Kelsey Hawkins
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
Since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, instructors and scholars have grappled with the ways that AI technologies are transforming writing practices. In a world that increasingly relies on Generative AI (GenAI) technologies like text generators to produce content for public and professional contexts, there is great exigency for writing instructors to foster students’ critical AI literacies. Developing critical AI literacy requires that students explore, identify, and critique the affordances and the limitations of GenAI technologies, including the ways that they reproduce cultural and linguistic bias, render certain literacies and language practices invisible (Johnson 170), reify dominant ideologies about standard language and monolingualism, and contribute to the continued erasure of the “missing people” at the margins of our discipline (Owusu-Ansah 143). Examinations of the relationship between AI technologies, language, and writing can be facilitated in first-year writing courses through the concept of discourse communities (Swales). Recent writing studies scholarship describes the role of language in defining a discourse community (Melzer), examines how language and power intersect within discourse communities (Sánchez-Martín), and encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the language expectations in the discourse communities they are a part of (Tremain). This research suggests that writing pedagogies should account for students’ experiences with language and discourse and should prepare students to negotiate the language expectations they will encounter in discourse communities within and beyond academia. The process of developing a critical awareness of both language expectations as well as the constraints of GenAI technologies can be articulated in four main stages: 1) Identifying the language expectations of a discourse community. 2) Enacting the linguistic patterns of the discourse community. 3) Interrogating the language expectations of the discourse community. 4) Negotiating the language expectations of the discourse community. This assignment asks students to collaborate with an AI text generator in order to complete this four-step process. Students train the GenAI tool to analyze and replicate the language and style of writing studies scholarship, compare the outputs with students’ own work in the course, and reflect on the constraints and affordances of AI technologies for discourse community participation. This process allows students to practice making informed, agentic choices about their engagement with the community’s language expectations as well as the ways that they might employ GenAI technologies in future writing contexts.