Teaching Tuesday: Alienation, Affect, and AI

This semester I’m teaching a lot. A lot. It means that I’m busy, but mostly busy in a good way. As I’ve discovered in the past, I’ve found that the more I teach, the more I think about teaching and the more I’m likely to invest in the little habits that lead to reflection.

This weekend, on a long bike ride, I thought about three things that are shaping my teaching experiences this semester.

Thing the First

For the first time in over 20 years, I’m teaching a class where I didn’t pick the readings. This class is in our Teagle Foundation funded Cornerstone program. The class is a one-credit class numbered English 100 that is accompanies the second course in our composition sequence (English 130, I think). I have the students for a month where we talk about a series of texts that get students to think about the experience of being educated and how it changes our relationships and attitudes.

The class is less important right now than my experience teaching texts with which I was unfamiliar and also didn’t quite understand how they would (or were intended) to work together. At first, I felt very alienated from the texts (and the class itself) and struggled to figure out what to say to stimulate conversation about them.

Over time, however, I began to appreciate the humbling experience of teaching unfamiliar texts and exploring them alongside the students in the class. Freed from some kind of commitment to a particular interpretation (or even clear relationship between the course’s learning goals and the texts), the class has opened up in new and unexpected ways. Students seem more willing to take risks especially as it becomes clear that I have no clear grasp of how to make sense of many of these texts. If nothing else, it freed me from my (more than) slight (cough) tendency to use the Socratic methods when a discussion heads in an expected (and perhaps unwelcome) direction. 

Thing the Second

The other thing that has come from this class is that it has encouraged me to think about how students come to engage with the humanities. Since I was not particular familiar with the texts and not particularly comfortable talking about contemporary fiction and essays, I could offer relatively little in way of methods or even interpretation. What I could invite the students to do is experience these texts not intellectually, but emotionally. In many ways, this class has become an exercise in creating space for affective learning.

This loosely follows my own experiences in college where I was drawn to the humanities not because I found the methods or interpretative frameworks or theories of knowledge compelling, but because I like the classes and texts. That was it. I just liked the texts and I enjoyed talking about them.

What this oddball 1-credit class is doing is giving students permission to enjoy learning.  On a campus increasingly driven by assessment, learning pathways, checklists, and pressure, we’ve created a space (perhaps accidentally?) where students can just hang out and read texts and talk about them. And they have permission to enjoy it.

Thing the Third

I’ve been pretty flippant about AI use in my classes not because I don’t care, but because I have the arrogant assumption that if I tell students not to use it and explain why, they’ll understand and agree.

So far my experiences have been mixed. On the one hand, students seem to not use AI to improve their capitalization, grammar, or the organization of their papers. On the other hand, there is a clear increase in fact dumps in even low-stake writing assignments. This is a bit of a surprise to me especially since Microsoft Co-Pilot is baked into the cloud-based Word that many students use.

I suppose that I’ll have to intervene again.