Hayden Kindrat is pursuing his PhD in English Literature at Stony Brook University (SUNY), with a focus in American and Anglophone literature, science fiction, and environmental fiction and ideas (all in the mid-twentieth century). He has taught courses in Stony Brook's English Department and Department of Writing and Rhetoric. He lives in Queens in New York City.
What do you think is the most important recent development or pedagogical approach in teaching composition?
Generative AI, for sure. I don’t think any development in the past has had so much potential to disembody and disincorporate the actual process of writing to such a degree. Students are using AI to write papers, AI-generated papers are being published in academic journals. When we read it, we can usually intuitively sense that something is wrong, but we can’t always put our fingers on why; we are already talking about using AI to detect AI writing.
It is especially important, too, because of its consequences on morale, which we’re already seeing. It is challenging for instructors; it has necessitated a presumption of guilt, so that we feed our students’ work into specious and faulty detection software; there is an atmosphere of paranoia shared in by students and instructors alike. Every semester for the last few years I have had students approach me with their concerns about their work being arbitrarily flagged for plagiarism, and every semester I receive papers that have clearly been written using AI — but I do not have the tools or the resources to definitively prove it, because the technology is evolving and changing faster than institutions can adapt.
It already seems like it is necessitating a total overhaul of how we administer even the most basic and fundamental writing instruction, and a reconsideration of what is or should be sought or valued in student writing. It’s disorienting to think about!
What is the most important skill you aim to provide your students?
Probably to think meaningfully and critically and what they write, how they’re writing, and all of the other processes that go into writing. And, of course, to think the same way about what they read or otherwise consume. I use the word “consume” because I think, with the way we are inundated with information and sensory input, deliberation tends to go out the window. We’re basically being conditioned to take information about as consciously as we take in oxygen. To take in as much as possible, as quickly as possible. I think it’s important to impart to students that everything they take in can and should be scrutinized for how it works, what it is saying, what the purpose or the intent behind it is, the nature and logic of its rhetoric, and so on.
In college writing courses, this is especially relevant to argumentation. Encouraging students to slow down, to think about what they’re saying, the best way to say it depending on the audience, and what evidence needs to be provided to actually convince an audience of something, is key — and one way to do this is to teach them to parse these same elements in the things they read, see, watch, and hear.
Hayden's Assignment That Works
Below is a brief synopsis of Hayden's assignment. For the full activity, see Database Scavenger Hunt.
This activity is designed to acquaint WRT 102 students with the databases accessible to them through Stony Brook University’s libraries. It takes place in the classroom. I usually set aside forty-five minutes to an hour for this activity.
Students are asked to bring their laptops to class, and to break into groups of four. I give the entire class a search task to complete which will involve the use of advanced search options, database directories and research guides, boolean operators (AND, OR), and phrase searching with quotation marks, which they’ve become glancingly familiar with prior to this activity. The first team to complete the task gets a point (candy, extra credit, etc), but they have to demonstrate for the class how they arrived at their search result on the classroom’s overhead.
Some of these tasks involve whittling down massive search results by whatever means they can think of, from hundreds of thousands of results, to hundreds, to a single search result. For example: “Make a search query involving ‘Shakespeare’ that yields a single search result.” Others involve using date ranges, such as “Find me the earliest mention of Stony Brook’s mascot, Wolfie, in a newspaper,” or, “Find a contemporaneous review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or, “Tell me something about the Long Island Railroad in 1976.” Others still are a bit more open ended, such as “Find me a weird New York State animal fact.”
I’ve done a variation of this activity later in the semester, after students have chosen their research topics and we have discussed “scholarly” and “popular” sources and Joseph Bizup’s BEAM method. Students work individually or in groups to find articles, and also to evaluate the articles in real time. I’ve found that responses tend to be interesting in what they reveal about how deeply students are thinking about the nature of the information they’re pulling, potentially for sources and evidence in their own writing. Some get very nitty-gritty with the advanced search features of a given database, others sidestep it all and wade into the morass of thousands or even millions of results for a basic query. And almost every time I do this assignment, I have a couple students who just try to use Google, which can create some problems when it comes to actually accessing an article behind an institutional paywall.
