Writing Human: Post-Chatbot Approaches to College Writing

We are seeking short, first-person narratives (2,000-3,000 words) from college instructors in any discipline who use writing activities and assignments in ways that foster engagement, enhance learning, and stimulate creativity.  We are compiling a book of stories that affirm the educational value of human writing at a time when more of our writing is being done for us by generative AI.        

We believe that writing is a powerful tool – perhaps the human mind’s most powerful technique – for learning new information, identifying connections across conceptual space, and articulating new ideas, perspectives, and solutions.  The process of writing slows down thinking and focalizes attention in ways that enhance deliberation and reflection.  The process of formulating words, grammatical structures, and other linguistic elements activates widespread and densely interconnected areas of the brain that reach outward into higher areas of executive function as well as down into more primordial regions of memory, emotion, and motivation.  Writing about something is a way of internalizing information by stitching it into the structure of your own consciousness.  It’s a way of translating external ideas into your own voice.  And, most profoundly, it can be a way of digging into yourself to excavate ideas and perspectives that you didn’t know were inside of you, while also actively inventing new ideas and new perspectives that had never existed before.  This is why, in the deep history of human learning, writing has held a privileged position as a badge of expertise and as the lingua franca of academic discourse.

Recently, the widespread availability of generative AI has disrupted traditional approaches to the use of writing in educational environments.  Instructors have discovered that, when they assign conventional kinds of writing assignments – research papers, persuasive essays, short answer responses to comprehension questions, etc. – students are likely to outsource the writing task to a chatbot, making the assignment meaningless as either an educational activity or a means of assessing the student’s comprehension of the content.  One solution to this frustration has been to replace writing assignments with other educational strategies, but, given the educational value of writing, it is worthwhile to consider how traditional writing assignments can be reimagined in ways that not only prevent students from so easily resorting to AI plagiarism but which, more importantly, provide them with opportunities to use writing as the transformational educational tool that it is.  Such an approach emphasizes the value of writing as a process rather than prioritizing the final “product,” it weaves writing activities together with reading, interpersonal dialogue, and self-reflection, and it invites students to use their writing to think into their own lives and memories, their own campuses and communities, and their own hopes, fears, and dreams about the future.  Thoughtfully designed writing activities leverage the power of writing to help students do the self-transformative work of learning and thinking, and they can also empower students to find their own voices and carve out their own places in the cultural conversations they are inheriting.

This book will provide contributors with an opportunity to share their stories about how they use writing in their classrooms.  Preference will be given to narratives that model practical, creative strategies for developing meaningful writing activities and assignments. 

Please send 500-word chapter proposals to Dr. Randy Laist (rlaist@bridgeport.edu) and Dr. Nicole Brewer (nbrewer@ccsu.edu) by April 1, 2025.