Access our AI Syllabus Statement draft here.

You identified that syllabus statements function to define rules and expectations within college classrooms. As you discovered, syllabus statements have multiple parts, often denoted with headings, that define specific policies related to student learning. You also noted that there is often a lack of clarity around the instructor’s role in supporting student learning, and some statements reinforce the power that an instructor or institution has over students. We will attempt to bring more equity to one part of a syllabus this semester: the artificial intelligence (AI) syllabus statement. For your second assignment, we will collaboratively write a syllabus statement about using AI in ENGL 201W. My goal is to use our collective work in future syllabi.

As we collaboratively work towards composing a syllabus statement on AI-use in the classroom, you will write independently on your blog, reflecting on how this collective work intra-acts (Cooper) with what you’ve learned about writing in school. In her article “Meta-Writing: AI and Writing,” Aimée Morrison describes her writing process and presents an AI-generated composition about AI and writing. In discussing the differences that human writing and nonhuman writing produce, Morrison notes, “my students think that good writing is producing an error-free response to a prompt—that there’s an ideal answer that the prompter already knows, and the goal of writing is to approach that secret answer as near as possible, with the least amount of risking being wrong. They think this because it has been, actually, much of their experience of writing in school contexts, which is what they consider to be writing. In many cases, we have been training them to try to write like a machine would. Smooth, bland, correct, formulaic, compliant, voiceless, not-wrong” (159-160). Consider Morrison’s suggestion here, that schooling (in the U.S., at least), asks students to produce a kind of writing that is sanitized, a kind of writing that does not look much different than writing produced by AI. This assignment will require you to reflect on Morrison’s concern as you compose with AI.

Scholars across contexts are considering the extent to which AI should be used in academic writing. Doyal et al. take up this concern in regards to medical writing and believe that AI is a necessary part of our future. Doyal et al. go on to claim that our challenge, then, becomes our “ability to strike a delicate balance between leveraging AI’s potential while respecting the importance of human creativity, critical thinking, and ethical considerations” (4). This assignment will invite you to consider ways in which humans–specifically students–can leverage the potential of AI while retaining creativity and critical thinking.

For-Now Expectations (these are subject to revision)

Our final Syllabus Statement should:

• Include sub-headed sections containing about 2 paragraphs of writing that explain our orientation to AI in educational contexts.
• Define AI and specify its use in higher education.
• Provide some ethical guidelines for using AI in academic contexts.
• Provide guidelines for citing AI according to APA and MLA citation methods. We may consult the following sources “How to Cite ChatGPT” and “How Do I Cite Generative AI in MLA Style?”
• Indicate any sources you used in our composition process.

All collaborative work will happen in class. This means that we will spend the next two weeks, give or take, drafting parts of the statement together in class. You will work on your own outside of class to reflect on the process of writing the statement

TIMELINE

• TH 3/14: Work collaboratively to define the genre of a syllabus statement and collect sample statements here.
• TUES 3/19: Gallery walk towards drafting our statement in class. Blog post due on intra-acting with human and nonhuman agents regarding syllabus statements.
• TH 3/21: Build on gallery walk. Draft our course’s syllabus statement in small groups, working on sections.
• TUES 3/26: Class canceled due to illness.
• TH 3/28: Syllabus Statement drafting in class.
• TUES 4/2: Final draft review.