Andrew Moser, Department of Philosophy
These are difficult times to be in the business of teaching writing. The one-two punch of the pandemic together with the introduction of ChatGPT and other LLMs has thrown much of what we do into turmoil over the past few years, with the latter seeming specially designed to confound those of us who teach writing. It was against this backdrop that the Philosophy faculty met in August for a departmental retreat, generously sponsored by a CFT Departmental Enhancement grant, to discuss student writing at the Gen-Ed level and in the major.
Despite this backdrop, the issues that prompted our meeting were sources of longstanding concern in our department, going back several years:
(1) The Philosophy Department has long been second only to English in the number of foundational writing intensive courses it offers. Yet it has been at least a decade since we’ve met as a department to discuss how we teach writing at the introductory level. As a result, whatever conversations we’ve recently had about writing and whatever ideas we exchange have tended to be the result of impromptu hallway encounters, never involving the department as a whole.
(2) Research essays have long been central to our curriculum in the major: most of our junior and senior level seminars require such essays, and our comprehensive exam now involves a revision and expansion of one of those seminar essays. In recent years, though, we’ve seen students struggling with these essays – both in the seminars and in the comps – to a degree that we haven’t in the past. In particular, they seem ill-prepared for independent research, have difficulty identifying appropriate secondary sources, and even when they have identified such sources, confused about how best to incorporate them into their essays. Do we need to rethink the structure of these essays? Rethink how we’re preparing our students for them? Change how we’re teaching writing to our majors? Opt for other sorts of projects entirely?
Of course it’s impossible to address these questions concerning how we teach writing without also discussing the problems posed by ChatGPT. As a result, our discussion pulled in very different directions, at times focusing on whether the out-of-class essay is still a viable genre of student writing at all, given ChatGPT’s facility with it, and at times focusing on how we can improve student essays. It was the latter focus that dominated, though, and here are some of the conclusions we reached:
Concerning (1), after looking over various resources for writing in philosophy at other institutions, we decided that we need to devise a departmental guide for both reading and writing in philosophy. This could be of use in all of our classes, but would, we hope, be particularly useful to students in our introductory classes. Such a guide would also be useful in the Writing Center.
Addressing (2), we decided, would require some changes in the structure of the major. The comprehensive exam in philosophy will still involve revising and expanding an essay from an earlier upper level seminar, but the research portion of the essay, and instruction in how best to do such research, will no longer be housed in the upper level seminars, but in a senior seminar, to be taken second semester of the senior year, focusing on research in philosophy. This will take some pressure off of the upper level seminars, allowing them to focus in more detail on the philosophical topics they cover, and will give senior majors course credit, in the form of the senior seminar, for work that they had been doing over and above their senior year course work.
Finally, because it might seem that our focus on improving student essays turns a blind eye to the ChatGPT-shaped elephant in the room, a few words from my own perspective on why we focused on improving student essays rather than exploring new, ChatGPT-proof writing assignments for our students: The general sentiment in the department was that, short of doing all writing in class, ChatGPT-proof assignments are a myth. And the problem with in-class writing is that thoughtful writing takes more time than is available in our class meetings. Now it may be that the focus on essays in particular is insufficiently imaginative, and that there may be other genres of student writing that would serve the same purposes and be more resistant to AI cheating. But, as I see it, there are two advantages to essays:
(a) Having a genre for student writing that is shared across many of their classes means that writing instruction in particular classes will tend to teach and reinforce many of the same skills necessary for writing in their other classes as well; there’s a carryover benefit to such a shared genre. Essays may not be the only suitable genre, but they do seem to be the de facto shared genre.
(b) Essays conveniently combine in a single package many of the skills that we see ourselves as trying to impart to students: articulating a stance on some issue or question, interpreting and analyzing text or data, constructing an argument for that stance based on the interpretation and analysis, and considering alternate ways of construing the issue, text, or data.
In the absence of better solutions for student writing, it may be that the best we can do at the moment is to be up front with our students about the values and skills that we hope to impart through our writing assignments and instruction, and to emphasize that such skills are the product only of doing the work yourself.