Commencement season is in full swing across the country: in my little village on the northern California coast, a friend’s son gave the valedictory speech for his middle school with all of his admirers, including me, cheering him on. The next day, I attended the graduation ceremony for the five graduates of our local charter school, three of whom delivered “valedictories.” We were outdoors, looking through redwood trees out to the Pacific Ocean, and the young graduates had a theme: gratitude for the families and friends who had supported them to this point. Commencement at Stanford isn’t for another few days when graduate and legendary tennis star John McEnroe will address the graduating class. I won’t be there in person to hear McEnroe, though I will tune in to see/hear the address later. In the meantime, I have been tuning in to some of this year’s commencement speeches, as I always do this time of year, and I’ve noted some recurring themes. Credit: Williams College via Wikimedia Commons   One of these is the importance of listening—to yourself as well as others—that came up in speeches by host, producer, and author Oprah Winfrey (Tennessee State); actor Sterling K. Brown (Washington University); former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker (Bentley University); and former Senator Liz Cheney. Here's Winfrey: “When you get yourself quiet enough to listen, I mean really listen, you can begin to distill the still, small voice, which is always representing the truth of you from the noise of the world.” And Brown: “For me, the goal of higher education is the same overriding goal I have for my life. And that is to become the best next version of myself. And you’re the only one who can know what that is—if you give yourself the time and the space to listen to what is already inside of you.” Winfrey and Brown are urging grads to listen—really listen—to their best inner selves, but Baker reminds them that it’s important to listen to other people as well: “This whole thing about listening . . . it’s real. My mom was a Democrat, and my dad, who is now 94, is a Republican . . . Growing up, the dinner table at our house was a constant conversation. I had friends who lobbied to come by just to watch. Nobody’s motives were questioned when my mom and dad went back and forth on the issues of the day. Nobody threw anything. But people had plenty of opinions. There was only one rule. You had to listen more than you spoke. And when you spoke, you had to demonstrate some appreciation for what the other person was saying.” And finally, Senator Liz Cheney: “America cannot remain a free nation if we abandon the truth. So as you go out to change the world, resolve that you will stand in truth. Those who are trying to unravel the foundations of our republic. . . know they can’t succeed if you vote. So, Class of 2023: get out and vote. This means listening and learning, including—especially, from those with whom we disagree. Of course, many other themes are being sounded as well, from Academy Award-winning actor Michelle Yeoh’s advice to Harvard Law grads to value collaboration over competition: (“For every winner, there doesn’t have to be a loser. In fact, most success stories are less about competition and more about collaboration . . . The truth is, I could not have done any of this alone.”) to Senator Raphael Warnock’s challenge to Bard College grads to “find your passion” and then to speak out about it (“I challenge you to find that thing in the world that feels like such a deep moral contradiction that you cannot be silent. You have to express yourself; you have to stand up and try to make the world better.”) As I have read and listened to these speeches, I’ve thought they would make an excellent basis for an analytic writing assignment. Students could learn a lot by reading and/or listening to, say, ten or twelve of this year’s commencement addresses and then looking for patterns and themes, for similarities and differences in content, in style, in delivery. Such an assignment would work well done in pairs or small groups. Or students could emulate Bill Gates’s 2023 address to the graduates of Northern Arizona University, in which he writes the commencement address he wishes he had heard. The results of such assignments might come in many genres, from a traditional print analytic essay to multimodal presentations, from spoken word or hip hop to visual and verbal collages—all ways to explore their own futures. Congratulations to all this year’s grads, whose college careers have been marked by pandemic pressures and so much more. And congratulations to all the teachers of writing who have stood by them. ... View more

Amid the super-hype surrounding ChatGPT (and similar programs) these days–not just the predictable Little Red Hen “the sky is falling” response from so many, but the much more deeply informed critical analyses from AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton–it’s been hard for me (and I suspect for many teachers of writing) to sort through all the noise surrounding the issue of generative AI in order to think hard about our discipline, writing, and its future. Writing, like rhetoric, is a plastic art, shapeshifting to meet changing needs and circumstances and opportunities. Plato famously decried this plasticity, charging that writing would kill memory and hamper communication. And indeed, writing did challenge the centrality of memory, which has been further marginalized by all the writing “assistants” now at writer’s disposal. The slow, gradual shift from orality to literacy—and the blending of the two—accompanied huge changes in communication and commerce as well as in the way people experienced the world. The advent of the printing press marked another gigantic shift in communicative technologies, as did the subsequent industrial revolution.    An example of what DALL-E can do when prompted   Clearly, we are in the midst of another such cataclysmic shift, as machines not only aid human communication but—as hundreds of AI researchers and leaders are currently warning Congress as well as the world community—are close to taking over communication in ways that could have devastating effects. At such a time, scholars and teachers of writing need to be part of the conversation, working to define “writing” in the age of AI (and beyond), exploring what it means to be a human writer today, and making sure that scholars of writing and rhetoric are at the AI table. In addition, we need to be asking how our responsibilities to students are changing in light of the rise of AI. What are we preparing student writers to DO—and what should we be preparing them for? That’s where prompt engineering comes in, the goal of which is to use prompts—or really chains of prompts—to lead the burgeoning group of generative AI apps to do what the human engineers want them to do. As a brief article in Forbes recently put it, “Learning to get the best results from generative AI is a skill that needs to be learned and honed. . .” Easier said than done!  Assuming that human writers will, at least in the near future, be able to direct the writing that ChatGPT, Bard, and their brethren do, what is our responsibility in preparing these human writers: what abilities (and ethics) will they need to possess, and how should we teach them? In the Forbes piece, author and futurist Bernard Marr sums up the abilities prompt engineering requires: in addition to having a grasp of subject matter and being able to attend carefully to details, such writers will need skill in communication, organizational, data analysis, critical thinking, and high-level planning. At the end of the article, Marr suggests that students interested in pursuing prompt engineering look to the online course portal Udemy for online courses or to Next-Level Prompt Engineering with AI, which “promises to teach students to create effective prompts that will give them a competitive edge over everyone else trying to use AI to automate their tasks.” I plan to take a look at these online courses: I wonder if they have an ethical component, or if they are asking students to consider the short and long-term implications and consequences of what their instructions/prompts will yield. In the meantime, when I look at the list of skills needed to become a prompt engineer (and to earn salaries of over 300K a year), I see skills that are embedded in most if not all of the writing courses we teach. Are teachers of writing today paying more attention to prompt engineering and other “new” jobs emerging as a result of AI? More important, how can we make sure that we will have a voice in creating intellectually robust and ethical curricula for students pursuing such jobs?   ... View more

For some fifty years now, I’ve had two favorite times of year: fall term, when I’ve gotten to welcome first-year students to campus for orientation; and spring term, specifically May, when I’ve always been involved in student writing award ceremonies. It’s that second time of year again right now, and colleges and universities across the country are honoring students for outstanding work in writing—and increasingly, in speaking.  When I was serving as Director of Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric, we had an opportunity to redesign the writing curriculum and to create a new second-year course focusing on research-based writing and more specifically on the oral presentation of that research. I remember the excitement and the angst that went into designing and piloting this new course. Those were the early days of using “new” technologies in our classrooms, and we were learning to use the technology ourselves at the same time we were engaging our students in using it. (I am just thankful that my first attempt at a PowerPoint presentation was not recorded for posterity!)   Stanford University awards the Andrea Lunsford Oral Presentation Awards at the conclusion of every spring term   In the first year of teaching this new course, our students undertook significant research projects, presenting them first in written form and then, after considerable revision, in oral/multimedia form. We learned right away that our students loved the work of transforming a lengthy written essay into a 12-to-15-minute oral/multimedia presentation and that doing so inevitably sharpened their thinking and the point of their arguments. In fact, our students insisted, in that first year, on revising their written essays in light of what they had learned in “winnowing” them into oral presentations.  That was long ago, and now this assignment sequence is used by teachers and students across the country. And the course is still very popular at Stanford—and has gotten better and better as the Program in Writing and Rhetoric has refined and improved it. Just last week, the nominees and winners of the Lunsford Oral Presentation of Research Awards were honored at a reception, during which winners and their projects were introduced by their instructors, who presented them with several books, a certificate of merit, and a cash award. I attended the event virtually and was thrilled by the depth and breadth of research these students have undertaken—and by their poise and eloquence. I’ve since watched their presentations, and you can do so, too. The work these second-year college students are doing is inspiring, especially considering that these students suffered through the Covid pandemic. Topics included the resistance to monolingualism in general and standardized French in particular in a presentation titled “Investigating the Diverse Dynamics of English Language Borrowing in French Rap Music”; “When Disability and Design Meet”; “Professionalism of Black Hair: Workplace Standards or a Continuation of Bondage”; “How Not to Forget: Collective Memory on Social Media”; and “Where Have Our Mothers Gone? Remedying the Native American Infant and Maternal Health Disparity Crisis with Traditional Birthing Practices.”  In accepting the awards, these students invariably thanked not only their instructors but also their peers, commenting on how much they had learned from working together and on how much support they had received. So while each of the presentations was authored by one student, the importance of collaboration and the collaboration nature of the entire endeavor was mentioned over and over. Even though I was not there physically, the strength of the mutual admiration society gathered to celebrate exemplary research and equally exemplary presentation of it was palpable. In her magnificent poem “To Be of Use,” Marge Piercy says that a “thing worth doing, done well, has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.” These students’ work was surely worth doing (several commented that an “assignment” had turned into a “passion” that would continue to guide their studies), was surely done well, and surely took a shape that “satisfies, clean and evident.” It was an honor and privilege to be among these students.  I expect that teachers of writing across the country are attending similar ceremonies this month. How I wish I could meet some of the students winning awards for writing and speaking at their universities to offer congratulations–and thanks.   Image by King of Hearts from Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Ever since George Lucas mashed up Gene Roddenberry and J.R.R. Tolkien to create one of the most profitable movie franchises in cinematic history, fantasy has come to dominate the American box office—whether involving sci-fi space operas, sword-and-sorcery medievalism, extraterrestrials, superheroes, vampires, or zombies (just to name some of the most popular examples over the years).  So dominant has fantasy become that the question today isn’t whether any competing genre has emerged to challenge it but, rather, which sorts of fantasy are currently the most popular.  In the 1990s, for example, extraterrestrials seemed to be everywhere (The X-Files, Roswell), but they were eventually overtaken by vampires, who for quite some time looked like they would never be dethroned… until zombies came along, and then it looked like it was going to be all zombies, all the time, for all time.  But now superheroes rule the roost, with such one-time leaders of the cinematic super-pack as Batman and Spider-Man being currently eclipsed by Black Panther, Thor, Loki, Ant-Man, Shazam!, assorted Avengers, and a gang of Guardians that includes a highly precocious raccoon… just to name a few. The semiotic question accordingly becomes: what does the currently unstoppable hegemony of the superhero tell us? As is always the case in a semiotic analysis, we can begin to answer this question with the construction of a system of associations and differences. In the case of superheroes, that system begins with the invention of Superman in the 1930s, and extends forwards to every current star in the superverse (if I may coin a term).  What all these heroes have in common—and which is something that they share with such mythological heroes as Gilgamesh, Hercules, and Beowulf—is that they defend their societies from external threats and dangers.  The superhero, in short, offers the comforting reassurance that a fearsome world can be brought under control—that all, in the end, will be well, thanks to the superhero’s prowess and vigilance. But there is a significant difference between the dangers presented in the early Superman and Batman sagas—threats to American society that were generally posed by such masterminds of organized crime as the Joker and the Penguin—and the fundamentally cosmic threats that haunt the superverse today.  For today the danger is existential: the entire universe is at stake, and without a band of Guardians or Avengers standing between humanity and the super villains who threaten to destroy us all, we would be doomed to extinction. I think that the most likely (or abductive) explanation for the current preeminence of the existential superhero is to be found in the fact that we are not having a very good century.  From the events of 9/11 to the ever-increasing threat of environmental collapse posed by global warming (not to mention the after effects of the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic), things are not going well, and for the first time in their history Americans seem to be losing their traditional, and heretofore unshakable, optimism.  The current crop of superheroes accordingly reflects a growing uneasiness, a sense of implacable doom. But popular culture mediates, as well as reflects, social distress, offering for the price of theater admission a comforting reassurance that all, in the end, will be well.  An Avengers: Infinity War, in which half the universe is destroyed, is followed by a sequel, Avengers: Endgame, in which the dead are brought back to life.  When necessary, the hypothetical existence of multi-verses can be trotted out, along with time travel and other sci-fi expedients, to revive the dead and restore normality.  Thus, in spite of how terrible everything looks in reality, today’s superheroes offer not only entertainment but a kind of existential salvation.  Which, of course, is why such tales are called fantasies.   Photo by Craig McLachlan (2019), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more

In 2018, increasingly alarmed at the polarization and the vitriol characterizing too much of our national discourse, Tim Shriver (Chair of the Special Olympics) and some colleagues founded UNITE “to find ways to help ease divisions in our country.” The group soon began to focus on language as one major means of creating and exacerbating divisions, and by 2021 they were developing what they came to call the Dignity Index, a set of measures for determining the degree of contempt (or its opposite, which they call dignity) in political discourse, especially between or among people who disagree. Convinced that contempt causes division and that dignity eases it, they hypothesized that putting a spotlight on language that conveys contempt or dignity might reduce contempt and help ease the tension and division so evident in public discourse.  UNITE put their Index to work during the 2022 midterm elections in Utah, training scorers to rank political speeches. They found that “voters from opposite ends of the spectrum were able to agree on scores” and came up with three key findings: first, the Index attracted a lot of attention from people who wanted to learn about it and become trained in using it; second, while people tend to come to the Index thinking of it as a way to judge the speech of others, they soon begin applying it to themselves and their own speech; and finally, when people spent time with the Index, they came to recognize contempt as a major problem, and one that they have some agency in helping to solve.   The group went on to launch “Students for Dignity” at the University of Utah and other universities and to develop additional training materials and courses for others who want to learn how to use the Index to bring about change in communication and ultimately to “embrace a dignity culture.” You can read their 2023 report, "The Dignity Index: Utah Pilot Project Technical Summary," here. One passage from the report seems worth quoting in full: During Dignity Index development, UNITE team members reported something unanticipated: as the expression of dignity rises in conversation, so did curiosity, humility, vulnerability, and the ability to see the good in others and the flaws in oneself. Observations such as these underscore the premise that treating others with dignity and easing divisions and solving problems are the same set of skills. This suggests the Dignity Index could be a helpful tool in easing political division and supporting productive public dialogue. I was especially interested in the report’s description of what some students had to say about using the Index. One student said: “We started to apply the guide in our own lives. We were reflecting on it, we understood it, and we trained on it and talked about it." This comment that suggests that we teachers of writing might use the Dignity Index in our classes, preparing students to use it and then working with them as they apply it to discursive exchanges they are studying in class, to political speeches, and to their own language use. As I’ve studied the report and tried to learn more about the development of the Index, I have wondered about the choice of “dignity” as the best term to encompass the kind of open, respectful, care-full language they are advocating. I expect that for many students, “dignity” and “dignified” connote a kind of distanced stuffiness that resists the definition the UNITE team implies. I wonder if they considered and debated other possible terms, such as “respect” (which comes with its own set of connotational problems as well) or “good regard.” I think “respect” might serve as a better antonym for “contempt” for students today. But in the meantime, whatever terms are chosen, an index that has been tested as thoroughly as this one has and that allows us to take a close look at how our own speech and/or writing veers toward contempt or toward dignity warrants our attention. Check out the eight levels on the contempt-dignity continuum here.   ... View more

Instructors of writing are usually omnivorous readers. After all, we enjoy sentences, don’t we? As summer break inches nearer, my stack of “reward” books beckons. After hearing philosopher of science Lee McIntyre speak in an NPR interview, I couldn’t wait to dive into his engagingly written book, How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. The radio interview offers a galloping overview of his approach to persuasion — Rogerian in nature — based on the psychology of belief, and the intention to reduce a sense of threat. McIntyre says, I’ve been having these conversations with science deniers and with others around these topics [to understand] how to assess what it is that people care about. I think that that’s actually the route to changing people’s mind. McIntyre opens his book with his remarkable experiences at a Flat Earth Convention, where he challenges himself, with self-deprecating humor, to practice respectful engagement with science-deniers. His tips? “Remain calm. Be respectful. Engage them in conversation. Try to build some trust” (28).  McIntyre offers evidence of this approach’s efficacy in his radio interview: There are well-known cases, [like] Jim Bridenstine, who President Trump appointed to be the chief administrator at NASA. Bridenstine was a climate change denier when he was in Congress. He was only in NASA for I think a few weeks before he changed his mind on climate change, which was amazing. It was based on his conversations with NASA scientists. He knew the evidence, but it was when he met the people, he got to know them, he got to trust them. That’s when he changed his mind. I’ll invite students to read McIntosh’s radio interview transcript next time I teach Andrew J. Hoffman’s essay, “The Full Scope,” included in the “Sustainability and Environmental Studies” readings in From Inquiry to Academic Writing, co-authored with Stuart Greene. Like McIntyre, Hoffman understands that throwing facts at a skeptic is a tactic destined to fail. Hoffman notes, “We cannot scold, lecture, or treat people with disrespect if we are to gain their trust; and trust is at the center of an effective theory of change” (743). Both authors acknowledge the stakes of these conversations are high — think climate crisis, vaccine skepticism, and threats to public health departments nationally. And yet, these conversations are necessary if we are to survive this moment in history. Lee McIntyre and Andrew Hoffman acknowledge that they are calling us into challenging rhetorical spaces, and that we might fail occasionally. I’m glad I have a (slightly) slower season ahead to practice these rhetorical tactics. After all, being calm, respectful, and engaging people in trust-building conversations is the rhetorician’s take on The Golden Rule. It’s as simple — and difficult — as that. Happy reading! Photo by April Lidinsky (2023). ... View more

Photo by Susan Bernstein May 10, 2023 Dear Students,   As you might recall, I mentioned on the first day of class that I was returning to in-person College Writing for the first time since March 10, 2020. I spent four and a half semesters teaching online, and in the fall of 2022 I took a semester off.  During my leave of absence, I thought a great deal about showing up. The mandate to return to “normal” brick and mortar classrooms was difficult to imagine, in part because of the long commute, the inadequate access to good ventilation in those classrooms, and the prospect of teaching in those rooms without a mask mandate.  But I missed what a colleague calls “the affects in the room,” even as I did not miss the impenetrable bureaucracy of the university and the frustrations of adjuncting. Eventually, I decided to return, embodied, in person, to class. In other words, I made the decision to show up. It was a difficult decision and it feels now, at the end of the term that, glitches notwithstanding, it was an appropriate decision.  The commute was a hurdle, and I realized that part of the hurdle was showing up, taking up space in real time and not as pixels on a Zoom screen. Put another way, I no longer felt invisible. This feeling of visibility was at once exhausting and exhilarating, and perhaps exhausting because of the exhilaration. Once more I was climbing up three sets of steep staircases, running to catch trains and buses, and hoping at each transfer point to find an available seat to catch my breath.  I knew I was not alone in considering the labor of showing up, and I once again became aware  of the challenges you faced as students, at least in terms of “normal” classroom requirements such as attendance and engagement with assignments and other course materials. “Normal” is in quotes here because even before the coronavirus pandemic, I questioned the definition of “normal,” and how that definition was being used to elide critical issues impacting teaching and learning, in and out of the classroom. In the wake of the pandemic, as you might imagine, my questions have gained a greater urgency. As you undoubtedly know, college enrollment still falls below pre-pandemic levels. Folks who did enroll recounted struggles with balancing coursework and caring for their mental health, and also increased responsibilities at home and on the job. Some folks bypassing college enrollment welcomed the opportunity to earn money, and not to accrue financial aid debt. Additionally, and not insignificantly, traditional-age and FirstGen students reminded me that the pandemic school closures in our area impacted the middle of your teen-age years, and the middle of high school, junior and senior year. Your classroom experiences of “normal” seemed far different from university expectations of a “normal” classroom. Nevertheless, as another colleague suggested, students are showing up in the lives of their communities outside of school, on social media, and at protests across the country, much as young people across the country assembled for the 2020 protests of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. During the spring semester of 2023, students were instrumental in protests against gun violence and against the expulsion of two Black Tennessee state representatives, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, for joining the students’ protests.  1500 students also showed up in a walkout from their school in Kansas City, Missouri to support their classmate Ralph Yarl, who is Black after he was shot through a glass door by a white man. Ralph was attempting to pick up his siblings from a visit with a friend, but rang the doorbell at the wrong house. The white man claimed that Ralph was trying to break in, even as Ralph never touched the door. Even as I write, protests are ongoing seeking justice for  the death of Jordan Neely who was killed on a New York City subway train by another passenger.  My questions about showing up grow out of our work together this semester. What does showing up mean for pedagogy in the wake of a global pandemic that killed more than 1.13 million people in the US alone? Who benefits most from rigid institutional structures, including everything from adjuncting to assessment to attendance, from compulsory unpaid labor, to mandatory courses, to required class participation? What would happen for access, diversity, equity, and inclusion, if placement tests (including multiple measures for placement), remedial classes, and honors programs were eliminated?  Alongside these questions, I continue to ask myself how I am showing up in the classroom? Am I there to enforce institutional rules, or to offer spaces for students to grow as writers and, if possible, to (re)discover writing as a joyful process?   As this semester comes to an end, I at least have one response to that last question. In considering your multimedia projects, I more clearly understand how you have encountered James Baldwin this semester, and the multiple forms that your perceptions have taken. I archived your collages, videos, and memes in a video, and I felt inspired by your projects to include more in-class creative work. The moment seemed prescient, and I did not want to wait until next year to begin. In the last week of classes, we created a mural based on “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.” I brought art supplies to class, and asked you to choose a quote from “Artist’s Struggle” to illustrate. The quote could be from any of your previous writing for the semester, or one that you had not included in previous work. The quote needed to appeal to pathos as well as create a deeper connection to Baldwin’s lecture. My intention was to add the mural to the multimedia projects video, and eventually I made another video based on the mural itself. The panel I created for the mural used a blue and white surgical mask, and the tips of two broken crayons pointing to the mask. On the mask I printed a quote from Baldwin that I have returned to over and over again: “All safety is an illusion.” I wanted a new way of conceptualizing this quote, and, I realized, a new way of conceptualizing “Artist’s Struggle.”   Mural panel illustrates the quote “All safety is an illusion.”  Photo by Susan Bernstein May 11, 2023 “All safety is an illusion,” and, as Baldwin suggests, art uncovers illusions of normalcy and reveals struggles and challenges that might remain otherwise invisible to the general public. Art, in other words, is bearing witness to injustice, and bearing witness means engaging with difficulties and frustrations. Bearing witness means showing up, and showing up means embodiment with what matters to the ordinary and extraordinary, in and out of college classrooms.   Have a good summer and best regards, Prof. Susan ... View more

  This is probably a dangerous idea to advance right now when some of you have research papers proliferating on your computer or your desk like unmatched socks in the dryer. Or maybe you are one of the lucky ones who have finished grading! Do you remember courses you took, perhaps not even in your field of specialization, that required one massive research paper that counted for fifty percent or more of your final grade? That one paper could largely make or break your success in the course. And how many times have you read a student’s research paper and wished that student had another chance to fix what was wrong, but the term was essentially over? That’s why a number of years ago I started assigning a series of research papers on the same topic so that students could refine their use of sources while there was still time to learn. From the first of the semester, students had been using sources that were in their textbooks and learning to document the use of sources to incorporate paraphrases and direct quotations into their own texts. With the three final essays, students worked with a topic of their choice, contingent on my approval, and their independent research. Students were encouraged to think carefully about the topic and write a proposal that was designed to head off some fairly predictable problems. The proposal assignment asked students to conceptualize how three different thesis statements could be crafted on the topic: a claim of fact, a claim of value, and a claim of policy. I asked students to provide a short list of possible sources to ensure that the students researched the topic enough to determine whether there was enough information available to write about it. One advantage for students is that the same information can be used for all three papers. If students document the first paper correctly, they should find the later papers are fairly easy to document. The number of sources can change as necessary, as can the specific sources used, but portions of the first essay can be used in the later essays. Of course, if there are serious problems with the choice of sources or how they are used, there is a chance to correct that in the later papers. What changes for all students is the purpose of each paper, which shifts with the type of claim being supported. A claim of value is a bit more difficult to support than a claim of fact and a claim of policy the most challenging of all. The final paper must be addressed to an audience in a position to do something about the situation being discussed, so there is a more persuasive element to the final paper. Does all of this sound like an incredible amount of work for the instructor? Keep in mind that with the second and third papers, the instructor is seeing, with most students, at least some student writing that he or she has seen before—and corrected. I require that the first, marked essay be turned in with the second and the first and second with the third.  For most students, the papers get easier to grade as they go through the sequence, and one of the biggest pluses is the growth that can be seen in the students who started out with a weak first paper. working hard during study hall  by mrskradz is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

In what seems like an eon ago (well, 1983 to be exact), Lisa Ede and I published an anecdotal essay in Rhetoric Review called “Why Write . . . Together?” recounting our experience of co-authoring and questioning the model of the solitary author. In 1986, we published a research update on this question and on our ongoing research into the ubiquity of collaborative writing everywhere, it seemed, except in the academy in general and in English departments in particular.  We went on to write a book (Singular Texts / Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing) and a collection of essays (Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice) that furthered our argument, and we both continued to write collaboratively and to teach students to write collaboratively. We were convinced that writing, one of our oldest technologies, is thoroughly collaborative—that even when we are writing alone at our desks, we are in conversation with many others whose voices help to animate and shape what we write. We spent most of our efforts over several decades focusing on the third word in our title: “together,” rather than the first two: “why write?”  But today, the rise of artificial intelligence in general and the proliferation of chatbots in particular signal a need to revisit the question of “Why Write?” If AI can produce texts for us, why should we write? This is a question teachers of writing are beginning to put to students across the country (and perhaps the world). It’s a question all teachers of writing should be thinking about and answering for ourselves—and then asking our students as well.    This image was generated by OpenAI's DALL-E.   I’ve tried to do just that by making a list of all the writing that I do and then trying to decide which I would be glad to ask a chatbot to take over—and which I would insist on retaining for myself. I have been surprised by how little of the writing I do I really want to relinquish, at least after giving the question serious thought. At first, I was attracted to the idea of asking some digital “writing assistant” to summarize works for me—and that is still attractive. But then I started thinking about what I would lose in the process: all the thinking, the analyzing, the synthesizing that goes on when I summarize something, and I had second thoughts.  How about asking such an “assistant” to write a tenure review? During summers when I undertook to write five or six such reviews, I often wished for help! But on reflection, again, I thought of what I would lose if I relegated that assignment to ChatGPT or its cousin. I gain enormously from reading and studying the scholarly work of colleagues: I wouldn’t want to give that up. These reflections led me back to the question, “why write?” It seems clear that I write to think and to learn, for a start. I also write to make connections with others I care deeply about. And I write to try to understand myself and my relationships, my dreams and goals, and my failures. Could an AI “assistant” help with such writing? Maybe. But also maybe not. I think the time is ripe for a nationwide asking of this question, posing it to all students in all our classes. What writing would they gladly give up—and why? And what writing do they want to hold on to—and why?  Asking and answering these questions will be valuable in themselves. But doing so will, I believe, also be useful for scholars of writing. At this very moment, we need to take a deep breath and a step or two back and engage in some basic definitional work. What, today, IS writing? (And how can we best define it? What theory or theories can account for and support it?) What, today, IS a writer/author? And what, today, IS collaborative writing—what are its modes and modalities, its varying permutations? These deceptively simple questions are enormously complex, calling for the very best thinkers about the writing and rhetoric to engage them. But they are also very exciting, since probing them, playing out different responses to them, creating and testing new definitions will help us pave the way for our own future. ... View more

My previous three posts have looked at pedagogy and plagiarism, the nuts and bolts of AI in first-year writing class. However, I have, in a sense, been skirting around the core question for instructors and students of college composition: Do artificial intelligence programs make the teaching and learning of “academic writing” irrelevant? If ChatGPT can respond in a reasonable and clear fashion to most college writing prompts—and will doubtless do so with much more style and substance in the future—is there any need for students to take on that task themselves? Cynically, one might argue that just as Spell Check and autocorrect made proofreading skills less essential for developing writers, the far more sophisticated ChatGPT obviates the need for college composition altogether. Of course, as any instructor knows, spelling and grammar checks are only semi-successful without human oversight, and if a program as simple as spellcheck is flawed and in need of human assessment, how much more crucial will it be for the members of Generation AI to be able to evaluate, analyze and call out AI writing gone wrong. The skills that AI exhibits with such apparent effortlessness—the ability to summarize a complex topic, say, or formulate an argument—are the same skills humans will need to assess the validity of those summaries and arguments. Indeed, the power and potential of ChatGPT will require humans to become smarter, more aware and less credible than we have been to date. Perhaps just as important as strengthening our cognitive skills will be the need to double down on the development of our non-cognitive abilities, and instructors will have to model behaviors they want their students to emulate. Ray Schroeder, a senior fellow at UPCEA, the online and continuing education association, urges faculty to “continuously grow our own personal, uniquely human, capabilities such as our ethos, empathy, care and insight into our fellow humans. These will continue to set us apart from AI, for a while.” The ability to experience feelings and sensations, which no trustworthy source has yet made for ChatGPT, continues to be the dividing line between Us and It. “The difference between the AI and the human mind is sentience,” says Boris Steipe, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto. “If we want to teach as an academy in the future that is going to be dominated by digital ‘thought,’ we have to understand the added value of sentience—not just what sentience is and what it does, but how we justify that it is important and important in the way that we’re going to get paid for it.” Hopefully, becoming more human will help steer us away from one of the gravest sins fomented by the AI revolution: having less trust in our students. Yes, some of them are blithely using ChatGPT without regard for the ethical implications of cheating, but many others are not, and we do the educational process a disservice when we carelessly assume the worst about what is happening outside our classrooms. Two recent Washington Post articles describe the damaging effects of AI-related mistrust. In one, a high school senior has her essay erroneously flagged by Turnitin’s new AI-writing detector. The student, Lucy Goetz, comments that being “caught” by Turnitin, which claims only a 98% accuracy, is frightening because “There is no way to prove that you didn’t cheat unless your teacher knows your writing style or trusts you as a student.” As the article’s author points out: “Unlike accusations of plagiarism, AI cheating has no source document to reference as proof.” And then there is memoirist and teacher Brian Broome, who asked his students to write a poem, then reflexively assumed one person had cheated because his poem was so strong, yet he was “a taciturn and unassuming young male student.” When he realized his mistake, Broome apologized to the student, who was “flattered by the praise” and indicated that “he wants to write more.” Broome concludes: “I can only surmise that, because of my mistake, he now knows he’s quite good at [writing]. And if that’s what progress looks like, I’ll take it.” ... View more

    The most recent politician to declare their candidacy for president in 2024 is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., one of America’s best-known anti-vaccine activists. Earlier in his career Kennedy established a reputation for himself as a prominent and respected environmentalist. When he shifted his focus in 2005 from toxicity in the environment to the alleged toxicity of childhood vaccines, however, he caught the attention of parents who distrusted vaccinations and believed that they were linked to autism in children or other medical problems. This case is an intriguing example of how Kennedy’s notoriety persuaded parents to accept his claims and refuse the substantial body of research that proved vaccines are safe. Rolling Stone published his article “Deadly Immunity” in 2005 where Kennedy warned that children were being harmed by the preservative thimerosal in childhood vaccines. The truth was that by 2001, thimerosal had been removed from all childhood vaccines. Kennedy went beyond using fraudulent data to misrepresent his sources. An article published in Scientific American, which analyzed his misuse of sources, details how he took quotations from authorities out of context to misrepresent what those authorities said and ignored basic rules for documenting research. Even Kennedy’s family eventually went public in an attempt to distance themselves from his faulty scholarship and extreme views. Their open letter is reprinted in the most recent edition of Elements of Argument. His niece and two of his siblings state, “We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment. However, on vaccines he is wrong. . . . He is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” Kennedy’s famous name seems to lend him authority and therefore, people who distrust vaccines rely on him to defend their beliefs. Those who are not familiar with his earlier writing about childhood vaccines may remember his recent opposition to the COVID-19 vaccines. An AP article in the Chicago Sun-Times summed up his extremism: “Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. He has apologized for some of those comments, including when he suggested that people in 2022 were worse off than Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for two years.” Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, also stated in an article by the New York Times: “His conduct ‘undercuts 50 years of public health vaccine practice, and he’s done it in a way I’ve never see anyone else do it. He is among the most dangerous because of the credibility of who he is and what his family name has brought to this issue.’” Will the fact that Kennedy continues to spread misinformation about vaccines in the face of indisputable scientific facts affect his presidential bid? Only time will tell, but in order to move past the violent division that the country has experienced over the past few years, America needs a president that leads with integrity. "39 RFK Jr"  by Felton Davis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jeffrey L. Jackson, a writing instructor at SUNY Cortland. "Tell us what you're feeling," a student asked me. She was the only one willing to speak. The rest of the class sat in silence as I cried in front of them. The video clip of a little boy calling his father a liar left me defenseless. The father fought to protect his son from financial hardship. The boy saw through the lies and reminded me of my own struggles as a young parent years before. I shared that with my class and realized for the first time, I had completely let my guard down in front of my students. ... View more

For the last several weeks, I’ve been talking with teachers of writing around the country, asking about how their classes are going this term. What they have told me has been very sobering, and it corroborates what I’ve been reading in reliable national media sources about the fallout students and teachers are experiencing after the worst of the pandemic has (we hope) passed. National studies reveal drops in enrollment, some of them dramatic, as well as withdrawal from classes at an all-time high. Student learning seems to have been significantly affected at the K-12 level and, increasingly, reports from college campuses also raise the alarm: students seem changed, and they are in need of a great deal of support and help—whether they know it or not.     Among the teachers I’ve talked to most recently, several themes emerged. One involves attendance and engagement: one teacher said that her students, who are now attending class in person, attend class haphazardly, dropping in and out. When they are there, they seem as if they are very easily distracted or trying to do several things at once, as if they are still on Zoom where they could turn their cameras off. Keeping conversations on track, and especially keeping students actively engaged, seems harder than ever. Other teachers talked with me about a dramatic increase in accommodations of almost every imaginable kind, and about the mental health issues students are facing. Designing a course that can meet the needs of all students is a challenging task—one reason I always think of excellent teaching as more of an art than a science—and the task now seems exponentially more difficult, as teachers try to respond not just to the need for accommodations but to challenges presented by the very hot culture wars, with trigger warnings, cancel culture, and book/author banning ever present.  Finally, teachers talked to me about student fragility as well as student resistance—maybe not resistance so much as fear or anxiousness around learning. Writing theorist James Moffett wrote years ago about the dangers of agnosis, which he defined as “the will not to know,” a kind of willful ignorance. Students today face a world of issues, events, even facts that they may simply wish not to know—and who can blame them?! As a result, they are sometimes reluctant to read or engage topics that in some ways simply overwhelm them. But they may also resist reading—print texts especially—because they are so accustomed to sound bites, video, and short snippets of text. Asked to respond to a 12-page article that had been assigned reading, one student responded, simply, “TLDR.” That is, “too long; didn’t read.”  These conversations left me feeling at least partly glad that I am retired and no longer teaching except for occasional gigs. I say “partly,” though, because the teachers I talked to weren’t giving in, throwing in the towel. Rather, they were doubling down on their efforts to design classes, assignments, and activities that would meet students where they are and engage them, that would in Piagetian terms be just ever so slightly ahead of students, holding the bar out just a little in front of them to challenge but not discourage them. And they are asking students to help create such assignments and activities, to assume agency and become co-teachers as well as co-learners. For these reasons, I’d really love to be back at full-time work, back in a place I have always loved best: the writing classroom. What challenges are your students facing in these post-pandemic times? And how are you responding to them? Do you have stories like the ones teachers have reported to me?   Photo by marco fileccia on Unsplash ... View more

The corner I where I need to turn: Trees, a tall building, an airplane,  a pigeon sitting atop a streetlight, and a bus stop sign underneath a mostly cloudy sky. Photo by Susan Bernstein April 27, 2023 On Instagram, I follow #morningpages, a collection of writing, art, prompts, suggestions, and aphorisms inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way,  that amplify  engagement in creative activities first thing in the morning, before the day begins. I had started the semester journaling in my lesson plan book, but soon realized that I needed a smaller book, something that would fit in my crossbody bag and that I could easily reach and that would not be cumbersome or take up space from other commuters on public transit. I found a little book that was just right, and, with that problem solved, I came up with my own version of morning pages that initially was dedicated to reviewing my lesson planning and reflecting on recent classes. My journal of morning pages: Detail of a black unzipped cross body bag with  a small journal and a pen emerging from the opening. Photo  by Susan Bernstein April 28, 2023 But after spring break, a new predicament arose. Emerging from the subway and crossing the street, I noticed a new construction project blocking the bus stop. There was a notice on the back of the bus stop sign that stated the cross streets of the temporary stop. But this part of the city, a hub for public transit, is organized only partly on a grid, and some of the cross streets twist and turn. I decided to follow the grid, trying to follow other commuters who appeared to be searching for the new stop.  But that impromptu plan did not work. I found the new bus stop only by accident. My new plan, asking other commuters for directions, and trying to remember landmarks that would guide me to the correct location, also wasn’t viable. I tried mapping the route before leaving home, but the directions included curves and merges on paths that were difficult to follow in real time. On the street I lost internet access, so GPS didn’t work either. Every single time, after extending my already long commute by several minutes, it was only by coincidence that I found a bus to campus. My neurodivergent affordances were overloaded. Somehow, I needed to stay mindful of the landscape of the streets, and  retrain my brain to duplicate that new geography, so I turned to my journal of morning pages. I vented new and old frustrations and saved a final paragraph to briefly review my lesson plan. Then something unexpected happened. Frustrations vented, my head cleared and I was ready to figure out another way out of my dilemma. I followed the street grid to the nearest available bus stop, and asked the driver how to get to campus. They mentioned the bus I needed, and also where the temporary bus stop was probably located–just around the corner on a street that eventually curved into a wider boulevard.  Fragment from my journal of morning pages handwritten in black ink on lined paper: “[waiting] for the bus and very shortly afterward  the bus that I’m on now showed up.  I took photos to remember the visual landmarks. Relief! ♥️” Photo by Susan Bernstein April 28, 2023 Although my writing process often changes with each new project, I noticed some similarities between creating these morning pages and searching for the correct bus stop: Contemplation, trial and error, venting, drafting, discovery, and relief. Most significantly, however, is that writing helps me process dilemmas and–in this case, duplicate a new geography–from journal pages to everyday life. Beyond my commute and outside the classroom, the larger world presents innumerable distractions and difficulties that overload the brain. While these ever present struggles remain, I am grateful that writing a journal of morning pages holds the potential to ease working memory and to open spaces for focus and relief. ... View more

A number of years ago in those long-lost days before Turnitin.com, I found myself experiencing a distinct sense of deja vu as I was reading a batch of student papers written in response to an assignment in my literary criticism and theory class.  Haven't I read this sentence before? I asked myself, and decided accordingly to conduct a Google search on it to see what would happen.  You already know where this is headed:  the search turned up an entire student essay that had been posted online in response to a similar assignment at a different university.  This compelled me to look over all the papers I had already read and graded, while putting me on the alert for those that I hadn't read yet.  In the end, I found five papers, out of a class of 35 students, in which pretty much the entire online paper had been copied and presented as original student work. I am reminded of this experience as I ponder the significance of an opinion piece by Inara Scott (an associate dean for teaching and learning in the College of Business at Oregon State University) published recently in Inside Higher Education.  Entitled "Yes, We Are in a (ChatGPT) Crisis," Scott's essay is a clarion call to everyone in higher education about just how big a problem (not "challenge;" problem) ChatGPT already is.  Lest you think that I am exaggerating, I am going to quote an entire paragraph of Scott's in full:  "Back in January, I, like many others, thought we could design our coursework to outwit students who would rely on AI to complete their assignments. I thought we could create personalized discussion questions, meaningful and engaged essay assignments, and quizzes that were sufficiently individualized to course materials that they would be AI-proof. Turns out, I was incorrect. Particularly with the arrival of GPT-4, there is very little I can assign to my undergraduates that the computer can’t at least take a stab at. Students may have to fill in a few details and remember to delete or add some phrases, but they can avoid most of the thinking—and save a lot of time. GPT-4 can write essays, compare and contrast options, answer multiple-choice questions, ace standardized tests, and it is growing in its capacity to analyze data—even a lot of data—that is fed to it. It can write code and make arguments. It tends to make things up, including citations and sources, but it’s right a lot of the time" (ChatGPT is causing an educational crisis (opinion) (insidehighered.com)). What I find especially striking about Scott's observations is how they go beyond the concerns of composition instructors to encompass, at least potentially, pretty much every subject taught in our universities.  The apparent fact that ChatGPT can take multiple choice and standardized tests, as well as write code, indicates that it has already invaded the terrain of STEM coursework, which can be heavily dependent on multiple choice and standardized testing.  At the same time, as Scott points out, there appears to be no way that instructors of wholly online courses can control the situation at all, short of failing every exam that shows over 50% of AI-generated content. This would probably not go over very well with administrators who have come to rely on online course offerings more than ever, in what I have heard called "the post-COVID" era, and who are also under extreme political pressure to show ever-increasing levels of "student success." Now, Scott is so worried about the future of higher education in such a climate that she offers both short term and long-term solutions to the problem as she sees it—solutions that I will let you read and judge for yourself.  For myself, I will only say here that what America is facing today is not only an educational crisis; it is a cultural crisis of immense significance.  For here is a paradigm shift to beat all paradigm shifts, a prospect that seems to fulfill the nightmarish vision of Kubrick and Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Will our class rosters present us with students who are all (in effect) named HAL?  And with ChatGPT writing code, will even the white collar, postindustrial workforce also be composed of indistinguishable HALs? I would suggest asking your students to write an essay contemplating such a world, but since the likelihood is that you will only get back an AI-generated essay, I will refrain from that.  It would make a dandy in-class discussion topic, however. And, not so by the way, this blog, though written on a computer, is entirely human authored.  But if some bot were to pick it up and toss it into the giant aggregation maw that feeds AI development, it could end up in a student essay some day in response to an assignment on artificial intelligence and culture change. Oy vey.  Somehow, I don't think that HAL would say that. Photo by Shantanu Kumar (2023), used under the Unsplash License. ... View more