Process Narration Videos and authentic student writing

Just like everybody else in writing classrooms nowadays, I'm dealing with AI. I like to think I'm mostly working with it, although, my sanguine teaching nature aside, I'm for sure at times working against it.

In several classes, I've overtly invited students to write about and sometimes even for the machine, as in my recent Language Puzzles and Word Games: Issues in Modern Grammar course, which includes this writing project choice (among many): "Using a prompt similar to an assignment from one of your courses, compare the text created by a generative AI chatbot/natural language generator with your own writing specifically in terms of grammar and usage."

In the Fall, I got to talking to an exceptional student, Veronica Medlock, about the drafting process in her writing. After that conversation, she quickly created and sent me a short YouTube video of the drafting changes while she composed, accompanying the video with a voice narration of the process.

It was fascinating.

We're trying to take this show on the road and have sent in a conference proposal about how such "Process Narration Videos," as we're calling them, can help promote and support authenticity in student writing assignments. Students can compose and submit these easy-to-create videos, which are built on the draft stage "mapping/tracking" that is a fundamental component of writing composition tools like Word and Google Docs, with accompanying voice narration.

Why is this so great? Of course, the English and writing teaching and learning literature has been overflowing with discussions about the problems of teaching writing in the--dare I call it?--age of AI. Teaching publications are dedicating focused space to AI (1) and instructors nearly every day receive invitations to professional development opportunities or information about new ed tech tools. Language and literacy teachers at all levels (and, of course, in many, if not all, other academic disciplines, e.g., math and programming) are dealing with the challenges of AI in teaching with a range of attitudes, approaches, tools, and philosophies. 

Some of my colleagues feel the authenticity problem is so dire that they are abandoning process-driven writing approaches and are instead returning to blue books or other non-digital, offline writing approaches. Those who have not given up have taken various often time- and energy-consuming stances and approaches: Requiring increasing amounts of informal writing, carefully scrutinizing the drafting process, leaning heavily on AI checkers in a kind of technological arms race, etc.

But as part of an overall writing pedagogy, Process Narration Videos provide a foundationally sound, pedagogically driven solution to authenticity issues in writing instruction. They reinforce good writing pedagogy, as they are grounded in writing process and ask students to reflect on their writing. They also help students see different stages of their writing, incorporate metathinking, consider rhetorical choices, and embrace informal writing, which of course is often embedded in strong writing processes.  

If our proposal gets accepted, Veronica and I will discuss the compositional background of this approach while focusing on the practical, hands-on way that it can be applied in classrooms across educational levels and curricula.

An important point is that students are often as frustrated by the prospects of other students using AI as their teachers are. So we're aiming to hit a nice balance: While Process Narration Videos can serve a dutiful--and responsible--academic process in discouraging AI-connected plagiarism, they are also simply good teaching and learning practice.

Note:

1) The topic of the most recent issue of CCC [77.1] was, as the Editors’ Introduction stated, “A Dappled, Undisciplined Response to Generative AI."

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.

Generative AI and integrity concerns: More discussion board support

As I wrote a few months ago, the hand-wringing about generative AI and academic integrity that has been taking place in academia caused teacher me to return to a fundamental educational technology that has served me well: Message boards.

The writing assignment submission approach I'll briefly describe has lots of pedagogical upside, but I'm talking about it here in the context of AI-driven concerns about academic integrity.

For my current course, students submit four short writing projects in addition to many low-stakes assignments. I call these writing projects Exploration dialogues; you'll see why in a moment.

They submit these projects in two ways.

One, they submit to a Turnitin dropbox in our Blackboard (Bb) Learn course, a method I use not for plagiarism policing so much but because Turnitin has an effective audio commenting function that is great for response and is seamlessly integrated in Bb Learn. Although I don't require submitted rough drafts of every project, they also must submit rough draft material, even photos of notes from class. (The photos, by the way, are great and super fascinating.)

But they also post their final drafts to a Bb Learn Discussion, and I provide them there with these instructions:

Please cut-and-paste only your final draft of your Exploration dialogue Project 2. Do not use an attachment.

On this thread, read two of your classmates’ projects and respond to them. From the Syllabus:

On a Discussion board for each project, you will read two of your classmates’ projects and write short (at least 50 words) but meaningful Reactions. There is no fixed framework for your Reactions, but asking questions and seeking points of clarification are ideal. These Reactions may also allow you to connect the project with your own work in the course or perhaps your own experiences. The project author then will reply to these Reactions, either individually or collectively. 

Feel free to ask me questions!

Philosophically, this approach is nothing whiz bang new. Teachers do things like this. These straightforward threads have yielded interesting results in terms of student dialogue and learning for this course. I could talk more about that, as I mentioned.

But I believe this approach provides a constructive approach to academic integrity in a time when teachers are not sure what to do. Can students still misrepresent their writing, generative AI or otherwise? Of course! But there are implications if they submit a paper that is not theirs.

For one, they may reveal weak mastery of the content, which could become apparent as these message board conversations unfold.

More importantly, they are doubling down on integrity issues by writing about something that isn't theirs! I mean, they have to really have ice water in their veins to engage in a conversation about writing that is not theirs, fooling not just the professor but their own classmates. Could it happen? Does it happen? Of course it could! But shoring up against such behavior through an open course writing environment like this seems less like cheating vigilance and more like using good pedagogy for a collectively good end.