Mutual Mentoring Team Grant Awarded for Teaching in the Time of Chat GPT

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A Mutual Mentoring Team Grant was recently awarded to the team of Anne Bello (Writing Program), Elkie Burnside (Writing Program), Andrew Farrar (Psychological & Brain Sciences), Amanda Hamel (Psychological & Brain Sciences), Shana Bulhan Haydock (Writing Program), Deb McCutchen (Writing Program), Anna Rita Napoleone (Writing Center), Tara Pauliny (Writing Program), and Janine Solberg (Professional Writing & Technical Communication Program).

The team project, “Teaching Writing in the Time of ChatGPT,” seeks to establish and share best practices for teaching writing in a context of rapidly evolving AI technology.

When ChatGPT was launched in the Fall 2022, alarmist headlines proclaimed “The College Essay is Dead.” Across higher education, researchers, teachers, and administrators updated Academic Honesty policies and lesson plans while contemplating the larger questions ChatGPT poses: What is the function of writing in an undergraduate education? What might the ethical use of this technology look like, and what are the implications for privacy and intellectual property? What existing practices help us respond to and engage with AI-generated text, and how might the teaching of writing need to evolve?

The purpose of this project is to bring together a diverse set of writing instructors from different programs across campus to consider these questions and to learn from and with one another in response to these fast-moving technological changes.