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Teachers and writers coming to terms with generative AI
By Leon Furze
It’s already a cliché to talk about all the ways GenAI has ‘disrupted’, ‘revolutionised’ or even ‘ended’ certain parts of education. When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, articles in the media predicted everything from The End of High School English to the death of the college essay, and as an English teacher, I know that my colleagues and I were paying close attention. But a few weeks before the release of OpenAI’s chatbot, I had started a PhD exploring digital writing, and I had already spent the better part of 2022 reading up on these upcoming new ‘large language model’ things.
I was just as surprised as everyone else when ChatGPT suddenly exploded, reaching 100 million users in just three months. In our early discussions, my supervisor Associate Professor Lucinda McKnight and I had mused that ‘in a few years, these “automated writing technologies” will be everywhere’. Our timelines shrunk pretty dramatically at the start of 2023. The timing of ChatGPT’s release was either perfect for my studies, or absolutely terrible – depending on which day you ask. On the one hand, I had the opportunity to work with English teachers at the very edge of the GenAI wave. On the other, we have seen three years of chaos and uncertainty.
That tension between excitement and fear has been a thread throughout my PhD, where I have asked English teachers about their use of AI and the implications for writing instruction. I have worked closely with nine secondary English teachers, both through one-to-one conversations and a shared community of practice in which the teachers discussed their anxieties, hopes, and experiences with the technology.
Through these conversations and our shared blog, I’ve had the opportunity to see how reactions to the technology have changed over time. I’ve seen how discourses and approaches to writing instruction, personal writing practices, and broader conversations about digital writing shape and are shaped by the teachers’ understandings of GenAI. Most importantly, I’ve had the privilege of seeing these teachers respond with curiosity and a critical eye to a technology which many feel has been ‘done to them’ by Big Tech.
Three years on from the release of ChatGPT, I’m writing up my findings and considering what has changed with discussions of GenAI, and what has stayed the same. I am confident that, despite the early panic, ‘High School English’ is alive and well, and that the teaching of stories, poems, print and digital media, and even essays is safe in human hands.
