Pedagogy

ChatGPT for Writing Teachers: A Primer

preterite Artificial Intelligence, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Technology, Writing
or, how to avoid writing like a machine
Background

At this year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication in Chicago, there was a lot of interest in generative large language models (LLMs), or what the popular media more crudely dub AI, or what many today metonymically refer to (like calling photocopies Xeroxes or sneezepaper Kleenex) as ChatGPT. I first played with an earlier version of the LLM, GPT-3, at about the same time I started playing with neural network image generators, but my interest in language and computing dates from the early 1980s and text adventure games and BASIC, to hypertext fiction and proto-chatbots like Eliza, and to LISP and early prose generators like Carnegie Mellon’s gnomic and inscrutable Beak—and also to the arguments I heard John Hayes express in Carnegie Mellon’s cognitive process Intro Psych lectures about how we might try to adjust human neural processes in the same ways we engineer computing processes. That idea is part of what makes ChatGPT and other generative neural networks appealing, even when we know they’re only statistical machines: thinking about how machines do what they do can help humans think about how we do what we do. ChatGPT offers a usefully contrastive approach for reconsidering writing and learning. So it’s worth understanding how it operates. With that desire, and having read devoured lectitaveram everything I could find on the topic, I went to a CCCC presentation and was only mildly and briefly disappointed, given that I was not (as should have been obvious to me from the outset) the target audience.

Here, then, is my attempt at writing an alternate what-if presentation—the one I’d half-imagined (in the way working iteratively with ChatGPT or MidJourney gradually gets one closer to what one didn’t know one was imagining—OK, you see what I’m doing here) I’d learn from in Chicago. And I’ll offer the combination warning and guilty plea up front:

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CCCC2022: Racial Capitalism and the Labor Theory of Value in Composition Pedagogy

preterite Academia, Composition Theory, Conference Notes, Economics, Pedagogy

This year’s online meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC, or 4Cs) was interesting for a variety of reasons, about which I’ll have more to say soon. In the interim, here’s the video of my presentation (with captions now, rather than the less-accessible 4Cs version).

As you’ll see, the presentation is a little elliptical, since I edited it from about 6000 words down to less than 2000. Here’s the written version, with references.

The Syllabus as Ossuary

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Writing

The common and ongoing complaint is that first-year composition (FYC) is a repository of dead forms. In composition’s associated disciplines in English studies, critical examinations of writing and reading technologies ossify into periodized media studies, and in first-year composition, radical experimentations in how college students continue to learn to write well become the formeldahyde frog in the wax-backed metal tray from Biology 101, its belly razored open and skin peeled back so that students might safely identify the intestines, kidneys, heart, and probe around inside, perhaps a little grossed-out by the process, but able to name its components and mark them on a final quiz.

The formeldahyde frog masquerades as object of inquiry, even inasmuch as everyone knows that the annual and ongoing mass death of millions of appropriately-sized frogs serves only the purposes of a school exercise that will be swiftly forgotten. The research essay in its current commonly accepted form is the frog with its belly-flaps pinned back, poked around upon in JSTOR and ProQuest and the Library of Congress subject and keyword headings like well-preserved amphibious digestive and evacuative systems investigated by the earnest and industrious student, indicating little more to that student than this is where food goes in and this is where poop comes out.

To shift metaphors: the research essay assignment is pedagogy as archaeology. In the information age, I am largely in agreement with the common and ongoing complaint about first-year composition pedagogy and dead forms, especially as that complaint indicts the research essay. As much as anyone else, I am guilty of teaching the dead form, the corpse of the beloved, knowing all too familiarly the workings of the forms of library research I insist to myself that students must know. Even if I frame the research assignment as “inquiry” or “documented argument,” even if I congratulate myself on helping students to see that writing research means something beyond the assemblage of regurgitated stale quotations about innovative environmental applications for hemp and cannabis ash or the burial habits of ancient Egyptians, I am still simply trying to animate a cadaver or vivify a golem, making the body of my own knowledge do what I want, and inflicting that upon the students in my class.

Yes, but: Doesn’t it operate as an introductory form? Doesn’t it do work that helps prepare students for other more sophisticated tasks? Doesn’t it help alert students to modes beyond Google of navigating our rapidly-expanding tombs of information?

It could. I wrote about this challenge — about the essay as database, the database as essay — in 2007, but I’ve been thinking it about it since 1998, when I was working on a Microsoft Access database during my day job and taking an evening research methods seminar with another young graduate student named Becca, who had a complex journalistic research project she was undertaking and was looking for a way to manage it as part of her class project, and I suggested building a database. I don’t know if she took my suggestion, but that woman was Rebecca Skloot, whose research project became The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Part of what’s so impressive to me about Rebecca’s book is that it attends deeply to research as an evolving process: she talks very carefully about how she’s doing it. I’d like to see more of what Becca does in the first-year composition research project assignment.

My FYC students begin their annotated bibliography essay tomorrow, their second essay assignment, as a lead-in to their third, which is ostensibly the research paper assignment. I love the perspective I heard from a colleague yesterday, who posed the annotated bibliography as edited collection, complete with introduction and conclusion: yes, I said, that’s it. That’s the production of new knowledge, focused enough to be interesting, acknowledging its antecedents, edgy enough to push the boundaries. I’ve been reading a lot about information these past few years, and the idea I keep returning to is that information is the work and process of building itself, and as the asset itself that gets exchanged, aggregated, built upon. Information, and the work of research, is labor become capital.