connects to one of the claims in the scholarly pieces we read. I told them I was eager to read their creative work, but, really, I would focus on the reflective essays.

The results were compelling. The creative work was of a higher caliber than I expected, but I suspect it was because the task wasn’t simply to express themselves. It was both to draw inspiration from a work we’ve read (which requires close analysis and reflection), to imitate it, and then to work within (and perhaps break) the conventions of genre. The reflections stunned me in their clarity about how genres work, what was possible, and what fell flat in the drafting process. Students confronted firsthand how lyric poetry could become prosaic if they used a jargon-y word or how lengthy exposition in a sci-fi narrative can easily dull the reader. They had inhabited the genre first-hand, and the point wasn’t to create exhilarating works of fiction—though some had—it was to attempt what the authors they’d read had attempted and to reflect on it.

I think we underestimate the potential for creative assignments outside of the English department. First, the original act of creation engages students with a sense of ownership. This is theirs. So students tend to nurture and care for the work that goes into the assignment because they’re invested. Second, focusing on replicating genre gives students models to work from, which avoids the dreaded blank page of starting from scratch. Third, writing with a purpose beyond simply “analyzing” or “reflecting” but actually to communicate to a real person in a specific situation can enhance and clarify this assignment even more.

Let me try to open up that last point for anyone skeptical that a model creative genre might not exist in the natural sciences. Several swim to my head: Biology? Rachel Carson or Lewis Thomas. Physics? Richard Feynmann’s There’s Room at the Bottom or Albert Einstein’s elegant explanation of quantum physics through a train metaphor. Math? Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books. I could come up with more examples, but my point is simply that they’re there.

But won’t this take up precious time the students need to learn content? The goal is not to replace content-learning with creative noodling. It’s to use the context of compelling, public-facing writing to allow students to digest and communicate complex concepts to non-experts. I worry, when we teach students to regurgitate dense, academic jargon on its own terms, that students fail to understand how to use, explain, or build on those concepts. They can repeat the jargon exactly by rote, but any patient third-grader can do that. My point is that writing—and, specifically, the principles of writing across the curriculum, which can work alongside creative writing and more expressive writing assignments in non-literature courses—can help students become emotionally invested in assignments that assign them the responsibility to translate the course’s discipline-specific concepts to the general public.

Creative assignments need not be huge, final papers, and they don’t need to be fiction. (As an essayist, I bristle when people assume “creative writing” or “literature” is synonymous with “short story” or “novel.”) They could take the form of weekly, low-stakes first-person reflections on the non-human world outside the students’ homes, a typical genre of earlier generations of “natural historians.” They could take the form of a short dialogue between two competing theorists. Or they could attempt to narrate a dense, physics theory to a child—which requires that students understand exactly how it works, what to include and leave out. Higher-level, abstract thinking is crucial for every discipline, but it’s strengthened by combining it with narrative, with high-functioning thinking of the senses. Our brains do not naturally split into narrative and non-narrative disciplines. Homo sapiens sapiens are, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, hybrid beings, both bios and mythoi, the storytelling animal.

Now is the time. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a biologist and lyric writer, graces the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, and her book has allowed so many reader to understand the overlapping crises of ecosystem collapse, settler colonialism, and a failing political economy, all from a very human perspective. And Kimmerer’s work is not alone. Plenty of literary examples, both contemporary and historical, can be incorporated into our respective disciplines. The latest Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, edited by marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, with pieces on the natural world and the ethics of AI, is an excellent starting place.

After all, isn’t this one of the most pressing issues of our time? Atmospheric scientists, environmental journalists, and science writers are sometimes admonished for failing to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis in metaphor, images, and accessible language that a middlebrow reader can comprehend. Especially for the natural sciences, we need to train our students in rhetoric, genre, and compelling public-facing writing across the disciplines. We need to start seeing our disciplines as interdependent, all of them connected through story.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged education worldwide, forcing universities and community colleges in the U.S. to turn online. While there is immeasurable “learning loss” during the last almost three years, there is also an opportunity to ensure that writing is a tool of self-expression that engenders political, economic, and social change. In the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, college classroom has changed forever, and there is opportunity for more and different cross-curricular writing than before.

In a complex interconnected world of increased poverty and inequalities, cross-curricular writing has the power to give young people access to the academic and professional world.  If education is freedom, writing is the tool of self-expression to transform it. It is our duty, as teachers and students, to transmit that across our academic communities. We must interact with students’ assignments in a more meaningful way, so we go beyond reviewing grammar, spelling, and style.

From 2019 to 2022, during which I was teaching at Brooklyn College, I did my best to bring critical consciousness to the classroom. But this became particularly challenging when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, as not only the class turned online but students were also struggling to adapt to the new world as well as to concentrate on the writing and other assignment processes.

Our solution was to go together through the online learning process, so students had an active role to play on it instead of being a passive recipient of knowledge. For instance, we had collaborative writing assignments—when students had to work in zoom breakout rooms to write an analysis of one international organization—and research papers, which were divided into several steps during the semester, including feedback from me and the other students in the classroom.

Yet, it was only more recently, as a WAC fellow at City Tech that I had access to a broader variety of pedagogical strategies on how to best make writing a process of critical thinking for students. In the insightful “Engaging Ideas” by John C. Bean and Dan Melzer, there are a variety of ideas that apply to pedagogy in general and can be particularly helpful for engaging students in times of online learning. Let me share three strategies from “designing productive small-group task” (Bean and Melzer. Engaging Ideas, 2021, chapter 8) that I found most useful for online assignments and my reflection about how they help to overcome the challenges of online teaching.

First, the template strategy, in which the instructor provides a template frame to shape a short essay. Students must create the content, developing the argument for each section. What appeals to me in this strategy is that students are free for thinking but at the same time have a clear structure to guide and develop that thinking. Moreover, students usually have difficulty to develop their ideas in a structured manner or a way the reader can understand. This is particularly good for online teaching and addressing concentration issues: with clear guidance, procrastination and distractions become harder.

Second, the question-generating strategy, in which the instruction breaks the students into groups to brainstorm possible questions related to the topics in discussion. Students must select 2-3 best questions and explain why they are good ones. Although the format – breakout groups – is like what I did before, I wish I had known about this strategy before as it focuses on question-generating rather than on the students answering the questions I was posing. This strategy incentivizes students to collectively think and build arguments because they need to justify why a specific question matters as well as to try convincing each other. One of the online teaching challenges is that, given the environmental distractions, students need extra incentive to actively engage in class discussion and assignments.

Third, the evidence-finding strategy, in which an instructor asks students to use evidence to support an assertion. In my field, international relations, this means finding textual details from primary documents. The way of doing this online is breaking the students into smaller groups and suggesting a topic for them to find evidence. For instance, looking at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and world leaders’ official statement, both usually available online, for evidence to support their argument on whether some leader is violating a human right.  The beauty of this task is that often we learn together how evidence is actually selectively chosen. Since this task challenges students to search and prove a point, it incentivizes them to move away from distractions and try to convince their peers.

To transform education with WAC, we must take the opportunity of the pandemic and construct together the change we want to see.  The strategies already exist. It’s our job to adapt and use them for the online learning and teaching world, which came to stay.

 

Works cited:

Bean, John C., and Dan Melzer. Engaging Ideas. 3rd Edition, Jossey Bass, 2021.