AI is here, and it is here to stay, which means that academia needs to incorporate it so that students learn about AI’s capability and are ready to use it properly. The most complained about issue in writing classes today is that students simply use AI to write their essays for them and, in the process, do not learn anything and use AI improperly. “The Anders 4 Phase AI Method of Writing Instruction,” is able to overcome these issues. This instructional method develops students’ writing skills while teaching AI literacy, which includes critical thinking. Different aspects of this method can also be applied to other courses/assignments. The Anders 4 Phase AI Method of Writing Instruction is a much-needed new way to develop writing in a way that better aligns with the new realities of how many people are already writing with AI.
Key Components (the four phases):
Foundational Writing Skills Development: instruction and assessment on key aspects of writing such as sentence structure, paragraph structure, transitional sentences, use of personal voice, researching, outlining, thesis statements, and any other needed writing components. Done through: multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short in-class writing.
Understanding of Different Essay Types: instruction and assessment on key aspects of different essay types done through multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short in-class writing
Prompt Engineering Development: instruction and assessment on prompt engineering using an advanced prompt formula, the ability to create effective prompts for AI to generate good essays that have proper formatting, student voice, and accurate information. Evaluated via multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank tests, and in-class writing of prompts and additional drafting.
Use of AI for Writing with Full Personal Accountability: assessment on specific essay creation done via student submission of essays developed through the use and assistance of AI. Additional in-class exams on key contents and periodic student presentations on created essays (to help ensure student accountability of knowledge integration).
Key Benefits:
Develops students’ foundational knowledge of writing and ability to create multiple essay types
Eliminates issues with students inappropriately using AI to write essays without fully understanding writing components
Reduces instructors’ stress/anxiety in feeling the need to run AI detection tools (no longer needed)
Helps to directly develop students’ understanding of effective writing while simultaneously developing their critical thinking, AI literacy, and ethical AI use skills
A much more detailed description of this method is available through the Sovorel Center for Teaching & Learning YouTube educational Channel:
Following HEPI’s recent Policy Note on students’ use of artificial intelligence (AI), HEPI Director Nick Hillman reviews a new book from the United States on what AI means for writing.
The author John Warner’s persuasive argument is that generative AI creates syntax but doesn’t write because ‘writing is thinking.’ (I hope this is the only reason why, when asked to write a higher education policy speech ‘in the style of Nick Hillman’, ChatGPT’s answer is so banal and vacuous…) People are, Warner says, attracted to AI because they’ve not previously been ‘given the chance to explore and play within the world of writing.’
Although Warner is not as negative about using ChatGPT to retrieve information as he is on using it to write wholly new material, he sees the problems it presents as afflicting the experience of ‘deep reading’ too: ‘Reading and writing are being disrupted by people who do not seem to understand what it means to read and write.’
The book starts by reminding the reader how generative AI based on Large Language Models actually works. ChatGPT and the like operate as machines predicting the next word in a sentence (called a ‘token’). To me, it is reminiscent of Gromit placing the next piece of train track in front of him as he goes. It’s all a bit like a more sophisticated version of how the iPhone Notes app on which I’m typing this keeps suggesting the next word for me. (If you click on the suggestions, it tends to end up as nonsense though – I’ve just done it and got, ‘the app doesn’t even make a sentence in a single note’, which sounds like gibberish while also being factually untrue.)
‘The result’, we are told of students playing with ChatGPT and the like, ‘is a kind of academic cosplay where you’ve dressed up a product in the trappings of an academic output, but the underlying process is entirely divorced from the genuine article.’
Writing, Warner says, is a process in which ‘the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it.’ That is certainly my experience: there have been times when I’ve started to bash out a piece not quite knowing if it will end up as a short blog based on one scatty thought or flower into a more polished full-length HEPI paper. Academics accustomed to peer review and the slow (tortuous?) procedures of academic journals surely know better than most that writing is a process.
The most interesting and persuasive part of the book (and Warner’s specialist subject) is the bit on how formulae make writing mundane rather than creative. Many parents will recognise this. It seems to me that children are being put off English in particular by being forced to follow the sort of overweening instructions that no great author ever considered (‘write your essay like a burger’, ‘include four paragraphs in each answer’, ‘follow PEE in each paragraph’ [point / evidence / explain]). Warner sees AI taking this trend to its logical and absurd conclusion where machines are doing the writing and the assessment – and ruining both.
Because writing is a process, Warner rejects even the popular idea that generative AI may be especially useful in crafting a first draft. He accepts it can produce ‘grammatically and syntactically sound writing … ahead of what most students can produce.’ But he also argues that the first draft is the most important draft ‘as it establishes the intention behind the expression.’ Again, I have sympathy with this. Full-length HEPI publications tend to go through multiple drafts, while also being subjected to peer review by HEPI’s Advisory Board and Trustees, yet the final published version invariably still closely resembles the first draft because that remains the original snapshot of the author’s take on the issue at hand. Warner concludes that AI ‘dazzles on first impression but … has significantly less utility than it may seem at first blush.’
One of the most interesting chapters compares and contrasts the rollout of ChatGPT with the old debates about the rise of calculators in schools. While calculators might mean mental arithmetic skills decline, they are generally empowering; similarly, ChatGPT appears to remove the need to undertake routine tasks oneself. But Warner condemns such analogies: for calculators ‘the labor of the machine is identical to the labor of a human’, whereas ‘Fetching tokens based on weighted probabilities is not the same process as what happens when humans write.’
At all the many events I go to on AI in higher education, three areas always comes up: students’ AI use; what AI might mean for professional services; and how AI could change assessment and evaluation. The general outcome across all three issues is that no one knows for sure what AI will mean, but Warner is as big a sceptic on AI and grading as he is on so much else. Because it is formulaic and based on algorithms, Warner argues:
Generative AI being able to give that “good” feedback means that the feedback isn’t actually good. We should instead value that which is uniquely human. … Writing is meant to be read. Having something that cannot read generate responses to writing is wrong.
The argument that so many problems are coursing through education as a result of new tech reminds me a little of the argument common in the 1980s that lead pipes brought down the Roman Empire. Information is said to become corrupted by AI in the way that the water supposedly became infected by the lead channels. But the theory about lead pipes is no longer taken seriously and I remain uncertain whether Warner’s take will survive the passage of time in its entirety either.
Moreover, Warner’s criticisms of the real-world impact of ChatGPT are scattergun in their approach. They include the ‘literal army of precarious workers doing soul-killing tasks’ to support the new technology as well as the weighty environmental impact. This critique calls to mind middle-class drug-takers in the developed world enjoying their highs while dodging the real-world impact on developing countries of their habit.
In the end, Warner’s multifarious criticisms tot up to resemble an attack on technology that comes perhaps just a little too close for comfort to the attacks in the early 1980s by the Musicians’ Union’s on synthesisers and drum machines. In other words, the downsides may be exaggerated while the upsides might be downplayed.
Nonetheless, I was partially persuaded. The process of writing is exactly that: a process. Writing is not just mechanical. (The best young historian I taught in my first career as a school teacher, who is now an academic at UCL, had the worst handwriting imaginable as his brain moved faster than his hand / pen could manage.) So AI is unlikely to replace those who pen words for a living just yet.
Although, paradoxically, I also wished the author had run his text through an AI programme and asked it to knock out around 40% of his text. Perhaps current iterations of generative AI can’t write like a smart human or think like a smart human, but they might be able to edit like a smart human? Perhaps AI’s biggest contribution could come at the end of the writing process rather than the beginning? Technology speeds up all our lives, leaving less time for a leisurely read, and it seems to me that all those ‘one-idea’ books that the US floods the market with, including this one, could nearly always be significantly shorter without losing anything of substance.
Three years into the current Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype cycle, catalyzed by the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI continues to profoundly disrupt higher education. A recent survey of more than 300 university leaders affirms many of the concerns expressed in public discourse: the majority of students use generative AI while the majority of faculty do not; cheating has increased while AI detection tools remain unreliable; almost all institutions feel behind progress in some way. While we certainly share these concerns, we do remain relatively optimistic about one aspect of higher education: learning to write.
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can now produce polished, technically competent texts in seconds, challenging our traditional understanding of writing as a uniquely human process of creation, reflection, and learning. For many educators, this disruption raises questions about the role of writing in their disciplines. In our new book, How to Use Writing for Teaching and Learning, we argue that this disruption presents an opportunity rather than a threat. Notice from our book’s title that our focus is not necessarily on “how to teach writing.” For us, writing is not an end goal, which means our students do not necessarily learn to write for the sake of writing. Rather, we define writing as a method of inquiry that allows access to various discourse communities (e.g., an academic discipline), social worlds (e.g., the knowledge economy), and forms of knowledge (e.g., literature).
The true value of writing lies in the thinking it generates (pun intended)—prioritizing new information, triangulating it with other sources of information to uncover new insights, and analogizing the information to make sense of it from different perspectives. We call this process of prioritization, triangulation, and analogizing “concentric thinking,” as it involves making multiple layered connections, similar to how our brains develop schemas. We not only assign writing in order to teach our content, but students also use writing to explore connections between assigned texts, lived experiences, and other course content.
By reframing writing as a cognitive process rather than merely an outcome, AI’s existence compels us to integrate writing more intentionally into our courses, regardless of the discipline. Sure, AI might produce an A-quality essay in seconds, but we humans remain a curious species; writing, along with its equivalent reading, is the primary way we satisfy our information-seeking drive. AI not only presents a good excuse to use writing for teaching and learning, but it also demands it. After all, to use generative AI effectively, one must be able to clearly prompt the tool as well as critically read the output.
The other cause for hope is that we describe a pedagogical issue, something we can influence by the ways we design and teach courses. We have the agency and the ability to foster quality learning, especially in our current era. Below, we explore the three cognitive moves of concentric thinking—prioritization, translation, and analogy—and show how low stakes, informal writing assignments can leverage these moves to enhance teaching and learning in the AI era.
Concentric Thinking
At the core of our model are three interrelated cognitive moves that writing facilitates: prioritization, translation, and analogy. These moves align with the ways experts organize and apply knowledge in their fields.
Prioritize Information: Before students can write effectively, they must learn to identify and rank key ideas from their readings, lectures, or discussions. For instance, in a history course, an informal writing prompt might ask students to select the most significant event in a unit on the Civil Rights Movement and justify their choice. This exercise encourages students to engage critically with the material, distinguishing central ideas from supporting details.
Translate Understanding: Translation involves reframing complex concepts into accessible language. This step not only reinforces comprehension but also prepares students to communicate ideas effectively to diverse audiences. In a biology course, students might write a brief explanation of DNA replication as if they were explaining it to a high school student. By simplifying the concept, they deepen their own understanding.
Analogize Insights: Drawing connections between course material and real-world problems fosters higher-order thinking. For example, in a sociology course, students could write about how current debates on economic inequality mirror historical patterns of social stratification. Analogical thinking helps students see the broader relevance of their studies and prepares them to apply knowledge in new contexts.
These moves are recursive, building on one another as students progress from informal reflections to more formal assignments. By designing prompts that scaffold these moves, teachers can help students develop the habits of mind necessary for disciplinary expertise.
Low-Stakes Informal Writing in the Classoom
Informal writing assignments, also known as “writing-to-learn,” are versatile tools that can be adapted to any discipline. Here are a few examples of how concentric thinking can be fostered through writing tasks that focus more on learning than evaluation:
Pre-Class Reflections: Before class, students might write a short response prioritizing the most compelling argument from the assigned reading. These reflections can be used to structure class discussions, ensuring that students engage with the material in meaningful ways.
In-Class Exercises: During class, students could work in pairs to translate a challenging concept into simple terms, then share their explanations with the group. This collaborative exercise reinforces understanding while fostering communication skills.
Post-Class Applications: After a lecture, students might be tasked with writing a brief analogy connecting the day’s topic to a real-world issue. For example, in an environmental science course, students could relate concepts of ecosystem balance to urban planning challenges.
Such assignments require minimal grading and can be formatively assessed for students’ learning journeys. The focus remains on developing students’ critical thinking and cognitive flexibility rather than correctness or adherence to conventions.
Writing as a Lifelong Pathway Towards Expertise
In an era where AI-generated text can mimic expertise without truly embodying it, writing as concentric thinking offers an irreplaceable cognitive pathway for developing genuine mastery. Expertise, as cognitive science shows, is not about merely accumulating knowledge; it involves organizing and integrating information into deeply connected schemas that can be applied across contexts. Writing fosters this process by requiring students to prioritize significant ideas, translate complex concepts into accessible language, and analogize insights to new or interdisciplinary challenges.
The informal writing we assign act as low-stakes opportunities for students to engage in deliberate practice. These prompts scaffold the connections between prior knowledge and new content, providing essential practice in disciplinary thinking. Through iterative feedback—designed not only to identify gaps but to guide deeper reflection—students gradually shift from surface-level memorization to a nuanced understanding of course material. Formative feedback serves as a bridge, helping students navigate challenges and transform their understanding of difficult concepts.
Furthermore, the interplay between formative and summative assessments underscores the relevance of writing to developing expertise. When students revisit their informal writing during the organizational phase of a major assignment, they engage in an essential process of synthesizing their learning. By integrating informal writing with final assignments, teachers provide a cohesive learning arc that fosters not just task completion but a deep understanding of disciplinary methods and epistemologies.
AI may offer polished outputs, but it cannot replicate the intellectual journey students undertake as they engage with course content, assigned readings, and other learning experiences with writing as the vehicle. The metacognitive insights gained through concentric thinking—prioritizing, translating, and analogizing—equip students with a level of expertise that transcends what any AI can generate. These skills are not only critical for academic success but also for navigating the complex, information-saturated world beyond the classroom.
As educators, we hold the tools to design writing processes that cultivate authentic learning and expertise. By reframing writing as a dynamic scaffold for inquiry rather than a static product, we prepare our students to think critically, synthesize knowledge, and apply their learning in meaningful ways. In this, we not only preserve the value of writing in higher education but also ensure that our students emerge as confident, capably generative (pun once again intended) of new knowledge.
Suzanne Hudd is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology who also served as Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Quinnipiac University.
Robert A. Smart is a former Dean of Arts & Sciences at QU, Professor Emeritus of English, and resident of the great state of Maine.
Andrew W. Delohery is the associate vice president of retention and academic success at Quinnipiac University, where he has also teaches courses in First Year Writing and the First-Year Seminar.
JT Torres is the Director of the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington & Lee University.
Even as someone who has done his fair share of thinking and writing about teaching writing, I did not realize that his landmark book, Writing Without Teachers, was first published all the way back in 1973. For sure, the approach to writing he advocated for in Writing Without Teachers and subsequent books challenged the prevailing dogma of academic writing by emphasizing freedom, student agency and audience above correctness and authority, but to consider the full import of Elbow’s message and compare it to what happens in writing classrooms, it’s tough to see a full “transformation” at work.
At the time I started teaching freshman composition as a graduate TA (1994), I had never heard of Peter Elbow, and none of the people tasked with preparing me for the job introduced me to his work. In fact, I would not encounter Elbow until 2001, when I expressed frustration with teaching through the lens of rhetorical “modes” and how I wished that I could get students writing more freely and authentically because I was tired of reading performative B.S. written for a grade.
“You should try Peter Elbow,” I was told. I did, and it was like the clouds suddenly parted and I could see the sun for the first time. Anyone who teaches writing as a process, who uses peer review and reflection, is working from Elbow-ian DNA. This surely fits any definition of transformation, doesn’t it?
But also, why was I not introduced to Peter Elbow as a beginning writing teacher? Why, at the time I did discover him, were departments still teaching rhetorical modes, or composition as (essentially) essays responding to literature?
In hindsight, I can tell that Elbow’s views on writing must have had a significant impact on the kind of writing I was asked to do in school and how I did it. I’ve written extensively how my grade school teachers of the 1970s privileged creativity and writing problem solving over correctness, engendering a lifelong curiosity about how writing works.
But by the time I was a teacher, it seems as though whatever transformation Elbow had caused had been beaten back, at least to some degree. Focus on process and revision remained, but this process was deployed in the making of very standard, significantly prescriptive artifacts that were easy to explain, straightforward to grade—as they fit established rubrics—and (at least in my experience) largely uninteresting to read and (in the experience of many students) uninteresting to write.
It isn’t surprising that attempts at giving students room to maneuver, which make it difficult to compare them to each other or standards of sufficiency, are resisted by those who prefer order to exploration. The most popular composition textbook of recent years is They Say/I Say (well over a million copies sold) a book that literally coaches students to write using Mad Libs–style templates to imitate forms of academic writing, under the theory students will learn academic expression through osmosis.
Having tried this book for half a semester, I understand its appeal. It’s really just a more refined version of the prescriptive process I used in the 1990s teaching rhetorical modes. If your primary goal is to have students turn in an artifact that resembles the kind of writing that would be produced through a scholarly process, it is very handy.
If the goal is to get students to think like scholars or go through a process that requires them to wrestle with the genuine challenges of academic inquiry and expression, it is a lousy choice. These are simulations of academic artifacts, predating the simulations now easily created by large language models like ChatGPT.
The orderly logic of “schooling” seems to repeatedly win over the mess and chaos of learning. Elbow argued that discovery and differentiation was the highest calling of the learning process, and that writing was an excellent vehicle for fulfilling this calling. This requires one to get comfortable with discomfort. For some reason this is serially viewed as a kind of threat to school, rather than what it should be, the focus of the whole enterprise.
The New York Times obituary calls Elbow’s approach a “more reflective and touchy-feely process,” which I read a signal as to the lack of rigor of the approach, but in truth, it’s the opposite. There’s nothing particularly rigorous about compliance, particularly when enforced by an authority above with all the power, like a teacher wielding their grade book.
As I’ve found over and over in my career, including weekly in this space for the last 13 years, there is nothing more demanding than being asked to deliver a thought that could only come from your unique intelligence. There is also nothing more interesting for both the writer and the reader.
Ultimately, I evolved in ways that make me not quite a full Elbow-ian. The experiences in The Writer’s Practice are structured in ways that do not quite square entirely with Writing With Teachers, though even as I write this sentence, I cannot help but note that calling the assignments in the book experiences, and the fact that I wrote the book in such a way that it could be engaged in the absence of a teacher, suggests that maybe the gap isn’t as wide as I perceive.
While I was working on the manuscript of what would come to be called More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, I would play around with possible titles, as the title on the proposal—“Writing With Robots”—was used for the purpose of getting attention for a book proposal, not something that genuinely reflected the sentiments of the book I planned to write.
One of the titles I considered was “Everyone Should Write,” a reference to one of Elbow’s later collected volumes, Everyone Can Write.
One of the gifts of the existence of large language models has been to demonstrate the gap between machine prose and that which can be produced by a unique human intelligence. In a way, this only revalidates Elbow’s original insights of Writing Without Teachers, that we, as humans, have a higher purpose than producing school artifacts for a grade.
I’m not giving up hope that we can accept this gift.
Co-Authored By Aaliyah Lee-Raji, Amadis Canizales, Amaiya Peterson, Andrew Stillwell, Anessa Mayorga, Aniyah Campbell, A’niyah Leather, Anna Fleeman, Brookelyn Vivas, Cassandra Mathieu, Christian Bennett, Clio Chatelain, Daniel Abernethy, Fatoumata Sow, India Davis, Isabella Maiello, Jazmine Collins, Jennifer Sanchez-Martinez, Joseph Stauffer, Karlee Howard, Kaylee Japak, Keanell Tonny, Kristian Isom, Leonardo Pisa, Mackenzie Lemus, Maddox Wreski, Madelyn Beasley, and Saverio Consolazio
In higher education, one of the greatest challenges is getting students not only engaged in learning but also excited about research. An equally pressing issue is navigating the increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the teaching and learning space. This semester, I aimed to tackle both by teaching a psychology of wellness class that integrated the principles of positive psychology with the use of AI tools. During the two-week module on positive psychology, I wanted students to experience research and writing as positive and engaging activities. I floated the idea of co-authoring an article on student wellness from their perspective, incorporating the responsible use of AI, fostering a passion for research, and ensuring that the process was enjoyable.
Here is how the project unfolded:
Day 1: Setting the Stage for Collaborative Writing
The project began by gauging student interest in co-authoring an article on student wellness. I asked those who wanted front-facing credit and authorship acknowledgment to text me their consent and indicate if they would be comfortable with their photo(s) being included. Importantly, students had the option to opt-out at any time if they felt uncomfortable with the direction of the article. I was fortunate because a large majority of the students showed a genuine interest in this assignment.
To kick off the project, I used ChatGPT to generate an outline based on positive psychology as aligned with the textbook chapters and student-led ideas and topics. The students were then divided into groups, where each group received a dedicated workspace in our learning management system, D2L. Each group selected a predetermined subtopic to focus on, and I tasked them with using ChatGPT to generate 20 ideas on that subtopic. From those 20 ideas, the groups narrowed it down to three, which they discussed in detail, considering both research-based and personal experiences. Each group member took notes to guide the next stage of the project.
Day 2: Mind Mapping and Cross-Pollination of Ideas
On the second day, students were given poster paper and markers to create mind maps of their ideas and help gain clarity on their discussions from the previous day. Each group placed their chosen topic at the center of the mind map and organized the associated ideas around it. The mind mapping exercise allowed students to visually connect their thoughts and discussions from day one.
One member from each group was nominated to circulate among the other groups, engaging in discussions about each team’s subsection of the article. This not only gave students a broader perspective on how their topics related to the overarching theme of student wellness but also facilitated the flow of information between teams. After gathering input from other teams, the group representative brought the new insights back to their original group, enhancing their understanding of their own topic and how it fit into the larger article. To ensure continuity, students took photos of their mind maps, which would later serve as guides for the writing process.
Day 3: Writing and Research Alignment
On the third day, each group was tasked with creating a document that contained a minimum of five references, with each group member responsible for contributing at least one reference. The document consisted of chunks of article drafts accompanied by their respective references. Students were asked to align these references with the ideas discussed during the earlier sessions and integrate them into their mind maps. Next, students took 15 minutes individually within a shared Google doc to write about their subsection, drawing from their mind maps and class discussions. This individual writing time allowed students to consolidate their thoughts and begin crafting their portion of the collaborative article.
Day 4: Ethical Use of AI in the Writing Process
The fourth day focused on ethical AI usage. We began with a discussion on how students had been using AI tools like ChatGPT and how they envisioned using any type of AI tools in the creation of this article. Together, we created an AI disclosure statement, agreeing on how AI would be used during the editing phase.
We explored specific AI prompts that could enhance their writing, including:
“Rephrase for clarity.”
“Organize this paragraph for the introduction, summary, or conclusion.”
“Give me a starting sentence for this paragraph.”
These prompts were designed to guide students in using AI as a tool to enhance clarity and organization rather than relying on it to write the content.
Day 5: Final Writing and Cohesive Editing
On the final day, students returned to their group documents and spent 15 minutes revising their sections. Afterward, they worked together to co-edit the document without the use of AI, striving to make the article more cohesive and polished. Finally, we revisited the agreed-upon AI prompts, and students were given the option to use AI only when they felt it was necessary for tasks like rephrasing sentences or organizing paragraphs.
The project culminated in a completed article on student wellness, co-authored by students and enhanced by responsible AI usage. The collaborative process not only demystified research and writing but also empowered students to see these activities as positive, engaging, and enjoyable experiences.
Takeaways From This Teaching Experience
The AI writing project was a valuable learning experience for the students, as it incorporated individual and collaborative learning elements alongside technology-based approaches. Reflecting on this experience, I have identified several key takeaways to carry forward into the new semester of teaching and learning.
The Importance of Throwback Learning Experience: Something Familiar Traditional tools like markers and poster boards remain essential in fostering cohesion, socialization, and competence-building. These activities encouraged students to engage in discussions and create visual representations of their ideas, which helped build their confidence and reinforce the collaborative process.
Starting With Original Ideas Matters Students benefited from discussing their ideas within the context of originality before integrating AI-generated content. Generative AI poses a potential threat to originality, emphasizing the need for human thought, discussion, and creativity to provide a benchmark for comparing the quality and intentionality of AI contributions.
Clear Parameters and Prompts Are Essential Defining the role of AI in the writing process was critical for success. Many students initially viewed AI as a tool for producing entire works. By discussing the parameters beforehand, it became clear that AI was to be used to supplement and enhance cohesion rather than replace the creative process.
The Importance of Prompt Development Students gained a growing understanding of the importance of crafting effective prompts for AI. Recognizing how prompts influence AI outputs is a crucial skill that was previously underdeveloped in many students. Moving forward, this skill will be vital as they navigate the intersection of human creativity and AI assistance.
Final Thoughts
Developing effective AI prompts is a pivotal skill that empowers students to use AI intentionally and meaningfully in their learning. A well-crafted prompt acts as the foundation for generating accurate, relevant, and cohesive responses, highlighting the importance of clarity, specificity, and purpose in the initial instructions given to the AI. By understanding how to formulate prompts, students can better harness the potential of AI to support their ideas, enhance their creativity, and improve the quality of their work without relying on AI to replace their original contributions.
This skill also encourages critical thinking, as students must evaluate the type of input needed to achieve a desired outcome, troubleshoot issues in responses, and refine their prompts for better results. Moreover, it aligns with the broader need for digital literacy in education, preparing students to interact responsibly and effectively with technology in academic, professional, and personal contexts.
Lastly, incorporating intentional AI use into teaching strategies ensures that students not only learn how to use these tools but also understand their limitations and ethical considerations. By balancing traditional methods, which foster originality and human connection, with innovative technologies like AI, educators can create a holistic learning environment that values both creativity and technological fluency. This balance will be crucial as AI continues to play an increasingly integral role in education and beyond.
Dr. Courtney Plotts’ students in class.A snapshot of the students’ work.
Special Note of Pride: I would like to note that this group of students worked on this project during class and completed this while two natural disasters accrued, power outages, remote and in person learning and did a great job considering the circumstances. I am so proud of each of them! We originally had bigger visions for the project but due to weather we had to make some changes to the plan!
Freshman College Students’ Advice to Peers for Health & Wellness in 2025
The new year always comes with the possibility of change and growth. As students, much of our growth focus is academics and learning-based. Being academically successful isn’t an easy task. Student wellbeing is an important factor in the learning process (Frazier & Doyle-Fosco, 2024). And for most of us, throwing ourselves into our studies and homework can come with negative side effects like burnout, stress, and decreased mood and motivation. But being successful doesn’t have to come at the risk of your mental health. In our view, academic success means more than good grades and knowledge. Although you may have gone through something last year, or are still going through it now, it doesn’t have to affect you in a negative way. There is so much more that goes into being successful. Success requires dedication, consistency, self-care, and a positive mindset. But for many of us a positive mind set is hard to come by.
The Collective Obstacle
The average age of our class is 19.7 years of age. We have lived with social media all of our lives. A lot of voices have imparted information. Some good, some not so good. The negativity that is readily accessible on social media can lead to negative self-talk. “Negative self-talk refers to your inner voice making critical, negative, or punishing comments. These are the pessimistic, mean-spirited, or unfairly critical thoughts that go through your head when you are making judgements about yourself” (Scott, 2023). Negative self-talk can be detrimental to your psychological well-being. It can really bring you down after you do it for too long. Negative self-talk can also induce stress, depression, and relationship problems. How you can start to believe the negative self-talk: you can start to believe negative self-talk after a while of you doing it. The more you start to tell yourself you can’t do something, the more you’ll start to believe it.
The effects of positive self-talk are the opposite of negative self-talk. It will improve your mental health, can reduce stress, lessen depression, and improve relationships. This not only impacts academics, but other aspects of life. To minimize negative self-talk, you can catch your inner critic when it’s happening and change your thinking to think more positive thoughts, remember that thoughts are not facts, contain your negativity, shift your perspective, think like a friend, or other trusted advisors.
Two Positive Ideas to Embrace in 2025
Two ideas to embrace in the new year that can jumpstart your positivity are evaluating how you think about failure and the control of your future. Failure is an inevitable part of life, but it is through our setbacks that we find opportunities for growth and success. How we respond to failure matters more than the failure itself, and cultivating a mindset of optimism is key to overcoming challenges (Hilppö & Stevens, 2020). Optimism, combined with grit—the perseverance and passion to achieve long-term goals—forms the foundation for a positive and resilient lifestyle. Together, these qualities enable us to turn obstacles into stepping stones and approach life’s difficulties with determination and hope. Think of failures as learning opportunities. Think about the knowledge you gain from hindsight when thinking about failure.
Additionally, understanding the distinction between what we can and cannot control is crucial for maintaining positivity and health (Pourhoseinzadeh, Gheibizadeh,& Moradikalboland, Cheraghian, 2017). Accepting that not everything is within our power allows us to shift our focus to areas where we can make a difference and grow from the experience. Remaining positive during challenging situations and remembering the aspects we can influence help us navigate adversity with a constructive mindset. It’s also important to respect that some factors are beyond our control and may happen for reasons we do not yet understand. By seeking to understand why certain things are outside our control, we can cultivate acceptance and use these moments as opportunities for reflection and personal growth.
The Importance of Health Communication in 2025
Healthy communication is critical to positive personal growth. Asking open-ended questions is important when engaging in meaningful communication because it ensures that there are no assumptions being made. One researcher found that assumptions “lead to consistent and unnecessary community failures” (Macrae, 2018, p.5). Additionally, healthy communication can build true connections among people and better understanding. Also, avoiding assumptions is a way to stay present in the moment allowing you to determine if there is genuine interest in the conversation. Most importantly, health aspects of communication like listening, reflecting, and pausing encourage new thinking and can develop new ideas just about anything.
In addition to healthy communication, think about sharing more of your experiences with peers. Starting from a place of curiosity and health, inquire about someone’s well-being. You can start with a simple phrase like “Are you ok?” Or be ready and willing to share your own personal experience when the time is right. Not only can this help someone else but sharing your story can also help you process what you have been through. Sharing and listening to each other’s experiences can show understanding and help you feel more willing to share now and in the future. Understanding and being present is a power combination for communication.
Lastly, remember that relationships are complex. Whether parental, academic, or personal, everyone has their relationships challenges. One tactic to strengthen relationships is humor. Remember to laugh and enjoy life and the people around you. Most people forget about light heartedness and humor, and how humor can help strengthen and resolve issues within a relationship. Humor can improve the quality of relationships by reducing the stress, tension, and anxiety of the people within the relationship. This effect can only occur if humor is used respectfully in relationships. When used right, humor also can create a more comfortable relationship with less anxiety and sadness for those in it. It’s ok to laugh—even in challenging times.
Summary
A positive mindset is the root of achieving any goal you put your mind to. As a collective voice, we hope the information we shared is valuable information. Our goal was to share meaningful information for your new year and new journey in 2025. As students, we fully understand the importance of mental health, especially because all of us experienced covid at some of the most challenging times of our lives. We hope this information helps you in the new year as much as it helped us learn and grow. Remember to stay happy, healthy, and safe in the new year and think positive!
Dr. Courtney Plotts is a Dynamic Keynote Speaker, Author, and Professor. Dr. Plotts is the National Chair of the Council For At-Risk Student Education and Professional Standards, the country’s only organization that provides standards for working with marginalized and nontraditional students in Kindergarten to College. Her role as National Chair includes training, consulting, and research. Her subject matter expertise has been used in a variety of book publications. Most recently “Small Teaching Online” By Flower Darby with James M. Lang published in June 2019. Dr. Plotts was recognized in 2017 by the California State Legislature for a bold commitment to change in education. She is currently in talks with higher education institutions to launch an institute that focuses on diversity and best practices in online teaching spaces to launch in 2021.
References
Frazier, T., & Doyle Fosco, S. L. (2024). Nurturing positive mental health and wellbeing in educational settings – the PRICES model. Frontiers in public health, 11, 1287532. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.12875
Hilppö, J., & Stevens, R. (2020). “Failure is just another try”: Re-framing failure in school through the FUSE studio approach. International Journal of Educational Research, 99, 101494. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2019.101494
Macrae, C. (2018). When no news is bad news: Communication failures and the hidden assumptions that threaten safety. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 111(1), 5–7. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141076817738503
Pourhoseinzadeh, M., Gheibizadeh, M., & Moradikalboland, M., Cheraghian, B. (2017). The Relationship between Health Locus of Control and Health Behaviors in Emergency Medicine Personnel. International journal of community based nursing and midwifery, 5(4), 397–407.
Individualized Education Plans (IEP) have been the foundation of special education for decades, and the process in which these documents are written has evolved over the years.
As technology has evolved, writing documents has also evolved. Before programs existed to streamline the IEP writing process, creating IEPs was once a daunting task of paper and pencil. Not only has the process of writing the IEP evolved, but IEPs are becoming technology-driven.
Enhancing IEP goal progress with data-driven insights using technology: There are a variety of learning platforms that can monitor a student’s performance in real-time, tailoring to their individual needs and intervening areas for improvement. Data from these programs can be used to create students’ annual IEP goals. This study mentions that the ReadWorks program, used for progress monitoring IEP goals, has 1.2 million teachers and 17 million students using its resources, which provide content, curricular support, and digital tools. ReadWorks is free and provides all its resources free of charge and has both printed and digital versions of the material available to teachers and students (Education Technology Nonprofit, 2021).
Student engagement and involvement with technology-driven IEPs: Technology-driven IEPs can also empower students to take an active role in their education plan. According to this study, research shows that special education students benefit from educational technology, especially in concept teaching and in practice-feedback type instructional activities (Carter & Center, 2005; Hall, Hughes & Filbert, 2000; Hasselbring & Glaser, 2000). It is vital for students to take ownership in their learning. When students on an IEP reach a certain age, it is important for them to be the active lead in their plan. Digital tools that are used for technology-driven IEPs can provide students with visual representations of their progress, such as dashboards or graphs. When students are given a visual representation of their progress, their engagement and motivation increases.
Technology-driven IEPs make learning fun:This study discusses technology-enhanced and game based learning for children with special needs. Gamified programs, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) change the learning experience from traditional to transformative. Gamified programs are intended to motivate students with rewards, personalized feedback, and competition with leaderboards and challenges to make learning feel like play. Virtual reality gives students an immersive experience that they would otherwise only be able to experience outside of the classroom. It allows for deep engagement and experiential learning via virtual field trips and simulations, without the risk of visiting dangerous places or costly field trip fees that not all districts or students can afford. Augmented reality allows students to visualize abstract concepts such as anatomy or 3D shapes in context. All these technologies align with technology-driven IEPs by providing personalized, accessible, and measurable learning experiences that address diverse needs. These technologies can adapt to a student’s individual skill level, pace, and goals, supporting their IEP.
Challenges with technology-driven IEPs: Although there are many benefits to technology-driven IEPs, it is important to address the potential challenges to ensure equity across school districts. Access to technology in underfunded school districts can be challenging without proper investment in infrastructures, devices, and network connection. Student privacy and data must also be properly addressed. With the use of technologies for technology-driven IEPs, school districts must take into consideration laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
The integration of technology into the IEP process to create technology-driven IEPs represents a shift from a traditional process to a transformative process. Technology-driven IEPs create more student-centered learning experiences by implementing digital tools, enhancing collaboration, and personalized learning experiences. These learning experiences will enhance student engagement and motivation and allow students to take control of their own learning, making them leaders in their IEP process. However, as technology continues to evolve, it is important to address the equity gap that may arise in underfunded school districts.
Shannon Keenan, Special Education Teacher
Shannon Keenan is a special education teacher in Columbia Heights, MN. She is also a graduate student at Concordia University in St. Paul, MN studying Educational Technology.
Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)
Imagine you’re a student in high school or college. Class is about to start. You are faced with a notable dilemma: Should you whip out a notebook or a laptop to take notes?
The answer is not so simple. A year ago, paper and pen seemed to be the winner when the journal Frontiers in Psychology published a Norwegian study that documented how different areas of the brain were communicating more frequently when students were writing by hand. When students were typing, the brain was not nearly so active. This extra brain activity, the neuroscientists wrote, is “beneficial for learning.”
The study ricocheted around the world. Almost 200 news stories promoted the idea that we remember things better when we write them down by hand instead of typing. It confirmed what many of us instinctively feel. That’s why I still take notes in a notebook even though I can hardly read my chicken scratch.
Yet earlier this month, the same academic journal published a scathing rebuttal to the handwriting study. A pair of scientists in Spain and France pointed out that none of the Norwegian college students was asked to learn anything in the laboratory experiment. “Drawing conclusions on learning processes in children in a classroom from a lab study carried out on a group of university students that did not include any type of learning seems slippery at best,” the critics wrote.
The Norwegian study asked 36 college students in their early 20s to write words from the game Pictionary using either a digital pen on a touchscreen or typing on a keyboard. The participants wore stretchy hair nets studded with electrodes to capture their brain activity. The scientists documented the differences between the two modes of writing.
Neither mode approximated real life conditions. The students were instructed to write in cursive without lifting the stylus from the screen. And they were only allowed to type with their right index finger.
The critics also questioned whether elevated brain activity is proof of better learning. Increased brain activity could equally be interpreted as a sign that handwriting is slower and more taxing than typing. We don’t know.
I contacted Audrey van der Meer, one of the co-authors of the Norwegian study who runs a neuroscience lab at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. She pointed out that her critics promote the use of keyboards in education, and so they may not be unbiased. But she admitted that her study didn’t test whether students learned anything.
Van der Meer is conducting a fresh experiment that involves actual learning with 140 teenagers. She had the high school students watch a recorded lecture. Half of them were randomly assigned to take notes by hand, using a digital pen and touchscreen, and the other half typed their notes. Afterward, they all took the same exam graded by teachers at the school.
So far, she’s noticed clear differences in note-taking styles. Those who typed their notes wrote significantly more words, often transcribing parts of the lecture verbatim. They didn’t make any drawings. Those who used a digital pen mainly wrote key words and short sentences and produced two drawings, on average.
According to van der Meer, students who use the keyboard are writing down everything the teacher says “because they can.” But, she said in an email, “the information appears to be coming in through the ears and, without any form of processing, going out through the fingertips.” She added that when taking notes by hand, “it is impossible to write down everything, so students have to process the incoming information, summarize it, and link it to knowledge they already have.” That helps the “new information to stick better, resulting in better retention.”
Van der Meer said she could not yet share the exam results with me as she is still analyzing them. She explained that there are “many confounding variables” that make it difficult to tell if those who used handwritten notes performed better on the exam.
Even the pro-typing scientists admit that handwriting is important. Previous research has shown that writing letters by hand, compared to typing them, helps young children learn their letters much better. A 2015 study found that adults were better able to recall words in a memory game when they wrote them down by hand first instead of typing them. And a 2010 book chapter documented positive associations between writing words and being able to read them.
While there’s fairly compelling evidence that handwriting can help children learn their letters and new words, there’s less proof that handwriting helps us absorb new information and ideas. That’s not to say the Norwegian neuroscientists are wrong. But we still need the proof.
I’d also add that not all learning is the same. Learning to write is different from learning Spanish vocabulary. There may be times when typing is the ideal way to learn something and other times when handwriting is. Also, learning something involves far more than either typing or handwriting, and the methodwe use to take notes might ultimately be of small importance compared to how we study our notes afterwards.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
In this special seasonal edition of the Wonkhe Show, we discuss how you can contribute to the higher education debate by writing for the site.
Plus we discuss the importance of communicating academic and professional insights to wider audiences, and we take you inside our editorial process – which is all about clear arguments and diverse perspectives.
With Adam Matthews, Senior Research Fellow at the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, Michael Salmon, News Editor at Wonkhe, David Kernohan, Deputy Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Debbie McVitty, Editor at Wonkhe.
Dr. Andrea Rexilius joins me on The Social Academic to talk about her new edited anthology, We Can See Into Another Place: Mile-High Writers on Social Justice (The Bookies Press and Bower House 2024). This innovative, multi-genre anthology brings together writers and faculty from the Mile-High MFA Program at Regis University in Colorado.
In this featured interview, Dr. Andrea Rexilius joins me to talk about social justice, radical imagination, and the power of storytelling. Read Andrea’s bio.
In this interview
Meet Andrea
Jennifer: Hello everyone. Welcome to The Social Academic. This is Jennifer van Alstyne and we are right after Election Day [USA]. So there are a lot of feelings and emotions out there. And even though this episode isn’t gonna air for a little while, the topic we are talking about today is social justice.
Andrea: Sure. Thank you Jennifer. Good to see you. I am a professor and writer living in Denver, Colorado, teaching at Regis University in the Mile-High MFA and Creative Writing Program. I think that’s all I’ll say.
Jennifer: Great. I’m curious because you’ve reached out to me about this episode and I’m wondering what prompted this anthology? What made you decide to bring together these faculty, these writers from the Mile-High program together into one collection?
Andrea: Well, they’re such interesting writers. They’re varied in terms of their genre, their aesthetic, which is also representative of the program that they were all teaching in. But a lot of them, there’s about 20, 21 of them in the anthology, and they don’t all always overlap. So I wanted to kind of, since they’re all part of that same conversation, teaching similar students working with the Mile-High MFA program at various times over the last nine years. I just wanted to put them a little bit more in conversation with each other, especially some of them that hadn’t crossed paths before, just to celebrate all of them together and share their work with, I think some of them probably looked each other up, but just to share their work with one another and with the public, with everybody else, because there’s just tremendous writing coming from all of them.
Jennifer: Yeah, the collection was tremendous and emotional and almost fraught with language that really pulls you in.
I’m curious, the anthology brings together a lot of genres, like multi-genre anthology. What made anthology and book the right format for sharing these stories?
Andrea: Yeah, I think in terms of anthology, it was kind of unusual to gather a kind of multi-genre format for an anthology. They’re traditionally fiction or their creative nonfiction or their poetry. A lot of writers only maybe read in one of those genres. A lot readers only read in one of those genres. We also have a graphic narrative, a comic strip in here. We have some playwriting.
And so all of those different ways of kind of conveying ideas seemed interesting to gather into one publication and to sort of begin to maybe break down some of those barriers across genre. There’s more and more interest in hybrid writing and reading hybrid materials, but something that actually celebrates genre distinctions and also genre overlap seems like an important thing to sort of add to the literary conversation.
Jennifer: I felt like your essay at the start, the introduction was so powerful in terms of shaping, the openness and the hope and the tenuousness that writers can achieve through storytelling. I found myself transported into each one of those writer’s forms. It felt like I was jumping from poetry to play to that, the graphic one, it was just overwhelming in the sense that I hadn’t really considered so many voices on this subject in the genre-bending kind of format. It was a different kind of experience to me compared to other things that I’ve read about social justice that I’ve watched about social justice this year. And it felt more powerful because of that. Like the collective of voices and the difference in genre made it more meaningful and impactful for me.
Did you find that when you were putting together, the different sections, and the layout for the book?
Andrea: Yeah, absolutely. It was really interesting because initially what kind of bound the writers together was their overlapping relationship with the MFA program. But I also just wanted to create an artifact of that kind of archive. All of those voices that were part of that community at the Mile-High, which is still continuing on, but that’s the first nine years of it. And I didn’t have the theme so much in mind when I first started gathering things. I wasn’t sure, is this something I’m just going to make as a kind of PDF that I make available to the community? Or, am I going to try to seek out a publisher, and put it into the larger world?
Pretty early on I had begun gathering some things and in the process of gathering them, I started shopping around some local presses in the Colorado area to see if it might be something they’d be interested in. And as sort of a long answer to what you asked me. But as I was shifting into, “Okay, it’s actually gonna be published by a press, it’s going to be a book that is available to anybody. It’s not just sort of in-house community. I started noticing patterns in the early submissions. And that’s where the theme began to develop from.
Also, seeing like how some of the poems communicated with the fiction, just the little overlaps and detail that were coming in were really interesting. That’s how the [Young Adult] interview got in there as well. ‘Cause there were so many writers, like Stephen Dunn’s piece, Addie Tsai’s piece, Lori Ostlund’s piece, where they’re talking about experiences in high school or as young adults and how writing impacted them, why they became writers and avid readers, and what their experiences to were with reading. They weren’t always delightful.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Andrea: So that started to kind of naturally grow out of the process of gathering those submissions.
Jennifer: I’m curious, who do you feel should really read this book? Who should go out and buy a copy or buy it for someone that they know or love?
Andrea: I mean, on the day that we’re recording this, I would say everybody should go read this book. I mean there’s many different representations and iterations of what we mean by social justice in the book, you know? It speaks to social economic stuff. It’s speaking to race relations, all kinds of different power dynamics speaking to neurological difference, the environments. It’s just a wide swath of what we think about when we are collectively, socially trying to enact justice for ourselves and our daily lives. But it also, like, the thing that I think about when I come to social justice is the idea of ‘radical imagination.’ And the idea that the mind, the interior, I quote Emily Dickinson at the beginning of the book, I love, I’m a poet, so I’m always referencing her, but she has a line, ‘The brain is wider than the sky.’ So this idea that like the mental space, the interior space is larger than this external world. It can imagine anything.
So when it feels like something, when possibilities are shutting down, I think the most powerful thing you can do is just remember that you have your own imagination. You can envision a different way forward. You can still be disappointed. You know we still have all of our emotions in relation to these things, but being able to maintain and hang onto that hope and awareness that like it’s always yours. It’s always in you. You always have that power of the interior and the mind to think differently than what the external world might be kind of crushing you into thinking and feeling and being.
Jennifer: Ooh, that was powerful. I needed to hear that too. I’m like crying. I’m like, what do I have tissues near me? And I don’t. But what I really gravitated toward from what you said is the word, ‘hope.’ Like the imagination can create hope. It can create futures that we haven’t experienced or thought of. It can be world opening. How do you hope this book can inform or provide an entrance into some kind of change or transformation?
Andrea: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I’m gonna quote a couple things and then talk about the final section of the book.
Jennifer: I love that
Andrea: My frameworks at Emily Dickinson again, “I dwell in possibility” because I think so much of diminishment of hope is feeling that the possibilities are becoming fewer and fewer. But again, that idea of radical imagination, if we can imagine something different than what we are being told must happen, or that there’s this kind of non-linearity, there’s always a possibility for something to shift or to swerve. And the more we think toward that possibility, I think the more empowered we stay.
And then this Toni Morrison quote was so important in thinking about putting together this book. She says, “Don’t let anybody convince you this is the world is, and therefore must be, it must be the way it ought to be.” That speaks similarly, I think to the Emily Dickinson piece about possibility that nothing has to be any particular way. Sometimes it’s that particular way.
But knowing that we still have so much inside of us that can speak out, that can share our experiences, that can voice things that the dissent from the powers that be, I mean, hopefully we retain that powers. I mean, people go underground, they make zines. We get the word out in whatever way we need to. And right now there’s this book, the last section, we move into questions for the reader that kind of bring you into this state of reflection and get you in touch with your own ideas and imagination.
So, what would you like to give voice to? How do you survive and thrive when everything feels like it is on fire? That’s a great question for today.
Jennifer: Today’s the day for that one. Woo.
Andrea: And probably in the coming days and first of the year, that’ll be a great one to speak to. What is your hope for re-imagining of our societal and cultural future? What actions would help us move individually and or collectively toward that re-imagined future? So finding ways to bring those spaces, those radical imagination and those imaginings into external action, to starting small, making it grow larger, finding people to share your voice with who, who have similar thoughts and feelings, putting it in a book form, reading something where other people speak to that.
Jennifer: A lot of professors, faculty members are listening to this podcast. And I’m curious, is this a book that would fit well in like a classroom discussion? Is this something that can or should be taught?
Andrea: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think it would be great for high school, for college or book clubs for all kinds of reading groups because they’re part of the multi-genre aspect too. There’s something in it for everybody. If you’re not super into reading essays, there’s a comic. If you don’t love poetry, there’s short stories. If you aren’t into any of that, there are some interviews with why young adults, authors at the end.
There’s places for you to do your own thinking and writing and responding to whatever was in the book. It’s meant to be engaging in that way, to invite people to participate in the conversation of the book, and to add their own voice if they think something’s missing from it, if there’s something, that they wanna add, all of those openings are are there. And it would be great.
I think too, just thinking about in a classroom setting, thinking about how the different genres and pieces in here speak to these topics as well. What unique things happen formally in short story or poetry or essay. So yeah, thanks for asking that.
Jennifer: Now, as editor, maybe you don’t have like favorites, but I’m curious if you have one or two pieces you could share with us that especially faculty members might find a spark, or something that really draws them in.
Andrea: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Steven Dunn and I think his piece in here is just absolutely brilliant. And he is speaking about his experiences in English class and then feeling left out of that conversation, feeling like it’s a conversation just for white people. He’s only reading stories written by white authors and is being told that his voice is incorrect, that he needs to correct his grammar, his way of being, his way of speaking. And I think that’s another thing like that this book demonstrates to some extent, through the genre, but also part of what we were all trying to do in the program together with students was just let every let people know like, you can be who you are.
So in order to be a good writer, you have to speak, you have to get in touch with what, who you actually are and what you actually want to say. And that’s when the writing becomes the most powerful. You shouldn’t be trying to conform your voice to anybody else’s. And I hear that in Steven’s piece and Addie Tsai’s piece.
There’s a lot of interesting reflecting in a lot of the pieces too: David Heska, Wanbli Weiden is writing this essay about his grandmother who was in a Native American boarding school that are infamous for, cultural obliteration and all kinds of horrific things. And she has this nostalgia for the boarding school.
He’s kind of reckoning with that, and sort of wondering why, answering why she might have that nostalgia in really interesting, complicated ways. And the ending of that piece I think really speaks to that reckoning with his grandmother’s state of mind and why she might have had that nostalgia and what other of nostalgia she had. I don’t wanna spoil the ending, but that’s one of my favorites because it.
Jennifer: I loved that piece.
Andrea: Yeah.
Jennifer: I’d be happy if you’d be open to reading something. That sounds great.
Andrea: I’ll read maybe a little bit from Steven’s piece that I was talking about. More beige. All right. I dunno what happens. Okay. It’s a snow day here. I usually am wearing bright colors, but I’m engaged. So this book to, or the piece from Steve Dunn, it’s from a book that he is working on called Travel With Nas, and he is co-writing it with a bunch of his friends and family members, which is, so it’s a collaborative project. He recently published another book, Tannery Bay, which he co-wrote with Katie Jean Shinkle. So that idea of sort of conversational collaborative writing comes through in his work in general too.
Jennifer: I love that.
Andrea: This is Intro / An Excerpt from Travel with Nas by Steven Dunn.
“I grew up in a small town in West Virginia: Kimball (population 500). I read a lot before going to middle school, but outside of textbooks and newspapers, I read only one book from the ages of 12-21. I’m a novelist now, a Creative Writing professor, and I write book reviews.
Reading only one book was partly an institutional fault, and partly my fault:
Partly my fault because I cared more about math painting and maps.
Partly an institutional fault because of poverty. And we were assigned only one little funky ass book throughout middle and high school, The Old Man and The Sea. We watched Of Mice and Men,Grapes of Wrath and Little Women. I hated English classes because they were mostly about correcting our language by prescribing us with ways to speak. We learned that the generations of language we celebrated in, cried in, analyzed with and joked in was wrong. And the books were about white people and white problems and white triumphs and white hopes and white dreams. So I was like, ‘Fuck English and literature and all that white bullshit.’ I was right and I was wrong.
I was wrong about English and literature because of course Black people have been writing literature about us, I just didn’t know shit about it, And them white folks ain’t care enough to teach it. I was right because I was listening to rap. And I was wrong because I was listening to rap.”
—Steven Dunn
Jennifer: Oh, Steven Dunn’s words are so powerful. I love that he’s interested in collective writing and also that he posts about the writing that he does on Facebook. So even if you’re not, the book’s not out yet, but like, I feel like I know a little bit more about Nas and about his process of writing it because he’s open to sharing it.
Online presence as an author
Jennifer: Actually, that kind of brings me into my next question. I’m curious about your online presence as an author. What’s it like to be a faculty member and a writer, and just like a person who your personality is like quite vivacious in the sense that it’s so memorable. How do you craft all of that online and show kind of your personality when you are in online spaces?
Andrea: Oh, wow. That’s a great question. I’m pretty introverted. Pretty like, I feel like it’s hard to know how that comes across. But I think of my social media, the way I curate it, because we’re all sort of curating it to some extent. I’m trying to maybe express my academic self on there, posting about books, about readings, sharing events with students, trying to kind of build that community with the MFA students and everybody in the Front Range, bringing different communities that I’m part of together. I’m teaching at Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, a community creative writing place, and also at a Regis University. So sort of colliding some of those folks at times. And then I have my sort of like more artsy poetic life where I am doing some volunteer classes at this farm in Lafayette [Colorado] that some of my friends run.
Jennifer: Really?
Andrea: They have a little, they have a farm share. It’s called Community Farm
Jennifer: That’s so cool.
Andrea: And there’s an art lab. So I had a former student of mine donated a bunch of arts supplies, and so it’s just overfilling with art supplies. So I’ve been hosting like collage and mask making parties there.
Jennifer: Ugh, that’s amazing. Mask making parties. I’m so jealous. So Dr. Rexilius and I know each other from Naropa University at the Jack Kerouac School back when I was in my MFA program. So I’m so excited we’re having this conversation now, but I am super jealous of these art classes. That sounds so fun. And I love What I see from you on social media is a lot of your artistic side. Like I remember your moth costume, your masks. Like I love seeing that part of who you are in online spaces for sure. What about as an author, we talked about like what you do for your community.
Andrea: Right. Right.
Jennifer: What’s it like talking about yourself as an author online? That one’s really fun [Andrea holds a mask to her face].
Andrea: Talking about myself as an author, I probably should do more of that because I tend to keep my process pretty low key. I don’t share about my writing process as much. I share more about the end result. I might share more about my creative process. I share more of the kind of masks and art making that I’m doing visual art making.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Andrea: But if I have something finished published, then I tend, I’ll share that.
Jennifer: Nice.
Andrea: Yeah. But I like to keep my process a little bit more to myself because I like to have it untouched by other opinions.
Jennifer: Oh, I’m so glad you shared that. That’s a really nice perspective. It’s not so much as private as protecting it almost.
Andrea: Yeah.
Jennifer: Like protecting your process. That’s beautiful. Oh, thank you for sharing that with me. I’m curious, is there anything you really dislike about social media or about being online?
Andrea: I don’t like social media.
Jennifer: You don’t like it at all? That’s totally fine.
Andrea: When you asked, I was like, ‘oh!’ I just panicked. I was like, do I have a presence? I do because I’m the Director of this program, I have a presence to be online for that. I do have different sort of pages that I manage. So different hats that I put on. I post more of the artsy personal stuff on my own page. That’s me. But it also, part of me is that community aspect. And then I have some program specific pages where, it’s maybe a little more professional or like posting, sharing work by the authors, in this collection sharing student work. As much as I know if people tell me about it, but it’s fine.
Jennifer: That’s always part of the process.
Andrea: Yeah. I don’t wanna… I try not to spend a lot of time scrolling on social media.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Andrea: But yeah, I guess I like, the part of it that I do like is it does connect so many aspects of my world over the years that otherwise would have, many of them I think would have, disappeared from my life entirely. Like friendships in high school, things like that. And it is really nice to sort of just see what people are up to. Even if I’m somebody that I was best friends with when I was 16 or something just to see, get a glimpse of their life.
Jennifer: I saw a childhood friend of mine who I haven’t talked to in, oh my gosh, a couple decades maybe, just had a child. And I was so touched for her, like we don’t talk, but it still felt meaningful to me. So you don’t like social media and you have actually a strong online presence compared to a lot of faculty members because you’re wanting to be part of that community and wanting to bring together communities as well. That’s really interesting.
Andrea: Yeah, I always think if I didn’t have this job, I would leave Facebook, but I’m still there.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. You’re still there. That’s true. Well, you gotta have somewhere to share your masks.
Andrea: That’s right. Yeah. I might keep it just to share the masks. I say I would leave, but I probably just share weirder things.
Jennifer: Right, a little bit leaning more into your personality. Exactly.
Jennifer: Now academics who I’d say don’t consider themselves writers are listening to this, and I want them to go out and buy your book. I’m also curious, like if they are interested in leaning into more social justice lenses or social justice audiences, even for their writing. Is there somewhere you recommend they start? Maybe if this is their first time leaning into that area? I’d say they’re academics who maybe don’t consider themselves writers, even though they do quite a bit of writing.
Andrea: Well, there’s lots of amazing literary conferences of all sizes and topics and themes. There’s a couple of things that I would note. Like in Denver, there’s a really great conference that The Word Storytelling, A Sanctuary runs. They have a conference called Margins. And so it’s an audience primarily of people of color who are writers. Talking about all types of different things. Some of that overlaps social justice. And I think that idea, radical imagination too, is this sort of holding equally everybody’s voice and making space for everybody’s voice to be heard. And maybe even making more space for the voices that are typically more marginalized. So that place would be a good place to start. There’s also a website called Writing the Other that is for writers and thinking about the publishing industry and how to, thinking about representation, appropriation, those kinds of issues, and how to navigate those as writers which I think also relates writers, academics, social justice, kind of entwines with all of those things. And then looking at this anthology has so many amazing authors in it. You can read any of them. Read interviews by them. They’re on podcasts. They’re doing online interviews. They have amazing things to say creatively, critically, academically. So there’s 20 people right there who have your back and can, who are also really open and friendly and up for answering questions. I shouldn’t speak for all of them, but reach out, see if they’re willing to engage. They definitely do a lot of them do classroom visits. They are used to sort of doing interviews and podcasts and things like that too.
Jennifer: Oh, that is so cool. I want everyone to go out and get your copy of We Can See Into Another Place. This is an important anthology, especially for academics like you. Oh, it made big difference when I read it, and I hope it does for you as well. Andrea, is there anything else that you’d like to touch on, talk about before we wrap up today?
Andrea: I think we got everything. Thank you so much for having me. It was really lovely to see you again and have this conversation with you.
Jennifer: Oh, I’m so excited to share your book with everyone and to feature you on The Social Academic. Thank you so much.
Dr. Andrea Rexilius is the author of Sister Urn (Sidebrow, 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks, Séance (Coconut Books, 2014), To Be Human (Horseless Press, 2010), and Afterworld (above/ground press, 2020).
She earned an MFA in Poetry from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Denver (2010). Andrea is the program director for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing. She also teaches in the Poetry Collective at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado.
I put this infographic together to help many instructors that are struggling with this issue as they teach and are trying to keep students from using AI when they are not supposed to. Be sure to take every opportunity to help students learn about AI Literacy when you can, even when telling them that for this assignment/eval they won’t be able to use it.
You as the instructor are the subject matter expert and must be the one deciding how AI will be used in your classroom and for your assignments/evaluations. For some assignments, the use of AI may not be the right answer in that you are trying to help them develop skills mastery, so they can properly gain the skill of what “right” looks like. Be sure to fully explain that to them so that they have full relevancy and understanding as to why they can or can not use AI.
