As FEN Blog begins its third year and we enter into year two of our term as editors, we’ve reflected on our first year, its challenges and its rewards, to inspire our second CFP. We’ve decided that rather than dictate a single topic for our contributors (the inventive power of such restrictions notwithstanding), we wish to extend an invitation in the spirit of the unique nature of our publication. As rhetoricians, we are cognizant of the demands of kairos, understanding that the effectiveness of any given argument is dependent on its timeliness. As a blog, we move with greater editorial nimbleness to deliver a message within that kairotic window. To take advantage of this affordance, we request submissions that speak to our current moment. What are you excited about as composition instructors this semester? What innovations are you executing that address this moment? Where are you finding success? Or unexpected challenges? What developments should we keep our eyes on? How do we keep up? Or what should we be looking forward to?

And while we don’t wish to put limits on what you consider most urgent and timely, we would feel remiss if we did not also acknowledge the sea change that is on all our minds: the first full school year in this new age of AI composing. So far, FEN Blog’s contribution to the burgeoning conversation has been on how not to respond to this new and scary reality. Our parent publication, Composition Studies, meanwhile, published a range of perspectives on the subject in their spring issue. Some of these perspectives highlighted the dangers and limitations of AI composing, from the omissions and biases in the undisclosed corpus texts of ChatGPT’s LLM (Byrd, Owusu-Ansah, Johnson) to AI writing’s inherent boringness (Morrison 160) and unwavering certainty (Vee 177). To counter these issues, Annette Vee advocates for composition courses that focus on critical inquiry, “making use of productive uncertainty” (177), while Courtney Stanton makes the case for a Writing about Writing approach (184). Gavin P. Johnson reminds us that “technologies must be taught” (171), and S. Scott Graham provides some ideas on what that teaching should entail, suggesting that Writing studies “tak[e] the lead on developing prompt engineering modules, new approaches to research and fact-checking pedagogy, rapid genre generation exercises, and output revision curricula” (167 – 168). Altogether, it’s a lot to digest in a short amount of time, but we’re working to keep up (just like our students) with the rapidly changing world. 

As a field, we’re already responding on institutional level, as evinced in the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI’s “Working Paper: Overview of the Issues, Statement of Principles, and Recommendations”. Several universities—including  UC–Berkeley, University of Michigan, UNC–Chapel Hill, Chapman University—have published statements on AI and/or provided resources for faculty to teach during the time of AI. We view these responses as signs that our field is committed to meeting this moment with a flexibility and nimbleness that reflects our bona fides as rhetoricians but also our roles as historians of composition, a history in which the technology of writing has continually evolved. As an online publication, FEN Blog is an open space for redefining composing as well as composition pedagogy and scholarship. Thus, we invite you to populate this space with new visions of what teaching writing with (and without) AI can be. As always, these visions can be multimodal, reflective, narrative, and other forms of public-leaning scholarly composing. We’d like to hear how you’re adjusting, what you’re trying, what’s working and what isn’t.

Works Cited

Byrd, Antonio. “Truth-Telling: Critical Inquiries on LLMs and the Corpus Texts That Train Them,” Composition Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2023, pp. 135–142.

Graham, S. Scott. Post-Process but Not Post-Writing: Large Language Models and a Future for Composition Pedagogy,” Composition Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2023, pp. 162–168.

Johnson, Gavin P. “Don’t Act Like You Forgot: Approaching Another Literacy “Crisis” by (Re)Considering What We Know about Teaching Writing with and through Technologies,” Composition Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2023, pp. 169–175.

Morrison, Aimée. “Meta-Writing: AI and Writing,” Composition Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2023, pp. 155–161.

Owusu-Ansah, Alfred L. “Defining Moments, Definitive Programs, and the Continued Erasure of Missing People” Composition Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2023, pp. 143–148.

Stanton, Courtney. “A Dis-Facilitated Call for More Writing Studies in the New AI Landscape; or, Finding Our Place Among the Chatbots,” Composition Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2023, pp. 182–186.

Vee, Annette. “Large Language Models Write Answers,” Composition Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, 2023, pp. 176–181.