This is the final post from me as editor of Canadian Writing Centre Review / revue Canadienne des centres de rédaction, as I am retiring from the position that I said I would last year. As I am no longer working in writing centres, I feel that I’m no longer qualified to continue in this position.
I see CWCR/RCCR as a project, which has been rewarding personally, but more importantly, the project has been a venue for those in the field of writing centres in Canada to speak and listen. While no one has agreed to take on the editorship of CWCR/RCCR, if this is the end, I feel that the project is successfully completed — 80+ posts over 6 years, which we collectively as a community should be proud. Continue reading “A final post”→
Manager, Writing Services, Wilfrid Laurier University
Vice-President, CWCA/ACCR
Today, the Ephesian agora doesn’t look like much—just an open field with slabs of exposed stone lining the grass. A row of headless columns tacks down the remains of an ancient mosaiced walkway, varied marble tiles wink back colour and light. Beyond those, stoas arch over shaded stalls where merchants sold their goods. To the left, the open market shakes out into a cluster of Junipers, and then the scrubby, rolling Turkish hills. For all its unassuming rocks and grass and marble, there is something striking about the simplicity of the ancient agora. Continue reading “Proximate Chaos: An Agora Model of the Writing Centre”→
In 2016, at the beginning of the first Trump presidency, reaction to the possibilities of what might lay ahead produced a significant number of pronouncements and warnings. The French paper, Les Echos, for example, wrote of Trump in November 2016: “Racist, populist, male chauvinist, arrogant and unpredictable. We do not know what is most terrifying in the personality of Donald Trump.” We now know that he is a rapist and convicted felon. As I’ve written here before, Trump displays all the markers of a neo-fascist. His latest threats include challenges to the sovereignty of Canada (Tasker, 2024, December 11), as well as not ruling out military invasion of both Greenland (Shamim, 2025, January 9) and Panama (Role, 2024, December 25). Continue reading “Trump’s travel ban, Baltimore, and the 2025 IWCA Collaborative@CCCC”→
CWCR/RCCR is pleased to announce the publication of Clare Goulet’s volume of poetry, Graphis scripa / writing lichen (available from Gaspereau Press, 2024).
Clare Goulet is writing centre coordinator and adjunct professor in the Department of English at Mount St. Vincent University, teaching editing, composition, and intro creative writing
Below is a post Clare wrote for CWCR/RCCR in 2023. This melodic and inspiring piece–part poem, part lichen biography, part autobiography–is worth reading and rereading. So, on this occasion, here it is again.
Congratulations to Clare.
– Editor, CWCR/RCCR
Vol. 5, No. 6 (Fall 2023)
Clare Goulet has published creative nonfiction, poetry, and reviews as well as essays on metaphor and polyphony. Adjunct prof and writing centre coordinator at Mount St. Vincent University, she co-edited with Mark Dickinson Lyric Ecology on the work of Jan Zwicky. Her book, Graphis scripta: writing lichen, will be published by Gaspereau Press in spring 2024.
1.
1975. Late summer in the woods behind the backyard, lost, first freedom, almost five, lying across a warm rough slab of granite, heat soaking into my belly where the cotton t-shirt has pushed up, scratched by brown prickly things—rock tripe, though I didn’t know the name, genus Umbilicaria—the world something sensuous, even reading which came too early, my head already filled with poems. The sun is hot. I mumble made-up lines, sleepy, peeling brittle bits to see the thick white cord connecting each to its substrate, holding rock, lichen, child in place. It will be forty years before these come together and I feel this whole again. Continue reading “Already Whole: rethinking your so-called ‘parts’ (announcement and repost)”→
WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship (WLN) is calling for contributions to an edited collection, The Future of Writing Centers, to be published on WAC Clearinghouse’s Digital Edited Collections (DEC).
DEC is an open-access publication forum focused on topics relevant to the field of writing center studies. These multimodal texts, which are rich with graphics, links to sources, videos, and teaching resources, extend learning beyond printed texts. In addition to its enhanced ability to engage and educate readers, this digital scholarship is accessible to international audiences and easily shareable through digital links.
Theme:
The theme of this WLN DEC volume, the future of writing centers, was the theme of the very successful 2024 European Writing Centers Association Conference. Though Franziska Liebetanz (Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)), in a special English-language edition of Journal für Schreibwissenschaft, is leading on the topic as it pertains to writing centers in Europe, this call asks for chapter proposals that reflect on how those wider contextual exigencies and affordances of neoliberal policies in higher education have led writing center administrators and practitioners everywhere—North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia—to question or re-think their writing center’s identity, the identity of the field as a whole, and the direction their writing center is, or writing centers in general are, taking or should be taking. How has your writing center responded to these difficulties and possibilities? How have these neoliberal techniques changed who we are, how we see ourselves, what we do and how we do it? What is the way forward? We are particularly interested in chapter proposals that examine the author’s own writing center or writing centers more broadly through the lens of globalization, emerging technologies, or pedagogical innovations. Impact on centers resulting from other techniques of neoliberalism will be entertained, but our focus will be on these three areas of impact.
Nuts and bolts:
For this DEC, we seek 500-word proposals for book chapters with an explanation on how you plan to integrate multimodal elements into your manuscript. Multimodal elements should not simply be add-ons but essential complements to the author’s ideas and argument.
Sarah King, Writing Support Coordinator, Centre for Teaching and Learning, University of Toronto Scarborough
When I was an undergraduate, I found academic writing assignments highly stressful. Books would pile up on my residence room floor, as I researched but put off writing until the very last minute, ultimately pulling all-nighters and submitting half-baked ideas. I think that’s why I’m sympathetic to anxious students and perhaps why, in the dark, middle days of the pandemic, I devised a way to make the graduate writing group techniques of freewriting, goal-setting, and timed writing useful for undergraduates. I called these “writing retreats,” students greeted them with enthusiasm, and our writing centre is still offering them regularly. Continue reading “Support for anxious writers: The six stages of an undergraduate online writing retreat”→
In the Latin American region, thirty years have already passed since the foundation of the UNESCO Chair for the Improvement of the Quality and Equity of Education in Latin America based on Reading and Writing, and more than two decades since the first writing center was created and the first research papers on writing studies were published. In addition, in 2024, the Latin American Network of Writing Centers and Programs (RLCPE) celebrates 10 years of building connections for joint practice among Latin American colleagues. In this decade, the practice we have shared has shown signs of growth, transformation, reconstruction and continuous innovation in the hands of writing specialists who develop academic literacies in a wide diversity of educational realities.
While the audience of this statement is for those in the US, it has usefulness in Canadian and international contexts, at the very least to understand the current political situation in the US. As is apparent from news reports and others outlets, the US political situation is in upheaval, with the outcome of the US national election in November in doubt. The ramification of an authoritarian Republican presidency will be dire for marginalized communities, immigrants, and people of colour, the knock-on effect of which will be wide-ranging. As a community, we need to stand against the rise of authoritarianism at all levels.
The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is the parent organization of the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA). Here is the statement as a PDF.
For its Fourth Annual Virtual Conference, the Online Writing Centers Association invites proposals related to any writing center related work (off-line and online). We are particularly interested in questions related to the ongoing trends of globalization and subsequent internationalization of educational institutions. How do writing centers variously situate themselves within these trends and what are the ways they respond to increasing multicultural and multilingual populations?
Areas to Consider
Proposals for this theme may consider, but are not limited to, the following areas:
Administration: Budgeting, institutional support, the writing center’s parent department, marketing and branding, physical location, etc.
Writing Center Staff: Employment, contingency roles, staff professional development, graduate student professionalization, tutor hiring and training, emotional labor, etc.
Student Populations: Overall enrolment, graduate v. undergraduate, STEM writing, multilingual writers, etc.
Diversity & Social Justice: Marginalized groups, race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality, diversity, accessibility, access, etc.
Questions of Value: Misconceptions of the writing center, skills transfer, the writing center and other academic support resources, student retention, writing center assessments, etc.
The 21st Century: AI (ChatGPT, Grammarly, etc.), multimodality, online v. in person tutoring, synchronous v. asynchronous tutoring, pandemics and other major national or global events/crises, etc.
Online Writing Centers: Administration, technology, barriers, populations served, synchronous v. asynchronous tutoring, etc.
Christin Wright-Taylor, Manager, Writing Services, Wilfrid Laurier University
Elizabeth Clarke, Learning Consultant, Transition and Learning Services, Wilfrid Laurier University
During the keynote for CWCA/ACCR’s 2022 conference, Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young (Dr. Vay) put out a call to Canadian writing centres to create a statement on translingual academic writing for students and faculty in their institutions. He also suggested creating a bank of translingual academic writing (TAW) to showcase the stylistic and rhetorical power of such writing, examples to light the way for students as well as faculty wanting to integrate diverse linguistic identities into academic writing.
Two years later, Laurier Writing Services has answered the call. We’ve created both a TAW statement and bank for our body of undergraduate and graduate students published on an public-facing website. Whether or not our statement and bank are specifically what Dr. Vay had in mind, it is our attempt to achieve his vision: a clarion call for institutions to allow translingual academic writing in coursework and a guide for students on what translingual academic writing could look like in their work.
The journey to this point reveals the kind of labour entailed in this work as well as the systemic and generic constraints placed on producing an artifact of this kind.
This article narrates the process by which we wrote the statement, gathered the TAW texts, and then adapted our content to fit the norms and conventions of “web writing” for a public-facing landing page.
The journey to this point reveals the kind of labour entailed in this work as well as the systemic and generic constraints placed on producing an artifact of this kind. Included in this article is the original TAW statement and sample bank created for the website, along with a link to the actual web page which is drastically revised to meet the conventions of web-writing and Laurier’s external communication norms.
The Audience and The Purpose Since Laurier Writing Services is housed under Student Affairs, our statement and bank, first and foremost, needed to target students. As such, the statement would be housed on Writing Services’ website and positioned as a resource for student writing.
However, we know that faculty also access our student-facing resources to help support student writing. For example, faculty embed our online resources for syllabi assignments. They also access our student website to gain information on how to direct students to book appointments and attend workshops. For this reason, a secondary audience for our TAW bank was faculty. Within the institutional political structure, Writing Services’ focus is toward students. At the same time, the TAW statement and bank can provide faculty with fresh ideas for how they design and assess their writing assignments.
The primary purposes of the TAW statement and bank are to:
Inform students that Writing Services not only believes in their linguistic and cultural identity but will help them integrate that identity into their writing in tangible ways.
Direct students to book a writing appointment with Writing Services to receive guidance on how to integrate their linguistic identity into their academic writing.
Show students examples of translingual academic writing to inspire their own writing.
The Process The process of composing and curating the translingual academic writing bank began with Christin, the manager of Writing Services. She reached across the university for collaborators, inviting insight and input from campus partners who support the Indigenous student body, the Black and Racialized student body, and the faculty.
Key partners in the collaboration of this work were Zeeta Lazore Cayuga, Indigenous Academic Student Success, who provided feedback on how students in her program might receive and interpret the translingual statement and bank; Alesha Moffat, Educational Developer and Instructor in Faculty of Education, who generously contributed her collection of translingual academic writing samples to the bank; Linn Huemiller, Web Content Specialist, who helped us fit our content to web writing conventions and who also helped us understand the user trends for our webpage; Elizabeth Clarke, Academic Equity Programs, who provided feedback on how students in her program might receive and interpret the translingual statement and bank.
Elizabeth’s contribution was so substantial that she agreed to become a co-writer for the project.
The Starting Artifact Here is the original TAW statement and bank written by Christin and Elizabeth.
Your Language. Your Writing. Your Voice.
Prepared by Christin Wright-Taylor and Elizabeth Clarke
“I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.”
~ Kamala Das, from “An Introduction”
Writing Services believes students have a right to use their own language and voice in academic writing. The staff are committed to developing writing strategies that not only consider the conventions of academic writing but also challenge and dismantle systemic barriers that students may face.
Nearly 50 years ago, the Conference on College Composition and Communication released a statement called, “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” (CCCC, 1974). This statement says students have the right to “Dig And Be Dug,” as Langston Hughes’s (2024) puts it. In other words, students have the right to bring their culture and language to academic writing and for that writing to be understood.
Writing Services acknowledges that academic writing has historically been Eurocentric, classed, and gendered, and that this has shut out students with diverse backgrounds. As Geneva Smitherman (1995) writes, “the Unhip among researchers, scholars, and intellectuals … [argued] that even though the [language] difference of those oppressed by race, class, or gender were cognitively equal to those of the mainstream, they were socially unequal” (p. 21). In other words, racialized English has been stereotyped as “ghetto.” International English is called, “broken.” And working-class English has been branded, “unintelligent.” But these various forms of language and dialects are just as intelligent and capable as mainstream language, and many scholars have shown us the way:
Suresh Canagarajah (2015) says that “rather than developing mastery in a single ‘target language,’ students should strive for competences in a repertoire of codes and discourses” (p. 284). Paul Kei Matsuda (2006) says that “all [writing] teachers need to reimagine the [writing] classroom as the multilingual space that it is” (649). And Ilona Leki and Joan Carson (1997) say that “experiencing a deep interaction between language, personal interests, needs, and backgrounds” is important for students in terms of linguistic and intellectual growth (p. 64).
This may sound lovely, but institutions and faculty may not know about Smitherman, Canagarajah, Matsuda, Leki and the many bright ideas about language diversity in academic writing. As a result, institutions are behind in including diverse languages and voices, which hinders student expression and intellectual growth (Horner & Trimbur, 2022; Matsuda, 2006; Shor, 1997).
What should students do then? First, read the excerpts of writing below that demonstrate all the different ways other scholars and writers have brought their culture and language into academic writing. Second, book an appointment with Writing Services to learn how you can balance meeting the expectations of your writing assignment with integrating your language and culture into your academic voice.
*Special thanks to Alesha Moffat, Teaching, Excellence, and Innovation for contributing key samples of translingual writing.
References Canagarajah, S. (2015). The Place of World Englishes in Composition. In S. Perryman-Clark, D. E. Kirkland, A. Jackson, & G. Smitherman (Eds.), Students’ right to their own language: A critical sourcebook (pp. 284–285). Bedford / St Martin’s.
CCCC. (1974). Committee on CCC Language: Background Statement. College Composition and Communication, 25(3), 1–18.
Horner, B., & Trimbur, J. (2022). English Only and U.S. College Composition. CCC, 53(4), 594–630.
Leki, I., & Carson, J. (1997). “Completely Different Worlds”: EAP and the Writing Experiences of ESL Students in University Courses. TESOL Quarterly, 31(1), 39. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587974
Matsuda, P. K. (2006). The myth of linguistic homogeneity in U.S. college composition. College English, 68(6), 637–651.
Shor, I. (1997). Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality. Journal of Basic Writing, 16(1), 91–104.
Smitherman, G. (1995). “Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Retrospective. The English Journal, 84(1), 21–27.
The Translation As you can see, there is quite a difference in style and format from the original statement to the web page. Though we spent hours laboring over the original statement, and were quite pleased with its stylistic savvy, Linn, our web designer, shared that the statement read too much like an “essay” and didn’t support optimal SEO algorithms. She also helped us understand the rhetorical context of the web page, which needed to function as a “wayfinding” tool, something that students can reference for where and how to access our resources. Finally, Linn helped us frame the content to best fit the way that students interact with the website: by Googling key search terms, then skimming the web page for the information they want.
To that end, we added two sections to the web page as practical support for students: “Book an Appointment” and “Talk to Your Instructor.” The booking section directs students to book an appointment with our writing consultants to help them negotiate using their own language and culture in their academic voice. The “Talk to Your Instructor” section offers students a template e-mail they can use to broach a conversation with their professor about possibly taking a translingual approach to their assignment.
Finally, copyright and accessibility considerations informed the design of the TAW bank. We had initially imagined the bank to be interactive with the writing samples appearing as tiles students could click on and navigate out to writing samples. However, in order to make the samples accessible and to avoid infringing on the original texts’ copyrights , we chose to offer the writing samples as links to publication pages where students can read the translingual pieces in full.
Reflecting on the Process After completing the translingual statement and bank, here are Christin and Elizabeth’s reflections on the process:
Make it a priority to collaborate on your translingual banks! Draw on partnerships across the institution to contribute to the content and to inform the process.
From Christin Make it a priority to collaborate on your translingual banks! Draw on partnerships across the institution to contribute to the content and to inform the process. It was vital to get Elizabeth, Zeeta, Alesha, and Linn’s input on the translingual academic writing bank. Their voices and perspectives contributed something significant to the process and ultimately made the translingual statement and bank better than it would have been otherwise.
Also, creating this statement and bank was a series of compromises: formatting it as a landing page sacrificed stylistic choices, as well as authorship (i.e. our names aren’t on the statement anymore). The landing page format also minimized the research and scholarship behind the statement and bank. On the other hand, by placing the statement and bank on the student-facing webpage, we gained accessibility to the students, relevance to their searches, and a visibility that wouldn’t otherwise be possible through internal institutional platforms.
From Elizabeth As a learning consultant who is a part of Academic Equity Programs and working within a predominantly white institution (PWI), it’s important to me to collaborate with other staff, faculty and community partners to support the enrichment of the work being done for students (the collective).
Christin reached out to me and asked if I could provide feedback on a one-page statement about supporting and empowering diverse students to write using their unique linguistic identity and how the statement read for me as a Black woman working within a university setting. I initially read the statement from several perspectives as a Black woman working within a university, working with different individuals and groups, and recognizing it would read differently to different people. I collaborated with another colleague, Shevaungh Thomas, Racialized Counsellor, and asked how it read for her. There, we discussed the intent, meaning and initial thoughts of the article and provided feedback for more clarity.
While sharing the feedback with Christin, the process turned into a collaborative piece of work, allowing us to bounce ideas and thoughts off one another to try to speak to different readers and invite them into the writing process. It was a neat collaboration for me, as I don’t necessarily always see myself as a writer, but further highlighted the importance of creating space for collaboration and diversity in writing centres in Canada, echoing Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young.
Will It Work? It is uncertain if the TAW statement and bank in this format will achieve Dr. Vay’s vision and our purpose. Will the students find this web page? Will it help them start conversations with their faculty and direct them to our resources? All of this is untested yet. However, another advantage to choosing to house this resource on a public-facing website, is that we will have access to analytics that can show us how many internal and external users access the site, how long users stay on the site, and how far down they scroll through the site. Our team will review these analytics periodically to see how and when users are engaging the translingual academic writing bank. In the end, this bank — in this format — may be a shot in the dark, but at least it’s a shot.
Neo-colonialism, and the US leadership of it, do not evoke the same sense of horror as the old colonialism and the oppressor nations of Europe used to evoke in the general imagination and in political practice. In some quarters the USA is not even seen as an imperialist power.
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom
This May, the French government sent a force of 3,000 police and military personnel to New Caledonia (Lukiv, 2024), an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean and a territory of France, to put down a protest by the Indigenous Kanak people. Their protests are for voting to be representative of the people of their islands; France recently changed the rules of who can vote, allowing “more recent arrivals to vote in provincial elections” (Macron heading to New Caledonia…, 2024, May 21). In a Guardian article, a member of the Indigenous Kanak people of the island chain, said, “I don’t know why our fate is being discussed by people who don’t even live here.” The official language of the islands is French, even though the peoples of New Caledonia speak “28 indigenous languages” (Bissoonauth & Parish, 2017, p. 39), and New Caledonia 17,000 kilometres from France. Continue reading “Writing centre industrial complex”→
Despite how writing instructors like me might feel about writing, students don’t always feel as though it is the most fun aspect of their scholarly or professional lives. Several years ago, in pre-Pandemic times, I initiated a transition workshop for incoming, first-year students focused on sharing a love and enthusiasm for writing. My goal was to reframe writing for incoming undergraduate students as a rich site of interest and community at university. I wanted the Writing Centre’s most public-facing work, our workshops, to do as much as possible to promote prosocial, support-seeking behaviours among students as well as to change the remedial narrative about the Writing Centre.
The 2-hour Pizza Party Writing Workshop attracted 80-100 students that first September and each September thereafter until the pandemic transformed it into an online workshop called “The Lowdown.” The majority of our early September appointments that follow are booked by students saying that they met us at the Pizza Party/The Lowdown and are looking to continue the conversations they began there.
The in-person, on-campus Pizza Party Writing Workshop is designed to maximize engagement and relationship building between attendees and many of our writing instructors. It takes place in a large auditorium with round tables to facilitate small group activity sessions.
After a brief welcome and introduction, students join topic-oriented table activities each run by a writing instructor or two. The table topics typically include:
Decoding assignment instructions
Discovering structure
Developing thesis statements
Constructing paragraphs
Engaging with sources & avoiding plagiarism
Editing sentences
Currently, the workshop also includes a table with information and activities about working with “smart” or “intelligent” writing tools like Grammarly and OpenAI products. The number of table topics is limited by the length of the workshop, and we usually allot 10-minutes per table topic with another 3 minutes for students to rotate. A rotation of seven topics takes about 85 minutes.
For each topic table, the writing instructor spends 3-5 minutes providing some general information (noting that variations exist depending on discipline) as well as suggestions for how (or whether) to focus on the issue at various stages of the writing process. The goal is to introduce the topic and the dispel topic’s myths while inviting the students to dive deeper in 1-to-1 tutoring sessions. We use old-fashioned, tri-fold poster boards to supplement the verbal presentation. We used to provide a handout at each activity table as well, but we now offer a link to the supplementary website we built, The Lowdown on university-level academic writing, when the workshop was forced online due to the Pandemic.
Then students are invited to engage in a short puzzle or gameful activity related to the topic (see examples on the supplementary website). These activities tend to prompt lots of collective teamwork and camaraderie. This is where we see bonds being formed between student attendees and with writing instructors facilitating the table activity.
Having completed a table activity, students win a ticket. They must earn a minimum of five tickets to get pizza. Eventually, the table activities are cleared away, and students continue their conversations over pizza. In this informal part of the event, writing instructors sit with students and have a chance to contribute to their conversations about transitioning to university life.
When the Pandemic hit, we were obviously unable to continue with the in-person or pizza elements of this workshop. We pivoted to an online workshop, renamed to “The Lowdown on university-level academic writing,” which ran in similar ways using Zoom break-out rooms. The online iteration of the workshop has excellent attendance, and is still the preferred modality of many students. We are looking into opportunities to re-launch the in-person pizza party.
For the online iteration of the workshop, we transformed our materials into the Lowdown website and changed some of the activities there to be do-able via Zoom. During the Pandemic, we began adding video resources to enhance the examination of these topics. This website is now capable of living as a stand-alone resource that can help first-year undergraduate students begin transitioning to university-level writing. Our plan, however, is to continue running The Lowdown and/or Pizza Party Writing Workshop to begin each year with a celebration of writing and talking writing in community. The primary goal is building personal connections between the writing centre and students.
If you’d like to chat about how to transform this workshop in your own context, get in touch!
With thanks to the many writing instructors at York’s Writing Centre who have contributed to the Pizza Party and Lowdown workshop as well as the resulting supplementary website.
This is Part Two of two in this series. You can read Part One, The Pandemic, GenAI, & the Return to Handwritten, In-Person, Timed, and Invigilated Exams: Causes, Context, and the Perpetuation of Ableism here. CWCR/RCCR Editor
Clare Goulet has published creative nonfiction, poetry, and reviews as well as essays on metaphor and polyphony. Adjunct prof and writing centre coordinator at Mount St. Vincent University, she co-edited with Mark Dickinson Lyric Ecology on the work of Jan Zwicky. Her book, Graphis scripta: writing lichen, will be published by Gaspereau Press in spring 2024.
1.
1975. Late summer in the woods behind the backyard, lost, first freedom, almost five, lying across a warm rough slab of granite, heat soaking into my belly where the cotton t-shirt has pushed up, scratched by brown prickly things—rock tripe, though I didn’t know the name, genus Umbilicaria—the world something sensuous, even reading which came too early, my head already filled with poems. The sun is hot. I mumble made-up lines, sleepy, peeling brittle bits to see the thick white cord connecting each to its substrate, holding rock, lichen, child in place. It will be forty years before these come together and I feel this whole again. Continue reading “Already Whole: rethinking your so-called ‘parts’”→
Clare Bermingham, Director, Writing and Communication Centre, University of Waterloo
This is part two of two in this series. The part one can be found here. CWCR/RCCR Editor
How should writing centres advise students and instructors on the use of GenAI in their writing and communication processes? This question has been front of mind for many of us who manage and work in university and college writing centres and learning centres. And there isn’t a single answer.
When making decisions about how to support students with GenAI, we, as writing centre leaders and practitioners, must account for our local contexts, the knowledges and stages of the students we tutor, and the learning goals or outcomes for particular learning situations or tasks. Our guidance for undergraduate students will be different than for graduate students. And multilingual students may have different needs than those whose home language is English. In this blog post, the second in the series about guiding students through this new landscape, I share questions and ideas to help writing centre colleagues take an inventory of their centres and institutional needs and prepare their tutors for encounters with GenAI in students’ work. Continue reading “GenAI and the Writing Process: Guiding student writers in a GenAI world (Part 2 of 2)”→
The responsibility in using GenAI for academic pursuits in higher education is shared between the user, the tool and, in instances where the tool is part of teaching and learning processes, the institution. As such, to say that students using ChatGPT as a research to bear sole responsibility for the accuracy of the information the tools provides is unethical and unjust. In this case, this is especially the case if the student is directed by an instructor to use the tool. It can be argued that the institution bears responsibility if it doesn’t provide instruction (digital literacy) on using the tools.
The anthropomorphism of GenAI writing and research tools mark their results differently from those of Google Scholar or Wikipedia, for example. GenAI, promoted as research and writing tools, bear equal and sometimes greater responsibility for not only the information they provide. These tools often position themselves within the limitations of their actions and the availability and accuracy of the data on which they draw, by providing caveats with their answers. At the same time, the anthropomorphic language that is used in providing these answers is convincing and authoritative. As a result, these tools have responsibility not only for the information they provide on the basis of its authoritative presentation. There a responsibility to those who use this information and the work that they produce as a result of the tool, especially in light of OpenAI’s own admission that ChatGPT “hallucinates” or makes up information. Continue reading “Is ChatGPT responsible for a student’s failing grade?: A hallucinogenic conversation”→
On July 20, 2023, OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT and Dall·E, stopped offering its GenAI detection tool, AI classifier, saying that it “is not fully reliable” (OpenAI, 2023). There’s a short statement on OpenAI’s website:
As of July 20, 2023, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy. We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated. (Kirchner, Ahmad, Aaronson, & Leike, 2023, January 1; italics in the original)
There, OpenAI describes its AI classifier:
Our classifier is not fully reliable. In our evaluations on a “challenge set” of English texts, our classifier correctly identifies 26% of AI-written text (true positives) as “likely AI-written,” while incorrectly labeling human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time (false positives). (Kirchner, Ahmad, Aaronson, & Leike, 2023, January 1; emphasis in the original)
As a result of the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, fundamental changes to higher education have happened, and continue to happen, quickly and with unforeseen consequences. “A US poll published March 2023, found that “43% of college students have used ChatGPT or a similar AI application” and 22% “say they have used them to help complete assignments or exams,” representing “1 in 5 college students” (Welding, 2023, March 27). Inside Higher Ed published a piece, The Oncoming AI Ed-Tech ‘Tsunami’, predicting “[t]he AI-in-education market is expected to grow from approximately $2 billion in 2022 to more than $25 billion in 2030, with North America accounting for the largest share” What was a relevant response for GenAI in December 2022 is now ancient history. The scene is fluid—there are few predictive models, and no one knows what might come next. (D’Agostino, 2023, April 18). A classroom instructor is quoted in May 2023: “AI has already changed the classroom into something I no longer recognize” (Bogost, 2023, May 16).
On April 4, 2023, Turnitin launched its AI detection tool (Chechitelli, 2023, March 16). At the time, Turnitin’s CEO, Chris Caren, wrote,
…we are pleased to announce the launch of our AI writing detection capabilities… To date, the statistical signature of AI writing tools remains detectable and consistently average. In fact, we are able to detect the presence of AI writing with confidence. We have been very careful to adjust our detection capabilities to minimize false positives and create a safe environment to evaluate student writing for the presence of AI-generated text. (Caren, 2023, April 4)
On April 3, the Washington Post, which had early access, tested the accuracy of Turnitin’s tool using 16 “samples of real, AI-fabricated and mixed-source essays.” It found the tool
…got over half of them at least partly wrong. Turnitin accurately identified six of the 16 — but failed on three… And I’d give it only partial credit on the remaining seven, where it was directionally correct but misidentified some portion of ChatGPT-generated or mixed-source writing. (Fowler, 2023, April 3)
At the same time, r/ChatGPT also provides information on how to skirt AI detection, which grows in sophistication. Tips appeared in May 2023 providing information on how to “pass Turnitin AI detection” using ChatGPT and Grammarly (Woodford, 2023, May 14). Students were using ChatGPT to fool the detection tools using prompts that turned ChatGPT into a ghost writer that mimicked student’s tone and voice. A student, interviewed by the New York Times, explained how they gave ChatGPT a sample of their writing, and asked ChatGPT
“…to rewrite this paragraph to make it sound like me…So, I copied [and] pasted a page of what I’d already written and then it rewrote that paragraph, & I was like, this works” (Tan, 2023, June 26).
Online web tools began to appear, such as UndetectableAI, HideMyAI, and QuillBot, designed specifically to fool GenAI detection tools.
AI detection tool will need to be taken “with a big grain of salt,” saying that, in the end, it is up to the instructor to “make the final interpretation” of what is created by GenAI and what isn’t—“You, the instructor, have to make the final interpretation”
Screen shot of UndetectableAI.
Also in May, Turnitin began to provide caveats for its AI detection tool. David Adamson, an AI scientist and Turnitin employee, says in a Turnitin produced video, Understanding false positives within Turnitin’s AI writing detection capabilities, that instructors need to do some work when using the tool. He admits that the results of submissions to the AI detection tool will need to be taken “with a big grain of salt,” saying that, in the end, it is up to the instructor to “make the final interpretation” of what is created by GenAI and what isn’t—“You, the instructor, have to make the final interpretation” (Turnitin, 2023, May 23). These false positives, according to Adamson, have different “flavours.” These flavours are specific kinds of writing that Turnitin’s tool is not good at predicting as GenAI writing. These include:
Repetitive writing: the same words used again and again.
Lists, outlines, short questions, code, or poetry.
Developing writers, English-language learners, and those writing at middle and high school levels.
Adamson ends the video by saying, “we own our mistakes. We want to…share with you how and when we are wrong” (Turnitin, 2023, May 23). These mistakes, Adamson states, represent ~1%, or 1 in 100, of submissions through the tool.
If we use Adamson’s rate of 1% false positives, 3.5% of 38.5 million submission is 1.3 million—1% of 1.3 million is 13,000 student papers that were found to be written in part by GenAI, when in fact they were not.
While this may be acceptable to Turnitin, this 1% represents real student assignments, written by real students. By May 14, 2023, Turnitin reported that 38.5 million submissions had been submitted for examination by their GenAI detection tool, “with 9.6% of those documents reporting over 20% of AI writing and 3.5% over 80% of AI writing” (Merod, 2023, June 7). If we use Adamson’s rate of 1% false positives, 3.5% of 38.5 million submission is 1.3 million—1% of 1.3 million is 13,000 student papers that were found to be written in part by GenAI, when in fact they were not. If Adamson’s 1% false-positive rate is applied to the 9.6% of papers reported with over 20% of AI writing (3.8 million assignments), this total is about 37,000 assignments. Together, this is approximately 50,000 false positives affecting 50,000 students. For scale, two of Canada’s largest schools, the University of Alberta has a student population is 40,100 and York University, 55,700. For the students, being accused of an academic violation can not only affect their academic record, but cause anxiety, loss of scholarship, and cancellation of student visas. Turnitin’s AI scientist Adamson say that the 1% false positive rate is “pretty good…” (Turnitin, 2023, May 23).
Turnitoff?
The University of Pittsburgh and Vanderbilt University have decided to not use Turnitin’s tool. The University of Pittsburgh
has concluded that “current AI detection software is not yet reliable enough to be deployed without a substantial risk of false positives and the consequential issues such accusations imply for both students and faculty. Use of the detection tool at this time is simply not supported by the data and does not represent a teaching practice that we can endorse or support.” Because of this, the Teaching Center will disable the AI detection tool in Turnitin effective immediately (Teaching Center doesn’t endorse, 2023, June 23).
Vanderbilt indicated that they’d “decided to disable Turnitin’s AI detection tool for the foreseeable future. This decision was not made lightly and was made in pursuit of the best interests of our students and faculty,” due to Turnitin’s lack of transparency of how it works as well as the false positive rate (Coley, 2023, August 16). Vanderbilt also did the math regarding the impact on their students due to false positives:
Vanderbilt submitted 75,000 papers to Turnitin in 2022. If this AI detection tool was available then, around 3,000 student papers would have been incorrectly labeled as having some of it written by AI. Instances of false accusations of AI usage being leveled against students at other universities have been widely reported over the past few months, including multiple instances that involved Turnitin… In addition to the false positive issue, AI detectors have been found to be more likely to label text written by non-native English speakers as AI-written. (Coley, 2023, August 16).
Vanderbilt concluded, “we do not believe that AI detection software is an effective tool that should be used” (Coley, 2023, August 16).
Canadian higher education institutions have a mixed approach to AI detectors. On April 4, 2023, University of British Columbia acted quickly to Turnitin’s AI detection tool, stating that they will not enable it. Their reasoning, among others, includes: “Instructors cannot double-check the feature results”; “Results from the feature are not available to students”; and an inability “of the feature to keep up with rapidly evolving AI is unknown” (University of British Columbia, 2023, April 4).
Nipissing University, in their senate-approved, June 2023 “Generative AI Guide for Instructors” guide, mentions that “use of generative AI ‘detectors’ is not recommended” (n.p.); theUniversity of Waterloo similarly cautions faculty, “controlling the use of AI writing through surveillance or detection technology is not recommended” (Frequently Asked Questions, 2023, July 25). Conestoga College in its guide to using Turnitin’s tool, instructs faculty to indicate that they are using the tool; “Without such notice, a student may at some point appeal.” (Sharpe, 2023, June 27).
Others, such as the University of Lethbridge and Queen’s University, use Turnitin without caveats specific to the AI detection tool that I could find on their public-facing website at the time of writing.
What is the literature saying?
A paper published this month in the International Journal for Educational Integrity, “Evaluating the efficacy of AI content detection tools in differentiating between human and AI‑generated text,” which did not include Turnitin, found the “performance” of AI detection tools[1] on GPT 4-generated content was “notably less consistent” in differentiating between human and AI-written text (Elkhatat, Elsaid, & Almeer, 2023, p. 6). “Overall, the tools struggled more with accurately identifying GPT 4-generated content than GPT 3.5-generated content” (p. 8). The findings of this study should raise questions about using GenAI detection tools in higher education:
While this study indicates that AI-detection tools can distinguish between human and AI-generated content to a certain extent, their performance is inconsistent and varies depending on the sophistication of the AI model used to generate the content. This inconsistency raises concerns about the reliability of these tools, especially in high-stakes contexts such as academic integrity investigations. (p. 12-13)
A conclusion of the paper advising “the varying performance [of detection tools on ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4] underscores the intricacies involved in distinguishing between AI and human-generated text and the challenges that arise with advancements in AI text generation capabilities” (p. 14).
According to Turnitin, students who are English-language learners, developing writers, or a secondary-level of academic writing are at a higher risk of false positives from their tool. Adamson admits that Turnitin’s false positive rate is “slightly higher” for these students—“Still near our 1% target, but there is a difference”
International students take the brunt, again
In higher education, it is well documented that international students, who make up “approximately 17% of all post-secondary enrollments in Canada” (Shokirova, et al., 2023, August 23), are accused of academic integrity breaches at a higher rate than domestic students (See for example, Adhikari, 2018; The complex problem…, 2019; Eaton & Hughes, 2022; Fass-Holmes, 2017; Hughes & Eaton, 2022). As we see in writing centres, undergraduate international students are often English-language learners, many of whom are writing academic papers in English at post-secondary levels for the first time. As a result, many undergraduate international students’ level of writing in academic English is low. Some students that I have tutored take several years of writing practice to attain a level of academic writing many in the academy consider “polished” or at post-secondary levels.
According to Turnitin, students who are English-language learners, developing writers, or a secondary-level of academic writing are at a higher risk of false positives from their tool. Adamson admits that Turnitin’s false positive rate is “slightly higher” for these students—“Still near our 1% target, but there is a difference” (Turnitin, 2023, May 23). At the same time, Adamson also claims that Turnitin doesn’t see “any evidence” that the tool is “biased against English language learners from any country at any level” (Turnitin, 2023, May 23). Unfortunately, I was not able to find data published by Turnitin to substantiate these claims, including what the difference in the false-positive rate for these students is: What does Turnitin consider “near” their “1% target”? Is it 2%, 3.5%, 1.5%? Considering the large numbers involved, 38.5 million as of May 2023, even a 0.5% increase is significant.
What will happen in September?
Like the winter semester of 2023, it may well be that the first assignments submitted this month will start another round of changes to academic writing, academic integrity, and students’ use of Gen AI tools. It will be important for institutions to monitor and update their policies and procedures regarding AI detection tools, like Turnitin, in response to possible changes to GenAI writing. International students should be paid specific attention in these cases, as they are already vulnerable within higher education.
References
Adhikari, S. (2018). Beyond culture: Helping international students avoid plagiarism. Journal of International Students, 8(1), 375–388. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1134315
Eaton, S. E., & Hughes, J. C. (2022). Academic Integrity in Canada. In S. E. Eaton (Ed.) Ethics and Integrity in Educational Contexts, (Vol. 1, pp. xi-xvii). Sprinter. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83255-1
Elkhatat, A. M., Elsaid, K., & Almeer, S. (2023). Evaluating the efficacy of AI content detection tools in differentiating between human and AI-generated text. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 19(17). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-023-00140-5
Fass-Holmes, B. (2017). International students reported for academic integrity violations: Demographics, retention, and graduation. Journal of International Students, 7(3), 644–669. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.570026
Hughes, J. C., & Eaton, S. E. (2022). Student integrity violations in the academy: More than a Decade of growing complexity and concern. In S. E. Eaton & J. C. Hughes (Eds.), Ethics and Integrity in Educational Contexts (Vol. 1, pp. 61–79). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83255-1_3
On August 31, 2021, OpenAI posted to their website, Teaching with AI, described as a guide “to accelerate student learning” using ChatGPT. This guide provides prompts to “help educators get started with” ChatGPT. These include prompts for lesson-planning development, creating analogies and explanations, helping “students learn by teaching,” as well as creating “an AI tutor.”
How institutions and course instructors are managing generative AI (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Dall⋅E, has been the focus of both scholarly and public-facing articles (Benuyenah, 2023; Berdahl & Bens, 2023; Cotton et al., 2023; Gecker, 2023; Nikolic et al., 2023; Sayers, 2023; Somoye, 2023), but few articles or resources have addressed students directly. And yet students are subjected to the suspicions of worried instructors and administrators caused by GenAI, and students are left to deal with the resulting surveillance and extra pressure of in-class assignments and monitored final exams (Marken, 2023). This is a critical point where writing centres can and should intervene. Our work is primarily student-facing, and we have the ability, through one-to-one appointments, to have conversations with students about what they are experiencing and what they need. Continue reading “Productive and Ethical: Guiding student writers in a GenAI world (Part 1 of 2)”→
Clare Goulet is writing centre coordinator and adjunct professor in the Department of English at Mount St. Vincent University, teaching editing, composition, and intro creative writing
