Researching AI in the Writing Center

As generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools continue to develop and filter into our everyday lives, the professional and student staff of the University Writing Center (UWC) recognizes the need for students to be able to critically engage AI tools. We acknowledge that learning to write engages writers’ social, cognitive, and emotional processes that cannot be replicated by technology, and yet, writing products can easily be generated by AI tools. We are asking ourselves: How do we support student writers as they use AI tools to learn to write?

Our student staff considers generative AI as a tool that can support writing development; however, we also recognize the ethical issues using AI can create for students – especially as AI tools are seamlessly integrated into technologies students are required to use in classrooms. The UWC hopes to be a space that can show students how to use AI tools within an academic integrity and critical information literacy framework.

This semester our student staff are working in one of three learning communities focused on an aspect of AI: 1) Mental Health and AI, 2) Teacher Discourse and AI, and 3) Human Vs AI. Each learning community is doing in-depth research on how AI works, what AI can/can’t do, and what the ethical implications in a higher education context might be:

· Mental Health and AI: How can AI be used ethically within the mental health field?

· Teacher Discourse and AI: How can teachers use AI to communicate better with students?

· Human vs AI: Can AI replicate human creations? And, can humans recognize the difference between AI and human creations?

Once the learning communities finish their research, they’ll create a final project to teach the rest of the student staff.

We are also using parts of our weekly staff meetings to work through AI-related scenarios such as specific assignments that might lend themselves to AI more readily or more effectively than others. For example, during a recent staff meeting, we discussed an assignment that asked students to write only using action verbs and no linking verbs. We considered questions such as, What is the difference between a student using AI to identify the verbs that need to be revised vs working with a consultant to identify the verbs? How accurate is AI at identifying action verbs? What counts as learning in this example? Where does the ethical line get drawn with outside help in a writing center vs AI context?

Most of the student staff are not actively using AI tools in writing center sessions until they unpack concerns around academic integrity, ethics, and learning to write. The first question the student staff asks students is: What does your professor say about AI usage?

We look forward to sharing more about what we learn about AI and writing in a future post.