On August 23rd, the English department hosted the sixth annual Compositionist Conference. The conference was the most well-attended to date with fifty-five USU Logan and Statewide lecturers, graduate instructors, adjunct instructors, and tenure-line faculty, both in person and on Zoom.
In her role as Director of Composition, Assistant Professor Beth Buyserie helms the conference and explains, “The Compositionist Conference is an annual opportunity for all English 1010 and 2010 teachers at USU to engage in current scholarly and pedagogical conversations on the teaching of composition. Our goal with the conference is to showcase teacher expertise, make connections between theory and practice, learn more about the current conversations in the teaching of composition, highlight critical pedagogies, and build community.”
The conference began with a keynote address from Assistant Professor Chen Chen on the conference theme: teaching writing in the face of advancing technologies such as AI. Following the opening address, conference attendees had the option of attending six sessions featuring multiple presenters from the English Department.
In the first session, Lecturer Rosa Thornley and USU Librarian Dory Rosenberg presented a method for instructor-facilitated dialogues to teach students to analyze, evaluate, and interact with generative language models. This recursive inquiry process prompts students to critically think about the spectrum of AI capabilities and limitations. Practicing this inquiry habit over time directs students towards intuitively questioning AI, which leads to students governing their own choices with emerging technologies and how choice will affect their own research and writing.
Lecturer Russ Winn concurrently shared insights on enhancing composition skills in the face of encroaching AI. Russ shared USU’s current approach to AI as well as practical and innovative strategies for implementing AI-aware multimodal teaching practices. Audience members then shared challenges, questions, and ideas all while reflecting on how to apply those ideas to individual teaching contexts.
In the next session, Chen, Graduate Instructor Wes Mathis, and Senior Lecturer Nikole Eyre introduced the English Department’s new course, ENGL 2020. Chen focused on applying existing and past scholarship in the field of rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication to the current conversations and concerns around the impact of generative technologies on writing instruction with an emphasis on ENGL 2020. She argued that we should not contribute to the panic about the topic but adopt a critical technological literacy approach that was developed in response to earlier technological development to foster students’ critical understanding of and engagement with generative AI tools. Chen also invited writing teachers to consider how their own teaching philosophies and labor conditions may shape their decision making around teaching with/about technology.
Principal Lecturer John Engler led a discussion about how faculty might invite students to use ChatGPT, not as a shortcut to their work, but as a tool to enhance their work. John shared twenty-three pieces of advice about using ChatGPT that he had gathered from articles published in The Chronicle of Higher Education during 2023. The ensuing conversation included ideas about how inviting students to ethically use generative AI to facilitate early research ideas or consider multiple points of view might be more effective than trying to prevent its use.
Concurrently, Graduate Instructor Jacob Taylor addressed the importance of revision in the writing process. Jacob provided strategies that they use in the classroom to help students understand the vital role that revision plays in writing, especially with the rise of AI. They framed the writing classroom as a space for students to experiment with different revision approaches to discover what process works best for them.
Graduate Instructor Zoe Dalley spoke about how journal writing can be a productive space for student exploration in the age of AI. Zoe synthesized current research with their own journaling and teaching practices to show how a queer pedagogical lens can preserve and enhance what it means to be a human writer as well as “inspire student risk taking, allow students to fail productively, and give students a space that validates their own ideas, voice, and lived experiences.”
In the final session, Lecturer Robb Kunz explained his engaging paper title, “That Time Batman Rode a Horse: Unlearning Fear and Relearning What Hardly Changes in the Composition Classroom.” Drawing on Paulo Freire as well as Sara Maitland’s The Writer’s Way, Robb showed that writing instructors have always been faced with change, and AI is just another pedagogical challenge to help students navigate.
Senior Lecturer Lezlie Christensen-Branum presented concurrently on how myside bias obscures open-minded and critical thinking and is therefore antithetical to the objectives of many tertiary writing tasks. It is particularly troublesome for compositionists because they are tasked with preparing college students for academic writing tasks across the disciplines, including nurturing the habits of mind that strengthen critical thinking and communication abilities. Myside bias is an enemy of the English 1010 and 2010 learning outcomes, and Lezlie shared factors implicated in myside bias to inform attendees about why it occurs in our classrooms and how curricula can be designed and taught to help students overcome it.
Adjunct Instructor Andrea Diamond modeled how to create a classroom experience where physiological, social, and moral ideologies intersect with writing to inspire pedagogical practices that promote and preserve community and creativity. Informed by authors like Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score) and Mo Gawdat (1 Billion Happy and Scary Smart) Andrea guided teachers through writer-centric classroom experiences designed to establish safety, encourage students to connect, promote self-knowing as authors, and enable writers to compose from a place of passionate purpose by a fluid writing process framework.
Beth summed up the proceeding, saying, “The Compositionist Conference models our program’s commitments to community and collaboration. I’d particularly like to recognize the work of Rachel Quistberg, who designs the program each year, but the conference could not happen without the efforts of many people, including the presenters, session chairs, reviewers, audience members, and English Department staff.”