Editor’s Notes: Hello friends! You’re reading an article from our Director Reflections series. In that series, writing center directors ponder questions, concerns, and insights about emerging technologies and their immediate and long term implications on the praxis of the center. This week, Dr. Graham Stowe from Canisius College continues his reflections on AI and its effect on “the excessive writing center”. Thank you, Dr. Stowe, for this reflection! If you too have a comment to share about AI and its impact on writing and writing centers, feel free to leave a comment below for us and Dr. Stowe.
Earlier this year I wrote here on the CWCAB blog that our best response to the development of large language model generative artificial intelligence was to wait patiently and see what happens. I suggested writing teachers create nuanced, specific assignments, and at the time I didn’t think writing center directors or tutors needed to worry much. I still think patience is important, and you should still be writing assignment sheets each semester, but that was true before we ever heard of generative AI. I have to admit that I am shocked at how quickly the technology has grown. My colleagues in computer science are less surprised than me, though. They’ve explained to me that the models “learn” at a nearly exponential rate. As such, it’s much closer to plausible-sounding academic writing than we might have expected. There are now generative AIs that read PDFs of articles and produce very good summaries, which is going to raise many concerns for classroom teachers.
In a writing center specifically, as long as tutors are very careful about checking the information they find, these programs could be useful when helping students with research. They work, in some ways, as quick search engines, and as long as you check the information you find, that might be a place to use them in a practical way in our centers. But because the software “hallucinates” material, including convincing sounding titles for academic articles, tutors would need some careful training on them before using them in their work.
I don’t have practical use concerns, though, really. On the whole, writing center directors and scholars are thoughtful, ethical people who aren’t inclined to make rash decisions. We make our living talking about writing and helping teach other folks how to talk about writing, and we have really good evidence that it works.
I do, however, have deep theoretical and, ultimately, existential concerns. To explain these, I’d like to start with my favorite writing center article, Beth Boquet’s 1999 “Our Little Secret: A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions.” She presents two seemingly contradictory histories of writing centers, one that sees a writing center as a method and one that sees it as a space. The “method” history sees writing centers a fix-it shop. Students are sent as a corrective.
The “space” history of a writing center, though, becomes what Boquet calls an “excessive writing center,” where the writing center becomes a place on a campus made for growth and ideas and joy and laughter, a place where students learn about themselves and try out new ideas. The excessive writing center isn’t against the institution; it’s what we hope for an institution to be.
I believe that generative AI is a threat to this kind of space. I’ve simplified Boquet’s argument quite a bit here, but my point is that some of the conversation around AI point towards the real possibility of changing higher education, and writing centers in them, past the point of recognition, further and further away from its excessive possibilities. Many see these technologies as potentially liberatory, and I don’t disagree. Like automated factories in the twentieth century, there are real possibilities in AI for improving the lives of millions in the workforce. I can imagine them being incredibly useful in a business setting, helping read and write email and memos. There are ways that generative AI could work for more than research in a writing center, creating a version of a conversation, if used alongside trained tutors. However, there are a number of people on college campuses and the culture at large who see generative AI and students as pretty similar: tools in an economic machine. Under this logic, AI is a tool that will help students to graduate so that they can then join the workforce. This is the thinking that puts college as we know it at risk, pushing us further down the path towards colleges and universities being exclusively vocational, and we’re already pretty far down this path. It’s how West Virginia University is being gutted, and how the University of Wisconsin, the University of North Carolina, and, more recently, the New College of Florida were gutted before it.
Generative AI might be a tool to aid in the writing process after we learn more about how it and how to use it. Students learn critical thinking from the writing process, not to mention a source of joy and beauty in language. Students will skip an important step if we move too quickly, and we risk losing these things.
About the Author
Dr. Graham Stowe is the Director of the Writing Center at Canisius College. He has been a guest author for the blog’s column “Dear CWCAB”. Dr. Stowe specializes in writing center theory and composition pedagogy. He has taught first-year writing courses with focuses on education theory, cultural studies, and the Harry Potter novels. He has also recently taught upper division courses on writing center theory and practice, the teaching of writing, and American literature. Writing is central to each of Dr. Stowe’s classes, both as a way to learn course material and to help students grow academically and personally.
Editor’s note: If you’re a Writing Center Director who would like to share your reflection on this or any other issue and how it’s affecting the writing center space, please email your article to wlnblog.editors@gmail.com .
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