AI and the Philadelphia Eagles' greatest center ever

Occasionally I get to cross my two little corners of the web. Here is a version of a piece I wrote on my blog on the site When Falls the Coliseum about the farewell speech of Philadelphia Eagle center Jason Kelce. It was a powerful, emotional speech, and a strong piece of writing and rhetoric.

The delivery was not just quintessential Kelce, but it was very much something of the writers of his time and generation: Dressed in a sleeveless workout shirt and sandals, he read the speech from his phone; he had perhaps even composed it on that phone--writers regularly compose on phones now.

For a book club at Drexel, I happen to be reading The Meaningful Writing Project by Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner, in which they describe their research project to discover how students report the qualities of meaningful writing experiences, how those experiences are connected to learning, and how what faculty offering such projects conclude about meaningful writing, finding this:

meaningful writing projects offer students opportunities for agency; for engagement with instructors, peers, and materials; and for learning that connects to previous experiences and passions and to future aspirations and identities. (4)

Watching Kelce, I thought and felt a lot of things from many perspectives. In my role as a teacher, I thought: "No way AI wrote that speech."

Why? Because I was struck by how authentic Kelce's speech was. It was him in content, style, and voice.

I thought how proud I am when I receive authentic writing from my students. And it made me think again of the big challenge--a challenge now renewed because of generative AI (GAI)--facing us writing teachers to create writing assignments that are not plagiarism proof so much as plagiarism discouraging because they bring out authentic, meaningful writing from our students.

I know it's not simple for us as teachers to create such writing assignments. After all, we're not going to be able to reproduce easily contexts like Kelce's, where someone emotionally bids goodbye to an activity of passion after nearly a decade and a half.

But I believe GAI productively pressures teachers to create more meaningful writing environments for our students. Assignments with authentic roots will have a greater likelihood of inspiring such responses.

There's considerable and rightful concern in composition about GAI. Will GAI engines grow in sophistication to the point that we won't need people for that very human task, writing? Maybe, but as I watched Kelce, I thought, "I don't think so"--or at least, "We've got a ways to go before that happens."

I won't start boasting that I can create plagiarism-proof assignments: Students will take up the challenge and prove me wrong. But listening to Jason Kelce's farewell from football, I realized that if I keep striving to develop assignments that mean something to them, students will return something meaningful for me and, more importantly, for themselves.