Teaching Large Classes, Generative AI, Engagement
Instructor: Professor Neta Gordon
Course: ENGL 1P94 Reading Literature Today
Class size: 200students, 10 seminars of 20 students
University has many types of writing assignments that are core to the discipline, i.e. the analytical essay and these new tools shifts our perspective. It’s an interesting moment but historically, technology has brought many interesting moments, like Google or Spell Check. (There was a time when it was felt that spelling was critical)
Professor Gordon’s teaching has always been very scaffolded and recursive. Writing an analytical essay is one of the hardest things anybody ever has to do: you have to attend to structure, argument, and audience. So she approaches it in stages. This has been made more relevant because it provides opportunity to discuss the difference between human generated analysis and machine generated analysis.
Machine analysis is very flat.
In the first seminar, Neta has students review 2 human generated essays and 2 machine generated essays. Students have to determine which is which. They discover that the machine generated essays have incorrect quotations and the analysis is quite flat and empty. Students quickly realize that as novices, they are able to identify machine generated text quite easily and then of course, instructors who have dedicated their lives to thinking about knowledge production and writing are also able to identify machine generated text.
This course is a genre course that covers literary terminology and how to look at literature and the way it works as a special form of writing. Like other forms of art, writing should produce a response.
So the work in class (through things like an online quiz) explore these initial responses. Students are assessed on their ability to make use of vocabulary and their ability to notice these elements. This assignment is very process oriented. From the first response, students move onto the essay template. This template makes essay writing more modular. Moving from the bullet points of the first response to full sentences but they don’t have to worry about style yet. They think about structure and content.
We want to give students permission to understand that process works differently for everyone. The template allows for students to connue working even if some parts are initially messy. TAs give students a lot of feedback. From there students clean it up, take the content from the template and smooth it based on the feedback, focusing on style and formatting and proper citation. The last thing students do as part of this is to write a response to the feedback, identifying the feedback they received, this is what they thought about that, what they changed, what they couldn’t change, and to describe the process. This last reflection is worth a 5% bonus because this is hard work and if students honour the process that should be rewarded.
Contact cpi@brocku.ca if you would like to see the course materials related to ENGL 1P94