Conference

The 56th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention will take place in Philadelphia, PA on March 6-9, 2025. 

Primary Area / Secondary Area

Pedagogy & Professional / Interdisciplinary Humanities

CFP

Regardless of whether we may take an optimistic or more cautious view of the rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the past few years, it seems at once inevitable and urgent that we will need to reevaluate how we conceive of and design assessments to evaluate and trace our students’ learning. Somewhere between, in the words of Jason M. Lodge of the University of Queensland, the “acute” problem of designing assessments for which AI is unlikely to successfully replicate human thought and the “chronic” problem of the way learning in itself may be changing in view of the shifts in how we interact with machines, we have the opportunity to redefine and breathe new life into what we prioritize in our teaching and what we focus on in this process of reinvention or revolution. In our writing and composition courses in particular, can this necessary reinvention become a moment to center community and human connection and to prioritize equity against the possibility of a new, AI-generated digital divide, drawing on the affordances of AI for equitable learning and linguistic justice while mitigating its parallel dangers? This roundtable invites reflections on how we can re-frame, re-invent, and re-design our views of assessment given the new prevalence of these tools, from proposals for individual assessment paradigms or alternative grading systems to more general aims and directions. If these adjustments push us to look beyond our standard practices, assignments, and scaffolds, what is it, at the end of the day, that we strive to teach our student, and are these aims more about the process of writing or the written product? Finally, how, if at all, can AI ultimately become a tool in support of these outcomes, for us, for our students, or both?

This roundtable invites cross-disciplinary approaches to the ways that AI tools might become an opportunity to reevaluate our views of assessment in and beyond composition courses, from proposals for specific assessment structures and scaffolds or particular uses of the technologies to higher-level reexaminations of what we value in teaching writing, centering the learning outcomes that are most important to our whole students and our whole selves.  Roundtable format and submissions:This roundtable hopes to encourage and allow for discussion and the exchange of ideas, so we will guard time for conversation as well as individual presentations (5–10 minutes each). Please submit an abstract of 200 to 300 words to NeMLA's portal by September 30th, 2024 at the link below, and please direct any questions about the roundtable to audrey.holt@yale.edu.  Submission Link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21343