Led by Meghan Velez and Kara Taczak, join us for the third webinar in our 2025-2026 Webinar Series!

According to a recent New Yorker article, college students use ChatGPT to be “resourceful” and "efficient" yet many suggest they don’t retain any learning when they use it. This article’s main premise centered on what might happen after AI destroys college writing. But it, like many other media publications, asks the wrong types of questions. Instead of making connections to writing studies’ core threshold concepts, such as “all writers have more to learn” or “writing is (also) always a cognitive activity,” they focus on rigid, narrow versions of academic writing reinforcing to students (and fellow educators) that writing is not rhetorical. As the continuing proliferation of AI technologies forces us to reenvision our definitions of what writing is and what it means, it becomes even more important to invite our students to do so as well. This webinar will discuss one such invitation: the use of social reflection and AI-generated texts in first-year writing courses as a way of empowering writers to theorize and question their processes, practices, beliefs, attitudes, and understandings about writing (Dryer et al., 2015). 

While AI-generated texts can make recognizable genre moves (Ozimo & Hart-Davidson, 2024), they often fail to fully address rhetorical situations (Hartwell & Aull, 2023). Therefore, the presenters designed an activity that asked students to analyze the rhetorical knowledge and moves necessary to complete an upcoming writing assignment and then read and collaboratively reflect on the rhetorical effectiveness of human-written and AI-generated texts (without knowing that some texts may have been AI-generated). Results from the Spring 2025 pilot study revealed that students who had more nuanced rhetorical knowledge and awareness of genre conventions found AI-generated texts less successful or effective, whereas students who had less advanced rhetorical or genre knowledge found AI-generated texts more successful. Instructors who ran the activity in their first-year writing courses reported that students could discern the rhetorical ineffectiveness of generative AI texts while also recognizing and appreciating the value of their own rhetorical knowledge.

Drawing on student surveys and instructor interviews, this webinar will indicate how teaching with AI texts can reveal and potentially help shape student writers’ rhetorical knowledge and reflective practice. After a brief description of the activity and the results of the Spring 2025 pilot study, webinar leaders will invite participants to analyze a major assignment in their own writing courses, considering the rhetorical and genre knowledge required to successfully complete it. Then, participants will engage in a guided reflection activity involving comparing human-written and AI-generated texts from a student perspective.

Participant Outcomes:

• Reflect on rhetorical and genre conventions of current writing assignments 

• Discuss AI-generated texts’ effectiveness at approximating rhetorical and genre “moves” needed to complete their assignments

• Analyze AI-generated texts as tools for teaching rhetorical knowledge and genre conventions

• Generate social reflection questions for their own writing courses

Registration Information:

• This Webinar is free to GSOLE members.
• Consider joining GSOLE to get access to this event and many more!
• Non-Members can register for $15.
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