I’m Andy Famiglietti, a professor of Digital Rhetoric and Digital Humanities here at WCUPA. In this guest post, I want to briefly explain how I’m trying to adapt how I teach writing to match the needs of students in our current era of AI writing tools.
Whereas a lot of the discourse surrounding the response of college classrooms to AI tools has focused on either prohibiting these tools or incorporating them directly into our teaching, I have taken a slightly different approach. I am trying to help students build rhetorical skills that will have value to them regardless of what kinds of writing tools they may have access to in the future.
I’ve chosen to do this in part because my sense of the AI landscape is that it is currently changing too quickly for us to be able to prepare students for any single concrete “AI future” they may graduate into in four years. This is both because new AI tools with new capabilities are being released at a very rapid pace and because our understanding of what these tools can do (or perhaps can’t do) is also very much in flux as third party research attempts to evaluate the claims made by tool vendors.
I’ve also chosen this particular approach to adapting my writing pedagogy because my own research shows that students are deeply ambivalent about AI writing tools. During a series of IRB approved focus group discussions of AI tools that I held during spring semester 2024, students frequently expressed mixed feelings about the use of AI tools in writing. They were often interested in engaging with these tools and curious about the benefits they might offer, but also concerned that they might negatively impact learning or pollute their information environment.
In one particularly poignant exchange, a student remarked that she used “AI a lot for sentence structure” because she had “always been told that [her] writing is super wordy.” She was happy to have access to “a tool that’s able to help” with this writing problem, but also said that “I wish I could do it myself with my own brain.”
In response to this ambivalence, I’ve tried to focus my writing instruction this semester on rhetoric. For me, this means a focus on how writers make choices in their writing that reflect the needs of their audience and purpose. For the student quoted above, such a focus might help her better understand how her word choices weren’t necessarily a “failing” to be automatically corrected by AI. Instead, she might learn to think critically about which words were right for which situations, the better to manage her “wordiness” in genre appropriate ways, with or without AI tools!
More specifically, I’m trying to do five things in my First Year Writing class this semester: (1) build relationships and clearly explain learning goals, (2) assign more low-stakes writing, (3) address the idea that “writing is thinking” directly, (4) directly teach critical reading, and (5) foster rhetorical and genre awareness.
1. Building Relationships and Clearly Explaining Learning Goals
This is my main response to concerns about AI plagiarism. Rather than attempting to police the use of AI tools (a method that research suggests is doomed to fail) I am trying to make the strongest personal connection I can with my students and make sure they understand why I have them writing what they are writing. Each writing task is designed to help them learn skills through the process of completing it. I’m being very explicit about this!
2. Assigning More Low Stakes Writing
When students feel nervous about producing “formal” and “correct” forms of writing, they often turn to AI tools for assistance. Marc Watkins has even found that students may end up in an endless loop, in which they ask an AI tool to help them “fix” their writing and the AI, coded to always be helpful, dutifully finds them “issues” they can “fix.” Instead, I want to encourage students to feel empowered to explore language and better understand what it does.
3. Writing is Thinking
Writing teachers have been saying that “writing is thinking” for a long time. However, in an AI era where the finished product of writing can be created in an automated way, it becomes important to emphasize the process of writing as a tool for thought for its own sake. Rather than just teaching “writing is thinking” as a part of pre-writing for “finished” pieces, I’m assigning work that explicitly asks students to reflect on how the writing process changed their thoughts.
4. Critical Reading
Reading is also something that writing instruction has tended to engage with in an implicit way. However, as students are increasingly exposed to AI tools that offer to read things in their stead, helping them understand the value of reading (and think critically about when they might or might not want to engage with these tools). With this in mind, I’m assigning work that will help students learn to “read like writers,” paying attention to the composition choices made by authors.
5. Fostering Rhetorical and Genre Awareness
Writing teachers have long asked their students to think about rhetoric and genre as they compose. However, this has sometimes been subordinated to the goal of producing examples of particular rhetorical moves or genre examples. In my class, I’m centering awareness of rhetorical techniques and genres, since this awareness will be needed for composition, regardless of the tools students may have to compose.
Taken as a whole then, what I’m doing represents less a break with previous forms of writing instruction as a recentering of certain elements of that instruction. My hope is that this will lead both to a class where students feel less pressure to cheat using AI, and one that gives students the skills they need to compose in whatever writing environment the future may bring.
