Writing and Generative AI in ENG 1100

ENG1100 is and has always been a course about writing.

“Writing” means many things: it means persuasive texts, interpersonal communication, and multimedia; it means science journalism, research-based arguments, and exploratory journaling. It organizes thoughts and provokes curiosity. Writing is an act. It is an intellectual practice, a way to connect with others, a way to grapple with tough questions, a way to attain civic and professional ends. It is a way to learn.

In a world where generative AI can produce infinite text, how do we talk with students about the value of writing? How do we adapt our course and pedagogy to ensure writing remains a vital practice that is not simply outsourced?

In ENG1100, we are committed to practicing writing as a form of mental exercise, a means for strengthening one’s cognitive capacities. We value and teach inquiry, with an emphasis on expanding students’ perspectives through the labor of research, writing, and collaboration. We are also committed to teaching students how to leverage emerging technologies to support learning and make things happen in the world. These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Taken together, and with careful development, these approaches can teach rhetorical discernment.

We are committed to three branches of teaching writing in ENG1100:

To ensure critical thinking and engaged learning, all classes include analog writing and thinking experiences. These are tech-free spaces and times that center human intellectual connection, ideation, and social collaboration.

Starting in 2023, we began revising pedagogies and curriculum to ensure that writing to think remains a fundamental aspect of the first-year writing experience. LLMs and AI-generated text are ubiquitous. But cognitive offloading does not have to be the accepted universal effect of LLMs’ ubiquity. Learning takes labor. In light of research on cognitive decline, we take this charge especially seriously and have adapted our daily pedagogies to ensure students think, create, and share. We can think and write with and without AI-generated text: the goal is to engage thoughtfully with writing and each other.

We explicitly teach critical reading. In a world where LLMs produce infinite text, careful and savvy reading has taken on a new level of importance.

Now more than ever, people need to be discerning, critical readers. The ease of text and multimedia production enabled by generative AI has shifted people’s locus of effort from text production to text analysis and curation. In a chatbot-dense world especially, people need to read critically, and we are committed to making sure that our students read with attention to context, bias, omission, and verifiable truth.

Reading each other’s writing is our other commitment. While LLMs can read their own output in a circular path to emptiness all day, we at Elon are committed to writing as a social act. That means something written by a human for class should be read by a human. The act of reading closely is an act of care. Faculty guide students to work closely with writing earnestly composed by their peers.

We teach critical and functional AI literacies. Critical AI literacies ask questions about limits and strategic approaches to AI use or refusal. Functional AI literacies include approaches to leveraging technology to support learning and to produce professional texts with real-world value.

Students practice working with AI tools to create texts that serve various ends, including for professional and civic scenarios. Depending on the rhetorical purpose, the writing process may include effectively curating text generated by LLMs. Students might also use AI tools to generate models, raise counterarguments, or play devil’s advocate. These are some pedagogical uses that faculty integrate to enrich rhetorical thinking.

Generative AI raises many ethical concerns related to intellectual property, fairness and equity, systemic bias, and academic integrity. These concerns are among the metaconversations about generative AI that animate our learning and work. Critical AI literacies require that students deeply consider these concerns and related questions. All generative AI use (and intentional non-use) requires critical discernment, for faculty and students alike.

The questions we ask about generative AI use in ENG1100 are not simply whether or not, but when, for what objectives, and how.

 

updated 3.18.26