By The Educator Collaborative Fellow Troy Hicks
As is often the case in school — and specifically when it comes to technology tools — many of us as educators have found ourselves nearly three years into the current AI era with ever-increasing lists of tools to try in our own teaching.
Some AI-infused ed tech tools make (perhaps exaggerated) promises to streamline the workflow of daily instructional tasks such as lesson planning, rubric creation, and even responding to student writing.
Other tools are meant to provide our students with more robust, interactive experiences where they can be tutored and quizzed in real time, carry on a conversation with a character or historical figure, or (if the school’s administration and acceptable use policy allow it) even begin to create some new graphic designs or gimmicky games.
Yet, as journalist and author Jeremy Kahn reminds us in his 2024 book Mastering AI, the work that AI can do for us and, more importantly, our students is both amazing and a “radical” departure of the kinds of metacognitive work that we really value for our students as writers. Moreover, he contends (and most literacy educators would agree): “Writing doesn’t just convey ideas; the act of composition compels us to improve them” (p. 51).
So, as I compose this first of two blog posts that will continue to explore the intersection of AI and writing instruction — with a handy “help me write” icon on now on the side of my Google Document, courtesy of their Gemini AI tool — I am reminded that we are in a tenuous moment. On the one hand, we want to help our students embrace new technologies, namely AI, in the effort to develop, as NCTE describes them, the “interconnected, dynamic, and malleable” literacies that are ever-present in our modern world. At the same time, we want to preserve the kinds of substantive, engaging thought that can only happen when our students craft words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays and stories.
2024: A Year of Increasing Use of AI by Students
As is also often the case, our students are ahead of us. According to Common Sense Media’s press release in September, 2024, “[a] majority of teens use AI tools, especially chatbots and AI-supported search” and “are using AI to stave off boredom almost as often as they’re using it for homework help.” And, while there certainly are stories of how youth have interacted with AI that have had tragic results, the full Common Sense report suggests that most parents and teachers are not talking with their students about what AI is, how it works, and what the implications of doing so can be.
In other words, at a time when groups like the MLA/CCCC are making the case that “[e]thical and effective use of generative AI (GenAI) technologies is emerging as an essential skill that students must develop in order to live, learn, and work,” most students are essentially using AI in the same manner as they have used search engines and social media for the past decade or longer: to search for answers on typical school tasks and as a source of entertainment. This is, in many ways, no fault of students themselves. For only half of them, the kinds of activities, assignments, and assessments that they encounter in school offer a positive intellectual challenge, and are quite likely able to be accomplished through the use of GenAI.
Just a few months after ChatGPT’s release, I shared this post on The Educator Collaborative’s Community Blog identifying three additional writing tools that educators might consider using (Sudowrite, Rytr, and Perplexity) as well as some ways to begin thinking about using such tools for different genres, audiences, and purposes. In my continuing conversations with educators, researchers, and students over the past year about the state of AI, it seems as though the tone of initial fear and outright resistance has shifted a bit, inviting us to think about ways that we can move our students beyond the ways of using GenAI as a fancier search engine or as purely entertainment.
Critical Perspectives on AI
AI, of course, still comes with many trade-offs and costs, ones that we need to thoroughly examine in our continued use of the tools. There are, thankfully, many higher education and PK-12 educators actively working to provide different responses to the use of AI in our classrooms and communities. These responses provide all of us ways to engage with AI in a more productive manner, including:
- growing our own understanding of what AI is (see, for example, the work of The AI Pedagogy Project and Common Sense Media);
- understanding the inherent ethical, economic, and environmental effects of AI (e.g., Crawford’s Atlas of AI and the work of Center for Humane Technology);
- engaging in critical questioning about when, why, and how we may — or may not — use AI in education (e.g., Leon Furze with this slide deck in particular; the Civics of Technology group and their posts about ChatGPT like this one and this one; and the Human Restoration Project’s blog posts and handbook.);
- actively resisting or refusing AI use (see, for example, Refusing GenAI in Writing Studies: A Quickstart Guide by Jennifer Sano-Franchini,Megan McIntyre, and Maggie Fernandes; and the work of Australian ed tech scholar Neil Selwyn, who is a critic of many forms of ed tech, especially AI.
My feelings on all this continue to fluctuate, too. Having taught advanced undergraduates as well as masters and doctoral level students over the past two years and experiencing many iterations of AI use — from what I perceived to be outright copy/paste plagiarism to incredibly thoughtful, diligently-documented use as a tool for brainstorming, drafting, and revision — I remain optimistic that our work as teachers of writing will, in the end, by enhanced in meaningful ways as we intentionally integrate AI in our instruction.
What’s to Come in 2025
As noted above, this is the first in a two-part series, and the second post will delve more deeply into specific strategies that I am exploring in my own work. Specifically, I will use elements of the MLA/CCCC’s “Student Guide to AI Literacy to frame a number of writing tasks that educators can try with their own students, all in an effort to help each of them, as MLA/CCCC contend, become a “thoughtful creator and consumer of GenAI content as technologies change over time.”
AI disclosure statement: I acknowledge the use of Google Gemini to summarize this blog post to create the social media post, Microsoft Copilot to generate potential titles that I then used to create my own, and Adobe Firefly to create the image based on the following prompt: “Create an image of students in a writing classroom who are using AI technology to write.” AI was not used directly in the composing process.
