Dear Fellow English Teacher:
We can start teaching the college composition course less based on procedural knowledge (skills) and more on declarative knowledge (knowing about). That will, radically, involve us in more lectures, objective exams, and maybe one synthesis paper at the end of the semester to demonstrate what students have learned. Perhaps more (very lightly assessed) journaling and online discussion writing will still be useful to build fluency during the semester (I’m still a writing process instructor on some level).
See this fascinating Inside Higher Ed article on AI and teaching writing. To me, the idea is to teach the use of AI writing programs to aid a person’s writing tasks appreciably. That is the future of everyday workplace writing. Why shouldn’t that be a big part of an English composition course, especially if we are forced to have 30 or 35 students in a section?
There is already available a huge quantity of resources on teaching with AI.
I’m slow to the game here, but even I can envision making English comp classes more like a combination of Speech, Literature, and computing applications classes. Already, we have to teach students how to access the capabilities in MS Word for proofing their papers and setting up an MLA citation list in Word or Google Docs or using older citation automation tools like EasyBib or CitationMachine. Plus, we can require using Grammarly Premium or Microsoft Editor, either of which will teach them ways to re-fashion their prose without us needing to mark on a paper by hand “frag,” “vague,” “wordy,” or “CS.” The AI algorithms can do that, in addition to providing corrective explanations to students in situ, and we can talk about how the program does it, what it does, compare it to other AI apps, and teach and discuss more exciting, higher-order things with our students.
Van Piercy 