The purpose of the course:
The purpose of this course is to extend graduate students’ understandings of writing theory and pedagogy, with an emphasis on the ways in which both are undergoing revisions in the age of AI–or more precisely, generative AI (GenAI), which is reshaping what it means to compose texts of varying genres and modalities across contexts of school, work, and leisure.
The recent “drop” of ChatGPT just three short years ago (followed by the veritable flood of proprietary tools like Gemini, Dall-e, Sora, and others) has led to a great deal of anxiety in educational settings, even as it is also now leading to wholesale reimaginings of teaching and learning, including especially in contexts of writing instruction. Those who follow job applications in English Studies will have already noticed the emergent (and steadily increasing) ads for tenure line positions in “Writing Studies and AI,” “AI and Literacy,” and so on, signaling an immediate professional demand for deep engagements with the changes underway. In alignment with such hiring practices and the rapid emergence of new research agendas tied to AI, this course aims to provide graduate students with relevant, marketable knowledge of GenAI and the types of pedagogical, curricular, and institutional adaptations underway.
Why you should take this course:
Whether you see this moment as a wild new frontier, as a second industrial revolution, or as an apocalyptic disruption to our economic, environmental, and social and cultural systems, you cannot sidestep its implications. Any graduate of an MA or PhD program in the humanities will need to be able to answer job interview questions about GenAI, discuss how it can be negotiated effectively, analyze what its implications are for institutional work or classroom instruction, and explain how it articulates with contemporary literacy practices. In short, you will need to understand the intersections of AI and literacy education in ways that are conceptual, theoretical, practical, and professional. This course aims to help you in that endeavor.
What the course will entail:
The course will thus engage you in a balance of theory-building and practical application; you will read critical theories of technology and rhetoric, especially foundational ones broadly valued by the “Computers and Writing” community (which has had its own conference for almost 40 years now). You will also read popular press (eg: the New York Times) and general academic (eg, The Chronicle of Higher Ed) accounts of GenAI as it is being adopted in both work and educational environments. In addition to reading, writing regular responses to, and discussing such materials in traditional graduate seminar fashion, you will also be experimenting with GenAI tools for reading (Notebook LM), researching (Gemini), composing and revising texts (ChatGPT), creating images (Dall-e2), generating and editing video (Sora), and producing music (Suno). You will be teaching each other these tools in student-led workshops throughout the semester, all the while critically interrogating the tools’ and the teachers’ changing roles within worlds of work and education.
The (broad) audience for the course:
Because this course is the ENG 705 seminar and not 709, the teaching of writing will be the through-line of our inquiries and explorations. That said, however, the course is still under the umbrella of Composition and Rhetoric and more broadly English Studies (and even more broadly, the humanities), so plenty of room will be made in the course for significant considerations of rhetorical studies as well as interdisciplinary theories, ethics, and practices. Graduate students across all areas of English Studies—and even in adjacent fields, such as Women and Gender Studies and American Studies—will be able to examine their own professional and disciplinary interests within the theories and practices that we will be studying.
Requirements:
No prior knowledge of Composition and Rhetoric is absolutely required, but it will certainly serve as an effective foundation, as will previous study in critical theory, literacy, ethics, and/or pedagogy.
Likely Assignments:
- Weekly readings
- Informal online responses to readings and discussions
- Team-led collaborative workshops in GenAI tools
- low-stakes composing activities using AI tools
- A major critical, creative, or practical project appropriate to your professional, scholarly, and/or pedagogical interests: options will include a traditional scholarly article, a course design curriculum project, or a multimodal composition integrating and interrogating GenAI.