Equitable writing classrooms and programs in the shadow of AI

Abstract

Each year, in TA orientation, in the practicum course, and in professional development sessions, I ask TAs and instructors to consider what is, for me, the key question at the heart of our work as writing teachers: what do we owe our students? And a related and equally important question: what do we owe ourselves? In 2024, just over two years into the public existence of OpenAI's ChatGPT, the contexts for these questions are perhaps more complicated than ever, but I think the answers are mostly the same: we owe our students equitable classrooms, space to try and to fail, compassion and care, and authentic engagement. We owe them the rights our discipline affirmed almost fifty years ago when CCCC adopted Students’ Right to Their Own Language as the official position of the largest organization of writing teachers in the world. This article reviews an approach to the current Generative AI moment that is rooted in these commitments and reflects an approach I call “informed refusal,” which allows us to acknowledge the existence of generative AI without requiring students to use generative AI products. We can continue to teach critical literacies and attend to the things that make first-year writing classrooms unique, especially our attention to individualized feedback on students’ writing and our attention to helping students build self-efficacy via sustainable writing processes and reflective habits of mind. At the same time, I argue against the adoption of detectors and other writing surveillance technologies because of the ways that such tools reinforce overly simplistic notions of plagiarism (Moore-Howard) and can harm our relationships with students.