In the 20+ months since OpenAI released ChatGPT, generative AI platforms and tools have proliferated, creating affordances and challenges, the balance of which we have yet to realize. Writing center professionals and practitioners are often sandwiched between stakeholders (students, educators, departments, and up-chain administrators) with conflicting knowledge of and ideas about the ethics and efficacy of GenAI.
Over the last several months, Sarah Z. Johnson (Director, Madison College Writing Center and member of the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI) and I have worked with several literacy organizations on an NEH-sponsored grant initiative to create a whitepaper on GenAI Literacies that the MLA-CCCC TF will publish later this year. While the document addresses tutoring, Sarah and I realized the need for a group and resources that more directly addresses WCs.
I have convened a small IWCA Task Force on GenAI, co-chaired by Sarah and me, to extend this work. IWCA would like to understand how different WC constituencies and affiliate organizations are being affected by GenAI and how their nations/regions, institutions, departments, WCs, and writers have responded, so we can curate resources that may include a statement about the difference between human tutoring and AI exchanges as well as offer guidance on how to prepare tutors to talk about GenAI and what we can do to influence practice and policies (when it is an option), etc.
Our initial goals are threefold:
- To crowdsource resources from WC people who have already begun addressing GenAI literacy, so our colleagues can determine what local practices are applicable/transferrable to their centers and campuses. If you have a resource and you are willing to share it, please complete the WC GenAI Submission Form. We plan to create something analogous to Exploring AI Pedagogy: A Community Collection of Teaching Reflections, but focused on WCs. If you have something to share or know someone who might be willing to share a resource, please complete the IWCA GenAI Resource Submission Form
- To enlist your help by answering this Gen AI in the WC Survey and sharing it with other writing center people. For example, Sarah plans to share with TYCA, so we can show our two-year writing center colleagues that IWCA understands that writing centers are NOT a monolith. To that same end, we need your help in reaching out to writing center people who may not be members of IWCA, but whose voices need to be heard.We plan to follow the survey with listening sessions in the fall, so we can get a fuller picture of how writing centers are experiencing and responding to the changing GenAI landscape.
- To collect the names of people who might like to join the TF. Currently, we seek to better represent different types of institutions, particularly HBCUs, tribal colleges, and secondary schools as well as institutions outside the U.S. Currently, we have members from the following institution types: 2-year college, private doctoral university, highly selective private baccalaureate university, public doctoral university with high research activity. All of these schools are located within the Midwestern and Northeastern region of the U.S. If you are interested in joining us, please reach out to me at wynn@oakland.edu.
Respectfully,
Sherry
Sherry Wynn Perdue, Ph.D. (she, her, hers)
Director, Oakland University Writing Center
President, International Writing Centers Association
212 Kresge Library
100 Library Drive
Rochester, MI 48309
I acknowledge the Traditional Owners, past and present, of the land on which I work. Our main campus is on the Land of the Anishinaabe, known as the Three Fires Confederacy, comprised of the Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi.