Actionable AI in the Humanities Classroom

At the most recent MLA Convention in New Orleans, Task Force members discussed the latest working paper on Building a Culture for Generative AI Literacy in College Language, Literature, and Writing. The session was also designed to highlight the complexities of these issues — which make new demands upon students, instructors, programs, and institutions — and the broad range of perspectives that Task Force members bring to their pedagogical understandings of AI Literacy, which represent a wide spectrum from enthusiastic adoption to skeptical resistance. The overview slides document the diversity of opinions explored at the session.

Our full-house of participants also brought several ideas to the conversation. One proposal that gained a lot of interest from attendees suggested that the Task Force create a clearinghouse website of generative AI policies from as many campuses as possible, so that those looking to create or revise a policy could look to peer institutions. There was also interest in a statement about the environmental impacts of generative AI and more guidance about refusal or opting out from using AI in the classroom.

Sarah Z. Johnson discussed AI and academic integrity/guidelines and policies in her role as an academic integrity officer. I discussed how AI literacy might be informed by current research on student attitudes and behaviors, including at my home campus, where the Studio for Teaching and Learning Innovation supported a study of over 600 students. Our research team found that students use generative AI for a variety of reasons (including curiosity, a desire for feedback, and anxiety when faced with writer’s block) and that they used it throughout the writing process from brainstorming to final revision. David Green drew on work about writing studies as a mode of inquiry from the late Susan Miller and a hip hop proverb from Lauryn Hill to explore the importance of memory, reflection, and vulnerability in the writing classroom. Matthew Kirschenbaum introduced the 3 R’s (“Risks, Resistance, Rage”) with a call-to-action graphic, expanding on his recent statements with Rita Raley in PMLA and the Chronicle of Higher Education about a need to fight technologies being introduced when “nobody asked for it” and “everyone hates it.” In Angela Gibson’s group that looked at “Benefits and Potential Use Cases of AI,” there was considerable interest in work being done by Huw Griffiths of the University of Sydney, who used a campus instance of Cogniti to create a custom chatbot as a method for thinking about metaphor in Shakespeare. (The course description is here.) Leo Flores, who is a former President of the MLA-affiliated Electronic Literature Organization, offered a session on what he calls “cyborg writing.”