CFP for Special Issue: Artificial Intelligence and Composing Just Education Futures
English Teaching: Practice & Critique
CFP online: https://tinyurl.com/AIandComposing
Submissions Due: 15 Aug 2023
Introduction
With the emergence of the next generation of automated systems in the form of generative AI – a moment marked by novel and disruptive ways of interfacing and making meaning with digital devices – existing practices are thrown into relief, making recognizable the mundane and taken-for-granted mechanisms that run in the background of everyday activity (Latour, 2005; Smith & Prior, 2020). At once we look to the potential future of AI exacerbating bias, disinformation, and surveillance, while also recognizing more clearly the existing abuses – for example, racist search engine results (Noble, 2018), labor exploitation in content moderation (Roberts, 2014), or normalisation of student surveillance (LeBlanc et al., 2023) – encoded into the basic functioning of existing systems.
Likewise, the use of generative AI in education and composition draws attention to normalised assumptions and practices in the teaching and learning of writing, including but not limited to the centering of individualised authorship, skill-based linear progressions, and product over process. Moreover, we continue to observe a preponderance of edtech solutionism (Waters, 2023) in automated writing tutor and assessment systems that position technology as a panacea for solving educational issues rather than examinations of the cultural and social practices that surround them (Robinson, 2023).
The significant role that digital technologies have played in expanding authoring and dissemination opportunities in recent decades draws particular attention to complex relations among cultural, symbolic, and material tools comprising multimodal composition (Freedman et al., 2016), as well as to ethical and sociopolitical implications of composing with and for imagined and unimaginable audiences (see DeKosnik, 2021). This is a moment requiring both recognition of the pasts and presents of algorithms in contemporary society – particularly in relation to how we compose and interpret meaning – and a reimagining of what it means to reconfigure these evolving cultural tools for more just futures (see Pangrazio et al., 2022).
Responsive to the rapid evolution of and spirited public discourse around generative AI, this special issue invites (re)imaginings of pasts, presents, and futures of composing. We encourage authors to engage a range of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches to understanding the imbrications of composing, education, and algorithmic lifeworlds. We will consider submissions engaging with perspectives from English teachers, teacher educators, educational researchers, youth, artists, and community educators across the range of theoretical and conceptual essays, empirical studies, practitioner narratives, and curricular design, artistic, and creative work pertinent to the theme.
Authors may engage questions such as and beyond:
- What pedagogies, policies, and designs are needed to support liberatory and justice-oriented composition and literacies instruction in an age of rapidly evolving generative multimedia AI?
- How might we resist technodeterminist and technochauvinist framings of literacies and learning in an increasingly digitized, algorithmically governed, and proprietary schooling infrastructure?
- What does it mean to center power, decolonialism, antiracism, and ethics in literacies research, theory, and practice in the face of increasingly algorithmically automated futures?
- What theoretical apparatuses are needed to engage algorithmic futures, and generative AI in particular, for justice? How might these intersect with and extend existing theoretical and methodological frames attuned to the digital such as the everyday cyborg (Lizárraga, 2023), transliteracies (Stornaiuolo et al., 2016), electracy (Ulmer, 2003), Luddite sensibilities (Waters, 2020), critical platform studies (Nichols & Garcia, 2022)?
- How may we envision emerging theoretical and methodological frames at the interplay of artificial intelligence and composing just education futures?
While we invite a range of topic areas, we anticipate that authors may engage such areas of inquiry as:
- Algorithmic infrastructures, machine learning, and composition
- AI, machine learning, and intersectionality
- AI and lifewide and lifelong literacies (within and beyond K-16 schooling)
- AI, algorithmic infrastructures, and diverse onto-epistemologies
- AI, surveillance awareness, and resistance
- AI and literacies amid contexts of anti-Blackness and white supremacy
- AI: Ethics, power, and composition
- AI and youth writing futures
- Composing speculative futures & AI
- Composition as auditing of AI and automated systems in education
- Counterstorying AI
- Curricular exploration with AI
- Data, privacy, and youth agency in digital composition
- Educators’ perspectives and practices, composing, & generative AI
- Justice-oriented composition, AI, and literacies research designs
- Learners’ perspectives and approaches & AI
- Theoretical apparatuses and framings illuminating algorithms in everyday literacies
Please contact the Guest Editors with any questions
Anna Smith, Illinois State University, USA, amsmi11
Jennifer M. Higgs, University of California, Davis, USA, jmhiggs
José R. Lizárraga, University of Colorado Boulder, USA, jose.lizarraga
Vaughn W. M. Watson, Michigan State University, USA, watsonv2
Submissions Information
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see the ETPC Author Guidelines for guidelines on submissions, including word limits. Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Submissions for this Special Issue must be made through the ScholarOne online submission and peer review system. When submitting your manuscript please ensure the correct special issue title is selected from the drop down menu on page 4 of the submission process. For more information, please visit the journal website.
References
De Kosnik, A. (2021). Rogue archives: Digital cultural memory and media fandom. MIT Press.
Freedman, S. W., Hull, G. A., Higgs, J., & Booten, K. (2016). Teaching writing in a digital and global age: Toward access, learning, and development for all. In C. Bell & D. Gitomer (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching (5th ed.). (pp. 1389-1449). American Educational Research Association.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford University Press.
LeBlanc, R., Aguilera, E., Burriss, S., de Roock, R., Fassbender, W., Monea, B., Nichols, T.P., Pandya, J.Z., Robinson, B., Smith, A., Stornaiuolo, A. (2023). Digital platforms and the ELA classroom. National Council of Teachers of English.
Lizárraga, J. R. (2023). Cyborg sociopolitical reconfigurations: Designing for speculative fabulation in learning. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 32(1), 21-44.
Nichols, T.P. & Garcia, A. (2022). Platform studies in education. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 209–230.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression. New York University Press.
Pangrazio, L., Stornaiuolo, A., Nichols, T. P., Garcia, A., & Philip, T. M. (2022). Datafication meets platformization: Materializing data processes in teaching and learning. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 257-283.
Roberts, S. T. (2014). Behind the screen: The hidden digital labor of commercial content moderation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Robinson, B. (2023). Speculative propositions for digital writing under the new autonomous model of literacy. Postdigital Science and Education, 5(1), 117–135.
Smith, A. & Prior, P. (2020). A flat CHAT perspective on transliteracies development. Learning, Culture, and Social Interaction, 24(1).
Ulmer, G. (2003). Internet invention: From literacy to electracy. Longman.
Watters, A. (2020). Luddite sensibilities and the future of education. Hack Education. http://hackeducation.com/2020/07/29/luddite-sensibilities
Anna Smith, PhD
Associate Professor, Literacies & Technologies in Secondary Education
School of Teaching & Learning, College of Education
Illinois State University
NCRLL Executive Board Member https://ncrll.org/
Check out our recent CFP for a special issue on Artificial Intelligence and Composing Just Education Futures for English Teaching: Practice and Critique. Submissions due August 15, 2023.