Writing as Thinking: Strategies for instruction and assessment at the university after the arrival of the chatbot
What is writing for? Why do we ask students to write? To what extent are the answers different across fields, whether in the humanities or in STEM disciplines? Generative AI intensifies these foundational questions, pushing us to articulate more precisely the purpose of writing in our teaching, and to ensure that our pedagogies clearly support that purpose.
Our project explores the idea that writing is a practice for thinking. Too much of the discussion about generative AI treats writing only as an assessment product, an artifact of students’ learning rather than the substrate that supports learning itself. While we take seriously the importance of “AI literacy” — understanding chatbots’ capacities and limits, recognizing and correcting their errors – we think that the threat genAI poses to the practice of writing is a distinct and more fundamental challenge that educators must confront. When we lean towards treating writing as an assessment-medium, a product which may be more or less capably generated by a chatbot, we short-circuit an account of students’ writing practice as the medium through which they actually acquire the skills and competencies of our fields, and of scientific and cultural literacy more generally.
As part of this project, we are convening communities of practice investigating the pedagogical implications of the idea that writing is thinking, including our approaches to assignments, classroom practices, feedback, and assessment. Out of these discussions we will generate and make available a toolkit for instructors across disciplines to approach writing in this mode.