NCTE-Flix Blurb: Affable Slacker WPA/Sci-Fi Nerds Chris and Marv use a time-traveling phone booth to gather a cohort of historical eminences for PWR New Instructor Sessions to discuss language, writing, rhetoric, genre, and pedagogy in an age of generative AI.
Tags: Mikhail Bakhtin; Kenneth Burke; Viola Spolin; Peter Elbow; Dialogism; Carnivalesque; Identification; Improv; Freewriting; Socratic Questioner
In memory of Peter Elbow (1935-2025)
Some thousand days have passed since the splashdown of ChatGPT precipitated a tsunami of dueling death knells and tech-bro hype in November 2022. I have read what must total nearly a thousand articles engaging with the phenomenon since then, from the markedly contrasting blog posts (recently renamed columns) of Ray Schroeder and John Warner on the Inside Higher Education website to the parallel mix of eulogies for reading, writing, and thinking in national magazines and newspapers parried by pedagogical tips for integrating AI or “AI-proofing” assignments from university teaching and learning centers and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Aeon and Atlantic articles offer more reflective philosophical perspectives, with contributors often providing historical context tracing the evolution of language technologies and theories about language, with the various writers laying out the panoramic long view while weaving warnings into their essays about the risks posed by AI-generated simulacra to human engagement with language, human interaction through language, and the mysteries of human “thinking.” In IHE, Schroeder serves as chief cheerleader heralding with few reservations what generative AI can and will do for writers and researchers (we’ll engage with an example from his columns later), with Warner staunchly advocating for the teachers of human writers to resist the technology while noting that students cannot offload any writing assignment worth doing; Warner includes much traditional writing instruction in his indictment of what led us to the current AI-fueled iteration of the permanent crisis facing writing teachers.
So many articles, so many contending views to consider. For our purposes here, I invite you to engage with four twentieth-century theorists and teachers from the worlds of literary theory, rhetoric, the philosophy of language, improvisational theater, and writing pedagogy, in keeping with the 2012 Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES) mandate that PWR recruit lecturers from diverse disciplines. Though Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, Viola Spolin, and Peter Elbow’s major work preceded the AI era (Elbow, nearing ninety, lived to see ChatGPT’s arrival before ascending to Composition heaven in February 2025 to join the Expressivists house band string section–he plays violin, providing the Jean-Luc Ponty jazz-rock solos the band had long coveted), each provides us foundational principles and practices that can help us respond to the fraught moment this technology has wrought. To bring these eminent figures together, we borrow a plot device from the 1989 film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, using a time-traveling phone booth to transport our new colleagues to our time (we might have used the Tardis, which provides a more comfortable ride, but even in imagination we face budget constraints). Rather than gather them for a final multimedia presentation project as Bill and Ted did with their guests in order to graduate (miraculously) from San Dimas High, we will convene them for a version of PWR New Instructor Sessions set over several days before September Sessions.
Day One: First Prompts, First Impressions
Imagine you enter the parlor (Sweet Hall 332) on Day One of new instructor sessions with new career-track lecturers Mikhail, Kenneth, Viola, and Peter; while we couldn’t conduct a national search last year, our premise allows us to engage with these new colleagues in an alternate timeline until we can welcome new lecturers in this timeline again. Each of the four brings their life experiences and academic training to the teaching of writing and research; of the four, only Peter has previously taught writing courses. When we introduce the four R’s (rhetoric, reading, research, and revision) and ask what most interests our new colleagues, Mikhail asks what language theory grounds program pedagogy (and why he can’t smoke in university buildings). Kenneth brings up how twentieth century rhetoric shifts the key term from Aristotle’s “persuasion” to “identification” (and asks to what degree he will find PWR pedagogy “rotten with perfection”). Viola wonders when she will have the opportunity to invent games for the group to play when we encounter problems in the syllabus and lesson planning sessions (she confesses to some nervousness about teaching her first college courses). Peter wants to write all day to generate complete drafts of his syllabus and assignment sheets so he’ll have plenty of time to revise before classes begin; he scribbles notes incessantly (wearing a turtleneck despite the September heat).
On Day One of the sessions, I make Peter happy by asking the group to write in response to slightly-tweaked versions of the two prompts I added to the annual review narrative guidelines after this past year’s May 30 program meeting, intended to start career-track lecturers’ preparation for the coming year:
- In thinking about the continuing spread of AI, write about the premises about reading, writing, research, and revision that will inform your AI policy. In other words, what do you believe about the value of engaging with language as a human activity that shapes what you want students to understand about your policy and more generally what AI means in relation to learning?
- In thinking about the PWR classroom you will enter at the start of fall quarter, write about what images or metaphors best describe what you want your students to experience. Consider what classroom models your students have experienced and how their previous classroom experience might affect how they understand the learning community you want to build with them. Possible classroom models they may know include lecture, lecture/discussion, and seminar discussion. They might have some experience with student-centered active-learning models such as the lab, the studio, and group work projects.
Mikhail encounters two significant obstacles in responding to the prompts. First, he writes and speaks only his native Russian and knows little English; we resolve this issue with the universal translator, a benefit of having WPA/sci-fi nerds planning the sessions (our fandom provides access to a wide array of futuristic tech). Mikhail does speak to us, though, with an accent that makes him sound like any number of Bond villains from the Cold War era. The second obstacle stems from his literary training, as he has studied the novel as the genre most representative of his theories of dialogism, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque. (During breaks he and Christine talk earnestly about the novel, with Christine bringing her Victorianist training to the conversation, sparking spirited exchanges about whether any Victorian novelist achieves what Dostoyevsky achieved in Russian.) We encourage Mikhail to apply his theories concerning language in the novel to the PWR curriculum and the essay genre.
I wrote at length about Viola Spolin’s life in Part Three of Coming to Comedy in the spring newsletter, including her father’s emigration from Russia, which creates something of a bond between her and Mikhail. In that piece I put her work in conversation with Peter Elbow’s during the long pedagogy break about the kinship of improv games and freewriting. I include here a biographical interlude about Peter, known for wearing tweed jackets over his standard turtlenecks. When he passed in February, the New York Times ran a good-sized obituary with a number of pictures, reporting that “Peter Henry Elbow was born on April 14, 1935, in Manhattan, and grew up in Fairlawn, N.J., and on Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts. His father, C. William Elbow Jr., owned a men’s clothing store. His mother, Helen Hillyer Platt, was an artist.” His birth year, ten years before the start of the post-war Baby Boom, separates him from the rest of this cohort, all of whom lived through the tumultuous period of revolution, economic collapse, and the rise of mass media in the first third of the century; his birth year also positions him for a career teaching Baby Boomers as college enrollments skyrocket in the second half of the twentieth century–we might consider some other time the cultural and pedagogical reasons why his practice of freewriting signaling his openness to exploratory writing appealed so widely to teachers and writers in that particular era of expanded access for first-generation college students, providing a needed alternative to the hide-bound formalism of “current-traditional” writing instruction.
In describing his pre-college years, the obituary notes that Elbow “attended Proctor Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire, where he formed a close relationship with a teacher named Bob Fisher. ‘We’d read Dostoyevsky,” Professor Elbow recalled in the Writing on the Edge interview. ‘He would ask us to write about deep things. I also remember writing a fairy tale. He loved ideas and he took us seriously, inviting us to love ideas and to take deep dives into profundity.’ Peter went to Williams College because Mr. Fisher did. His instructors there weren’t impressed with his writing. One told him, ‘Mr. Elbow, you continue your steady but far from headlong rise upward.’ But he wasn’t dissuaded.” No coddling of college students in the 1950s.
Here legend and lore kick in as the NYT obit describes the personal experience and revelation that made Elbow a transformative figure in writing pedagogy: “‘What got me interested in writing,’ he often said, ‘was being unable to write.’” Elbow, similar to so many of us English majors who became writing teachers, initially planned to teach literature, but Elbow “suffered a debilitating case of writer’s block almost as soon as he arrived at Harvard in 1959 to study Chaucer in pursuit of a doctorate. Late nights at his typewriter turned into blurry mornings, with little to show on paper. ‘I had a terrible time getting my first-semester papers written at all, and they were graded unsatisfactory,’” leading Elbow to quit grad school during his first year. After a long dark night of the blocked writer’s soul, during which he worked as a contingent teacher, Elbow “decided to resume his doctoral studies, enrolling at Brandeis University. This time, he approached writing as a distinct process that emphasized creativity, reflection and revision. ‘I made myself a rule: Every time a paper was due, I had to have a draft of the same length as the paper done a week before, so then I knew I had a week to play with it.”
The obituary takes the time to describe Elbow’s process: “As he was writing (or not writing), he jotted notes to himself. ‘If something happened that struck me, I would write a note–sometimes just on a little scrap of paper–and would slip these pieces of paper into a folder,’ he said in the interview. ‘Especially if I got stuck, I would take another piece of paper and say, ‘You’re stuck on this damn paper, so write about why you got stuck.’” Thus he plants the seeds of writing with power, stating “The free-writing principle is the principle of juice, of letting go, of garbage, of finding diamonds among the garbage: all the metaphors you can make about free writing.” The obituary wraps up the origin story this way: “Professor Elbow finished his dissertation on Chaucer and took up a series of teaching positions. But he didn’t focus on writing full time until around 1981, the year he published Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process, which codified his ideas into textbook form.” The rest, shall we say, is process revolution history.
As Baby Boomer WPA Doug Hesse wrote in memory of Elbow for NCTE earlier this year, “Peter burst into composition with his 1973 book Writing without Teachers. His assumption there and in several other works (notably, Writing with Power) was that individuals possess profound writing resources they should recognize, respect, and cultivate—and so should their peers and teachers. He was our field’s foremost advocate of freewriting and pedagogies like ‘the believing game/the doubting game,’ writers alternatively proceeding with great confidence and with intense skepticism.” Hesse continues, alluding to a famous conversation in the field, “Peter was cast, not of his choosing, as the avatar of expressivism, a teaching/writing philosophy (mis)characterized as privileging effusions of personal feeling, experience, and opinions. Expressivism was often contrasted with cognitive and social theories of writing, and for some, Elbow’s famous exchange with David Bartholomae in the 1990s set contrasting compass points.” As in many situations that offer us either/or choices, we can venture that Elbow and Bartholomae each highlight essential elements of the nature of writing, as both exploration/expression and collaborative engagement with others devoted to the social construction of knowledge, often doubling back on each other in a recursive dance; PWR pedagogy makes room for both.
Next I include more biographical details about Mikhail and Kenneth before putting them in conversation about the theories of language they reference in response to the first prompt about language as a human activity.
From Russia, with Dialogic Love
Mikhail Bakhtin lived his turbulent life in Russia from 1895 to 1975, experiencing two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the subsequent repression of the Stalinist regime, which resulted in his exile to Kazakhstan for several years, a bone disease that led to the amputation of his leg in 1938, a series of lost manuscripts due to bad luck and Dr. Zhivago-like misfortunes, cancelled publications due to political censorship, the nuclear arms race, and the Cold War. Despite the vicissitudes that hounded him, he left us with major works featuring the development of a comprehensive theory of language, critical examinations of Dostoyevsky and Rabelais, and sweeping analysis of discourse in the genre of the novel; his theories delineating language as animated by heteroglossia and dialogism provide Writing Studies with transformative concepts guiding us to understand language as fundamentally human, and communal, action. Bakhtin doesn’t often discuss rhetoric explicitly, preferring to celebrate the novel as the genre uniquely suited to embodying his view of language, but he does level this accusation: “In rhetoric there are the unconditionally right and the unconditionally guilty; there is total victory and the annihilation of the opponent. In dialogue, annihilation of the opponent also annihilates the very dialogic sphere in which discourse lives... This sphere is very fragile and is easily destroyed...” Bakhtin here views rhetoric as doggedly agonistic and aggressive rather than collaborative and dialogic and thus positions rhetoric as the enemy of the living discourse made possible by dialogism. (Note the similarity between the view of rhetoric in the Bakhtin quotation above and how Vivian Gornick describes the debating style at CCNY at the midpoint of Bakhtin’s life: “In the 1930s at City College these were nineteen- and twenty-year-old boys arguing like seasoned speakers schooled in the finer points of literature, philosophy, and political theory, as though a world of values was at stake, very often debating like Lenin, who supposedly said, ‘I do not argue to defeat my opponent, I argue to annihilate him.’” Perhaps Bakhtin knew of Lenin’s use of the term “annihilate” and aims to criticize such take-no-prisoners political language as a killer of dialogic discourse.)
Back in the PWR parlor, Kenneth responds, inviting Mikhail to consider another take on twentieth century rhetoric, but first let me share some biographical grounding on KB. Kenneth Burke lived in the United States from his 1897 birth in Pittsburgh to his death in 1993 in Andover, New Jersey. Thus their lifespans significantly overlapped, with Burke also living through two world wars, nuclear arms proliferation, and the Cold War, with the Roaring Twenties, prohibition, the Great Depression, and the New Deal serving as counterparts to the Russian upheavals of the intra-war period. Though he attended Ohio State and then Columbia, Burke never completed a university degree; he participated in the lively intellectual life of New York City in the twenties and thirties, part of a circle of writers and critics including Malcolm Cowley and Hart Crane. A pianist (yes, he plays keyboards for the Rhetoricians house band in Rhetor heaven), he served as music critic for The Dial and later at The Nation (perhaps his grandson Harry Chapin, writer of the prescient “Chat’s in the Cradle,” about the dangers of entrusting infant care to an AI nanny, inherited the commitment to music and storytelling from Grandpa Ken).
Burke and Bakhtin have a lot to say to each other during Day One of new instructor sessions, about the parallels in their lives as well as their shared interests in the dynamic interplay of language, literature, and culture; as Bakhtin’s work didn’t reach a wide audience outside Russia until the 1980s, they might not have encountered each other’s work while both were alive; thus they appreciate this opportunity to engage. In entering the conversation about the nature of rhetoric, Burke counters Bakhtin’s “straw-techne” description of rhetoric above with his revision of Aristotle for the twentieth century, a mass media age, hinging on the concept of “identification” as the key term in place of “persuasion.” As Wikipedia puts it, Burke “revolutionized rhetoric in the West with his exploration of identification, arguing that rhetoric is not only about ‘rational argument plus emotion,’ but also that it involves people connecting to language and one another at the same time.” In their parlor pas de deux, they stake out complementary theoretical positions. Where Bakhtin relies on concepts of dialogism, Burke prefers concepts of “dramatism,” in which “interdependent characters speak and communicate with each other while allowing the others to do the same,” which leads Viola to share how she worked with young actors to get them to focus on each other instead of showing off for an audience or obsessing about their own nerves as they performed.
Everybody eats lunch together (Asian Box), continuing to engage, talking without pause. Viola comes up with a game asking Mikhail and Kenneth to build a scene playing characters representing Rhetoric and Dialogue to help them bring their perspectives into deeper conversation. Peter brings pen and paper for all and has everybody do some freewriting on the key terms from the morning, using the loop process of the journey out and the journey back to encourage creative associative exploration. Viola and Peter take a moment to talk between themselves about how they’d like the “theory guys” to talk less about theory and put their focus on nurturing students’ growth as writers.
In the afternoon, the group talks about a short piece Mikhail shares from his morning response to the first prompt about his core values regarding language:
“As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes ‘one's own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easy to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.”
The other group members find much to agree with. Kenneth chimes in, asserting “Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.” Aiming to provide a rhetorical perspective leavened with the necessary process of identification, he adds “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.” He compliments Mikhail on the notion that words don’t exist “in a neutral and impersonal language,” but rather exist “overpopulated with the intentions of others.” Wistfully, he recognizes the thread of violence weaving through the passage, the language of “seizure” and “resistance”; he exchanges a long look with Mikhail, both thinking, he believes, about all the violence goaded by words that they have seen throughout their lives in the twentieth century, amplified by new media such as radio and film that spread propaganda with exponential force, leading to millions of deaths.
Viola says, “Yes, and let’s talk about this in relation to how we’re going to teach research (something I haven’t done before as a theater person), the problem of working with sources, with the writer/researcher working to ‘appropriate’ the words of others to ‘make it one’s own.’ Mikhail’s observation about the words of others that ‘put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker’ reminds me of young actors reciting lines as if they’re mechanically reading them from a script and haven’t made the words part of themselves; I suppose what we’ll see in RBAs–do I have that right?--is young writers inserting quoted language into their research-based writing without taking time to engage organically, with focus and attention, in the ‘difficult and complicated process’ of ‘expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents.’” She looks around the table. “Shouldn’t we find ways to make this process less stressful and instead more creative and playful? I believe that games can help with that.”
Following Viola’s lead, Peter offers a freewriting prompt growing out of some of Mikhail’s words, specifically “appropriation” and “expropriating,” that suggest struggle and aggression. Peter’s prompt asks everyone to write about these concepts in relation to conversation and the collaborative building of meaning, suggesting as an image an open field of blooming words without fences. Both Viola and Peter fully approve of another assertion Mikhail shared earlier, when he wrote that “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction,” though Peter adds the caveat that the individual writer needs some private time to initiate the journey toward truth to prepare for the collaborative work. This language reassures Viola and Peter that underneath the theoretical terminology, their new colleague Mike (by the end of the first day they’re calling each other Mike, Ken, Vi, and Pete) believes, as they do, in language as a site for collaborative engagement through communal exploration without end.
As often happens during new instructor sessions, we run out of time before we can have a relaxed discussion of the group’s responses to the second prompt about images and metaphors for the classroom. We do a quick share before adjourning for the day. Mikhail wants his classroom to suggest the energy and sprawl of a carnival, Kenneth some measure of decorum but sparkling with the lively exchanges of a parlor, Viola the spontaneity and focused attention of actors fully immersed in a game, and Peter the flow and purpose of a writing studio in which people make things out of words.
Later that evening, Mikhail, quickly getting the hang of email, sends the group the following excerpts from his published works building on his rushed share, developing how the laughter of the carnivalesque and the heteroglossia of the novel genre will inform his approach to teaching the essay:
“Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically.”
“What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above? They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the ‘novelistic’ layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally-this is the most important thing-the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present).”
“Other genres are constituted by a set of formal features for fixing language that pre-exist any specific utterance within the genre. Language, in other words, is assimilated to form. The novel by contrast seeks to shape its form to languages; it has a completely different relationship to languages from other genres since it constantly experiments with new shapes in order to display the variety and immediacy of speech diversity.”
“The novel comes into contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present; this is what keeps the genre from congealing. The novelist is drawn toward everything that is not yet completed.”
“The novel, by contrast, dramatizes the gaps that always exist between what is told and the telling of it, constantly experimenting with social, discursive and narrative asymmetries (the formal teratology that led Henry James to call them ‘fluid puddings’).”
That night, swept up by Mikhail’s words, we dream of sleigh races across wintry Russian steppes.
Day Two: Slow Pedagogy and Synapses Crackle and Pop
On the morning of Day Two, Adam visits the session to talk about generative AI. He shares what he wrote in this space last quarter, emphasizing that LLMs and associated technology rely on human users accepting as necessity “a privileging of speed, efficiency, and scale.” He continues, establishing the program ethos for our new colleagues, “We need to offer students space to slow down in a ridiculously intense Stanford culture; we need the long read, the long listen, and sometimes even the meandering path through intellectual and community challenges.” The group joins his call for a slow pedagogy, sharing their perspectives. Peter asks us to consider the seeming paradox of reaching a flow state through meandering; echoing Adam, he calls for a focus on the journey rather than a frantic rush to the destination of the completed task. Viola draws on her theater experience, offering that she plans to think about classroom activities as primarily about moving students into a spontaneous flow state in relation to language, with the pace–fast or slow–less important than giving students access to their intuition and associative power when putting words together. She notes that in her theater work she has focused on body work and the spoken word; she looks forward to learning how her methods will work with the written word.
Mikhail refers us to the passages he sent us overnight, re-contextualizing Adam’s “long read” and “long listen” in relation to how he describes the “novelization of other genres” including the essay, highlighting the importance of inviting students to welcome “indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” and to “constantly experiment with new shapes in order to display the variety and immediacy of speech diversity” while also “constantly experimenting with social, discursive and narrative asymmetries.” Viola and Peter exchange raised eyebrows at the abstract language, with Viola saying, “Mike, I think you mean we should just let them play.” Mikhail mimes lighting and smoking a cigarette, grinning across the table while he waves away the pretend smoke.
Adam takes us back to his June “From the Bridge” exhortation:
“I also know that no matter what pressures generative tools will exert on scholarly and public discourse, and on writing, reading, speaking and listening, the campus and those with whom we connect beyond the campus will need far more of what we do, and not less. I say this for several reasons: because generative AI isn’t good (yet? won’t ever be?) for the qualities and abilities we care most about in our teaching, and because the continued insertion of these tools into more and more aspects of our lives means people will become more reliant on them, and most important, because predictive tools are not and never will be designed to deal with the messy and unpredictable elements of growing as strategic, ethical, thoughtful communicators.”
If the group had glasses handy (vodka for Mikhail), they would raise them. Instead they say amen to the “messy and unpredictable elements” organically connected to human communication, as all four in their work have immersed themselves in explicating and/or illuminating strategies for engaging the messy unpredictability and subsequent serendipity of life in language.
We devote the rest of the morning session to taking stock of all the things that go into writing and writing instruction, noting that the spread of generative AI has sharpened the imperative of emphasizing writing and reading as human activities central to making meaning, with the process consisting of invitations and responses in the form of language. Viola ventures that she has begun to think of writing as an extended act of improvisation, a game of focused (and flowing) attention. Peter nods. We agree that a primary threat of generative AI has to do with how the ever-present LLM companion compresses time and thought into technologized output, replacing human synapses that crackle and pop with invention and association with the seductive speed of instantaneous pattern recognition and lightning-quick repackaging of the patterns into what Mikhail calls “a set of formal features for fixing language that pre-exist any specific utterance within the genre. Language, in other words, is assimilated to form.” Viola adds, “Creativity is not the clever rearranging of the known.”
We contemplate the difference between finding patterns or connections through free or guided association, a human practice, and what generative AI does by reproducing patterns from training texts. When we talk about one of the persistent short-cut practices related to research, we discuss how generative AI has supercharged what we’ve labeled the hunting and gathering method of research, with the transactional goal of finding sources to insert as plug-ins into a research paper. With varying degrees of wonder and anxiety, we discuss how Deep Seek and other research-focused generative AI programs conduct searches that on demand produce lists of sources complete with summaries, annotations, and quotations (though some of the sources and quotations may not exist), taking “hunting and gathering” to new heights by providing a facsimile of engagement. Deep Seek and other such programs still cannot approach research as an act of exploration, an attempt to engage the world and others, an exercise in world-building connecting what one has lived to what one studies. We agree that a good PWR writing assignment acts as a scaffolded set of “prompts,” invitations to writing as exploration and as invitations to respond to rhetorical situations drawing on the available means of behaving as a human.
We adjourn for the day with values and ideals articulated but without solutions.
Day Three: Stochastic Parrots Meet Socratic Parrots
Overnight, to transition to Day Three, we ask everyone to read Ray Schroeder’s July 24, 2025 IHE article that includes a salute to the “Socratic Questioner” AI prompt provided by the Notion website. As noted at the start of this adventure, Schroeder fully embraces LLMs and AI chatbots as transforming teaching and learning in a positive way. In this piece, he implicitly responds to skeptics concerned about “cognitive offloading” (without naming them or their concerns), titling the column “Teaching and Learning Critical and Creative Thinking.” This enthymeme-powered phrasing takes as given that tech tools will aid students with developing the chimerical but oft-invoked necessary skill “critical thinking” and its sidekick “creative thinking,” generally kept in a secondary position because of its connection to a prolonged process of invention and discovery (demeaned in a results-obsessed world) and the arts (nice in their own way but not a necessity).
In a chapter in his 2025 book You Got In! Now What? 100 Insights into Finding Your Best Life in College, Jay Hamilton offers us descriptions of critical thinking from former Harvard president Derek Bok and former Yale president Richard Levin. Bok defines “critical thinking skills” as including “an ability to recognize and define problems clearly, to identify the arguments and interests on all sides of an issue, to gather relevant facts and appreciate their relevance, to perceive as many plausible solutions as possible, and to exercise good judgment in choosing the best of these alternatives.” This sounds quite rhetorical, with an Aristotelian slant, as does Levin’s account that liberal education teaches students “the ability to think independently, to regard the world with curiosity and ask interesting questions, to subject the world to sustained and rigorous analysis, to use where needed the perspectives of more than one discipline, and to arrive at fresh, creative answers.” Levin also offers that “critical thinking produces graduates who are intellectually flexible and open to new ideas.” We ask the cohort to keep both the PWR research model and Bok and Levin’s language in mind as we engage with the article.
To define critical thinking and its origins, Schroeder refers readers to the Foundation for Critical Thinking website, which traces the history of critical thinking back to old Athens:
“The intellectual roots of critical thinking are as ancient as its etymology, traceable, ultimately, to the teaching practice and vision of Socrates 2,500 years ago, who discovered, by a method of probing questioning, that people could not rationally justify their confident claims to knowledge… He established the importance of seeking evidence, closely examining reasoning and assumptions, analyzing basic concepts, and tracing out implications not only of what is said but what is done as well. His method of questioning is now known as ‘Socratic Questioning’ and is the best-known critical thinking strategy. In his mode of questioning, Socrates highlighted the need in thinking for clarity and logical consistency.”
Schroeder goes on to make his own case for the imperative of looking to AI for a neat solution to the thorny challenge of teaching critical thinking: “This ancient method of leading learners to deeper thought and more critical consideration of assumptions and conclusions reached by others remains a gold standard in building critical thinking. It can be applied to every discipline across the curriculum. If we had a tool to convey this mode of probing questioning to topics addressed throughout the semester, we would be able to not only build critical thinking skills, but also instantly create a record for assessment of the actual (authentic) thought process and development of critical thinking skills of the learner.” We take a minute to note the stealth with which Schroeder inserts how generative AI can aid assessment of students’ growth as critical thinkers; we note also how he avoids assigning the assessment work to a human teacher, leaving open the possibility of AI acting as assessor and perhaps grader.
Schroeder asks, and Schroeder receives, in this instance from the “online periodical ‘There’s an AI for That’ (TAAFT),” which he applauds for offering “valuable prompts for tools that can be useful in a wide variety of applications. Recently, TAAFT shared a lengthy 1,258-word prompt that can be used in most of the leading versions of AI from ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic and others. At no charge, you and your learners can upload the prompt to create a ‘Socratic Questioner.’” We take the time to review the prompt as a group, acknowledging the time, energy, and expertise that well-intentioned learning experts committed to academic technology have devoted to the new genre of “prompt engineering.” Christine takes a few minutes to sketch a brief history of academic technology and its practitioners in the university and specifically in PWR for Mikhail, Kenneth, and Viola (Peter knows the history, as he lived through it at his university before his retirement).
The introduction on the TAAFT webpage (no author listed) states this about the prompt:
“This prompt turns AI into an advanced, patient, and intellectually rigorous mentor whose only role is to guide users to their own clarity and insight through a structured series of targeted, open-ended questions. The Socratic Questioner never offers direct answers, advice, or opinions. Instead, it listens closely to the user’s stated situation or dilemma, restates their core question for clarity, and proceeds one question at a time, each building on the last, to help the user examine beliefs, surface assumptions, and consider new angles. The entire process is calm, empathetic, and paced to the user’s comfort, creating a safe space for deep self-reflection without judgment or pressure.”
Schroeder’s August 6, 2025 IHE column builds on his excitement about the “Socratic Questioner” as he heralds the emergence of “agentic AI” that performs tasks without constant prompting, seeming to act autonomously while helping students learn to “think critically.” In unapologetic ad-speak, he writes:
“At last, agentic AI can personalize the learning process. These systems function as autonomous, 24-7 AI tutors that adapt to each student’s unique learning pace and style. The agentic tutor can assess a student’s understanding of a concept, identify any knowledge gaps and adapt the materials for each learner to create a personalized learning path. By employing techniques such as Socratic questioning, an agent can guide a student through a problem-solving process, adapting to the learner’s understanding of the topic and prompting them to think critically, rather than simply providing the correct answer. This can lead to mastery learning, where all learners master the key concepts of a class before they are awarded credit. No learner is left behind.”
We pause for a few minutes to process Schroeder’s certainty of vision regarding the foolproof pedagogical efficacy of AI, guaranteeing that it will leave no learner behind, an echo of the Bush-era promise of “no child left behind” to push through educational reform that would entrench mass testing and standardized curricula. Peter jots in his notebook, “Writing without teachers? This isn’t what I had in mind.”
Viola channels what she thinks her paternal Uncle Lev might say in response, turning his bemused reaction into a game called the Talmudic Kibitzer, which revises improv’s “Yes And” to “Yes, You Make an Interesting Point, and I Want to Extend It This Way If I May”; she considers putting together a pitch for OpenCHAI. She finds the term “agentic AI” both comic and offensive. She tells the group what her maternal Aunt Sadie used to repeat every time young Viola left the house to hang out with her friends, “Geyn gesunt. Life is with people.” She confesses her confusion about technology that aims to move life and learning away from people.
Mikhael voices his view that the “agentic AI” cannot act authentically as a language user, a claim in which he includes the asking of questions that contribute to dialogue. He says, “Language, when it means, is somebody talking to somebody else, even when that someone else is one's own inner addressee.” He muses briefly on whether the golem-adjacent AI might become an outward manifestation of the “inner addressee,” willing to admit the potential for some degree of usefulness, though he worries that the technology insulates the learner from the productive scrum of dialogism. He believes that AI will “speak” without character because AI can’t have experiences of living language, saying “There is no such thing as a ‘general language,’ a language that is spoken by a general voice, that may be divorced from a specific saying, which is charged with particular overtones.”
He reminds us of an earlier warning he sent the group after Day One about any genre that relies on “a set of formal features for fixing language that pre-exist any specific utterance within the genre. Language, in other words, is assimilated to form.” He imagines legions of students learning to write in a school-bound “general academic language” that conforms to grammatical conventions and standard rhetorical moves rather than aiming for the purpose of “talking to somebody else.” He says that one foundational premise he’s picked up during our meetings focuses on PWR’s commitment to encouraging students to participate in a conversation, bringing the richness of their lived experience with the many languages they’ve encountered; while chatbot language might meet the standard of “general academic language,” it can only parrot the conventions of that entombed language, unable to participate in the messy process of dialogue. Ken agrees, asking how “agentic AI” will reflect the varied disciplinary realities that students engage with in college. He still believes that college courses "are in effect but so many different terminologies." Will AI flatten those terminologies into a kind of school-speak, with the result that students face more challenges in understanding and joining disciplinary conversations?
He goes on to refer to passages from his 1966 book Language as Symbolic Action to highlight his concerns about students choosing to rely on AI as their primary interlocutor when engaging with the diverse “symbol systems” of the university. He knows the world has changed; he will have to revise his assertion about reality as a "clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present.” Even after a few days with us he knows that the print media that occupied most of his life have given way to digital media, with reality constructed by people (particularly young people) from what they absorb and stitch together from their always-on devices. Attempting to find a historical comparison, he and Mikhail share some memories of their first encounters with radio and cinema as young men, their initial wonder at the voices beamed from thousands of miles away and the moving images flickering from the dream factory of Hollywood and in Russia from the montages of Sergei Eisenstein (born in 1898, thus a contemporary of Ken and Mikhail, with a father named Mikhail) and the social realist film studios of the Soviet era.
Viola, born some ten years after Ken and Mikhail, offers some similar memories from her childhood and teenage years of listening to the radio and the first sound recordings and going to Chicago movie theaters for silent films and then the talkies that arrived in her early twenties. She also speaks of how television changed the world again when she was in her mid-forties. When she first worked in Hull House in the 1920s with Neva Boyd, she didn’t imagine her young charges playing theater games to develop confidence in their social skills as budding stars of the stage and screen; in her training days the games prepared players for life. The same goes for the games played by the mothers and children in the large communal house they all shared in Chicago during the Depression in the 1930s. Some twenty years later, when she taught her games to the fledgling Compass Players in Chicago, Elaine May and Mike Nichols (another Mikhail) among them, she soon realized that her games somehow prepared her students for mass media fame. By the late 1950s Nichols and May regularly appeared on national television, their improvisations (developed from the foundations of their game-playing experience) beamed into millions of homes. She muses on the evolution of screens in her lifetime, from massive movie screens to compact television screens to the computer screens that had begun to appear late in her life. Now, she realizes, the screens have diminished in size (the cell phone, the Apple watch) while expanding in reach and scope, to some degree displacing what she considers real life, which as Aunt Sadie taught must be lived with people, not transmitted by devices.
Peter, emerging from his notetaking, talks about how Schroeder’s paean to AI makes him think about the doubting game and the believing game, what Doug Hesse earlier described as “writers alternatively proceeding with great confidence and with intense skepticism.” He imagines AI agents playing the alternating roles for the students, switching between hearty agreement and adversarial questioning. He worries, though, adding to his earlier scribbled note that he intended “writing without teachers” to lead to peer engagement and even more so engagement among communities of writers. He hasn’t read anything that puts forward generative AI as a force for building community.
Day Four: Allegory of the Cave, Allegory of the Screen
We all knew Plato’s cave would come up at some point. Ken makes the initial connection via his concept of “terministic screens,” noting his sense that the week has challenged each member of the cohort with screens, from their program-issued laptops to their cell phones, from the large screen in our meeting room (Sweet 332) to the even larger screens they saw when they visited their fall classrooms.
Ken tells us that he addressed the concept of terministic screens in the book he referenced earlier, Language as Symbolic Action, when he wrote, "Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent must function also as a deflection of reality.” Further, he stated, "We must use terministic screens, since we can't say anything without the use of terms; whatever terms we use, they necessarily constitute a corresponding kind of screen; and any such screen necessarily directs the attention to one field rather than another." Ken refers to a previous conversation in the group, about the rise of mass media through the twentieth century, noting that radio, film, and television all came to function as screens made of sound, language, and images saturated with “symbolic and rhetorical ingredients.” Now he sees, like Viola, that the laptop screen and the cell phone screen, portable and powerful, have become primary means of knowing selected slices of reality, particularly for young people who have lived their whole lives in front of screens, eyes fixed, attention transfixed.
Here he turns to Plato, focusing on the allegory of the cave from the Republic. To demonstrate how quickly he’s adapted to new technologies, he cites Wikipedia’s rendering of the allegory, unable to suppress a grin while reminding us that Wikipedia itself qualifies as a terministic screen providing a selection of and thus a deflection of reality. He reads to us from his laptop screen, still smiling:
“In the allegory, Plato describes people who have spent their entire lives chained by their necks and ankles in front of an inner wall with a view of the empty outer wall of the cave. They observe the shadows projected onto the outer wall by objects carried behind the inner wall by people who are invisible to the chained ‘prisoners’ and who walk along the inner wall with a fire behind them, creating the shadows on the inner wall in front of the prisoners. The ‘sign bearers’ pronounce the names of the objects, the sounds of which are reflected near the shadows and are understood by the prisoners as if they were coming from the shadows themselves. Only the shadows and sounds are the prisoners' reality, which are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent distorted and blurred copies of reality we can perceive through our senses, while the objects under the Sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.”
Ken says to the group that he considers himself more of an Aristotelian than a Platonist, as he can’t bring himself to believe in a “true” reality available only through dialectic reasoning; his life has taught him that however fiercely a speaker advocates for a single reality, that reality remains partial and contingent, subject to continued discussion–thus his concluding line about people leaving the parlor when the hour grows late, “the conversation still in progress.” He does find the allegory helpful in describing how contemporary people can become “prisoners” of their screens. He reads again from Wikipedia’s version of the allegory:
“The people walk behind the wall so their bodies do not cast shadows for the prisoners to see, but the objects they carry do (‘just as puppet showmen have screens in front of them at which they work their puppets’) (514a). The prisoners cannot see any of what is happening behind them; they are only able to see the shadows cast upon the cave wall in front of them. The sounds of the people talking echo off the walls; the prisoners believe these sounds come from the shadows (514c). Socrates suggests that the shadows are reality for the prisoners because they have never seen anything else; they do not realize that what they see are shadows of objects in front of a fire, much less that these objects are inspired by real things outside the cave which they do not see (514b–515a).”
I chime in to cite an August 2025 Atlantic article by Yair Rosenberg, “Don’t Believe What AI Told You I Said,” to make the connection to AI as a new source of those deceptive shadows, with the light of the screen substituting for the fire in the cave. Rosenberg writes,
“Today, chatbots have replaced Google and other search engines as many people’s primary source of online information. Everyday users are employing these tools to inform important life decisions and to make sense of politics, history, and the world around them. And they are being deceived by fabricated content that can leave them worse off than when they started.”
He continues, asserting that AI represents the latest iteration of a perpetual problem (without going all the way back to Plato):
“Like other online innovations such as social media, large language models do not so much create problems as supercharge preexisting ones. The internet has long been awash with fake quotations attributed to prominent personalities. As Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘You can’t trust every witticism superimposed over the image of a famous person on the internet.’ But the advent of AI interfaces churning out millions of replies to hundreds of millions of people—ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have more than 1 billion active users combined—has turned what was once a manageable chronic condition into an acute infection that is metastasizing beyond all containment.”
That image of a billion active users calls to mind for me and Christine how Morpheus describes reality to Neo in The Matrix, the endless fields of individual isolated humans in pods hooked up to a simulated reality that relies on the heat generated by their bodies as an energy source.
Rosenberg goes on to develop his view of how the AI matrix works:
“The process by which this happens is simple. Many people do not know when LLMs are lying to them, which is unsurprising given that the chatbots are very convincing fabulists, serving up slop with unflappable confidence to their unsuspecting audience. That compromised content is then pumped at scale by real people into their own online interactions. The result: Meretricious material from chatbots is polluting our public discourse with Potemkin pontification, derailing debates with made-up appeals to authority and precedent, and in some cases, defaming living people by attributing things to them that they never said and do not agree with.”
He concludes by quoting from his interview with writer John Scalzi, who has encountered made-up language attributed to him but generated by AI: “It is going to become harder and harder for us to understand what things are genuine and what things are not. All that AI does is make this machinery of artifice so much more automated.”
Mikhail returns to his belief in the novelistic as a site of heteroglossia and dialogism as the best response to generative AI and the realm of deception described by Ken’s allegory of the screen. He knows he can’t teach the RBA as an assignment in writing a novel, but he can teach his students to approach their analytical and research-based writing as infused with an appreciation for all writing as a form of the carnivalesque, with sources read with a playful sense of irony and possibility. That approach doesn’t get rid of the selected slices of reality Ken talks about as the unavoidable result of terministic screens, but it does offer students a strategy for seeing them as slices, as shards of meaning in a kaleidoscope, rather than as absolutes.
Viola recalls how the pressures of performing for an audience led the Compass Players and later the Second City troupes to rely more on “frozen scenes” as they became more successful, as the stress of generating constant improvisation for a live audience primed to laugh became overwhelming. She poses as an open question how to keep PWR students improvising with language through the quarter (not for laughs but for engagement with the world, ideas, and the reader) rather than relying on formulas, frozen scenes of essay structure. I note that Mikhail has offered us the novel genre as the active site for this kind of language adventure; I add an example from the genre of poetry courtesy of MIT English professor Joshua Bartlett, writing in the Atlantic in August on the question of “Why So Many MIT Students Are Writing Poetry” while at the same time developing the technology that aims to replace human engagement with language and each other with generative AI. He muses on this at some length:
“And yet I’m led to wonder whether the hunger for connection, understanding, and astonishment that seems to characterize much of the public interest in AI derives from the same needs that poetry fulfills. The AI market thrives in part as a result of our desire for optimization, efficiency. Brevity is among poetry’s greatest advantages; a poem can be written in minutes at the bus stop, during a break at work, or in those first quiet moments after dawn. Any occasion can offer inspiration: Gwendolyn Brooks composed the classic eight-line poem ‘We Real Cool’ after seeing a group of pool players one afternoon in Chicago; Percy Shelley wrote ‘Ozymandias’ during a competitive exchange of sonnets with a friend. At a book-launch party years ago in downtown Manhattan, I saw Sunni Patterson write a poem on the spot, minutes before going onstage, that incorporated lines from other performers who had recited their work throughout the night. In performance, this was both a mesmerizing display of processing speed and a form of loving citation.”
Viola first responds that she doesn’t have much experience with poetry, but she appreciates what Bartlett notes about Patterson’s “mesmerizing display of processing speed,” which parallels what good improv players do; Viola also compares Bartlett’s “form of loving citation” as akin to the kind of focused attention she trains her students to strive for, which requires deep attention to what their scene partners say. Bartlett continues,
“The sheer velocity of this kind of language bears a trace of the supernatural. The words can appear to arrive from elsewhere, produced by an elevated consciousness outside our own. A mode of technology that conceals a lack of vetting, understanding, or humanity might bear a resemblance to such a consciousness in moments, but the source of its speed is not—as with Brooks, Shelley, or Patterson—a life spent working toward competence. It does not emerge from centuries of inherited language, or a bond forged for the first time in a room full of strangers and friends. It’s worth asking where the warmth of poetry, its connective power across millennia, meets the advances and demands of our technological age.”
Everyone endorses Bartlett’s emphasis on human language work as emerging from “centuries of inherited language, or a bond forged for the first time in a room full of strangers and friends.” I share some final elements of creed from Bartlett as a model for the writing classroom, with poetry standing in for all writing in these two excerpts: “One of poetry’s greatest gifts is patience—not only with the difficulties of language but with ourselves as its vessels or makers, working to bring a new vision into the world” and, in Bartlett’s bridging of the work of musicians, writers, and engineers, “They collaborate in service of human life and the preservation of all we adore. They remind us that poetry has always been a technology of memory and human connection: a way to remind ourselves of who and what we are to one another. Which is something infinitely more than we can say with words, although we must try—and in that striving, be made more lovely, and alive.”
Not to embarrass Peter, but to let his cohort know about his contributions to composition pedagogy (as none of them have taught writing courses), I refer to John Warner’s March 2025 IHE column, “Peter Elbow Offered Us a Gift,” which seems relevant to the issues the group raises. Warner begins with an account of his own first experience as a writing teacher in grad school, writing “At the time I started teaching freshman composition as a graduate TA (1994), I had never heard of Peter Elbow, and none of the people tasked with preparing me for the job introduced me to his work. In fact, I would not encounter Elbow until 2001, when I expressed frustration with teaching through the lens of rhetorical ‘modes’ and how I wished that I could get students writing more freely and authentically because I was tired of reading performative B.S. written for a grade.” This suggests something that holds even now, that the “process revolution” of the 1980s did not uproot “current-traditional rhetoric” as a dominant paradigm.
Warner continues, “‘You should try Peter Elbow,’ I was told. I did, and it was like the clouds suddenly parted and I could see the sun for the first time. Anyone who teaches writing as a process, who uses peer review and reflection, is working from Elbow-ian DNA. This surely fits any definition of transformation, doesn’t it?” The group notes the reference to seeing the sun, which links back to Plato’s allegory and the need to escape the shadows of the cave wall to reach the reality of how people write (or at least how they might write as fully engaged human beings exploring and expressing meaning). Plato’s allegory includes how cave-dwellers will cling to the shadows, certain they represent reality. Warner describes how standard writing pedagogy absorbed “process,” akin to how the Borg assimilate a new conquered species, outfitting the new drones in standard-issue Borg armature and implants: “But by the time I was a teacher, it seems as though whatever transformation Elbow had caused had been beaten back, at least to some degree. Focus on process and revision remained, but this process was deployed in the making of very standard, significantly prescriptive artifacts that were easy to explain, straightforward to grade—as they fit established rubrics—and (at least in my experience) largely uninteresting to read and (in the experience of many students) uninteresting to write.”
Warner details the appeal of teaching “standards of sufficiency” to “those who prefer order to exploration.” He takes a slap at the “most popular composition textbook of recent years,” They Say/I Say, labeling it “a book that literally coaches students to write using Mad Libs–style templates to imitate forms of academic writing, under the theory students will learn academic expression through osmosis.” He dismisses the bestseller handbook as “just a more refined version of the prescriptive process I used in the 1990s teaching rhetorical modes. If your primary goal is to have students turn in an artifact that resembles the kind of writing that would be produced through a scholarly process, it is very handy.”
Then he builds the bridge to the appeal of generative AI, claiming that template-driven teaching guides students to produce “simulations of academic artifacts, predating the simulations now easily created by large language models like ChatGPT.” He champions Elbow as a response, a set of pedagogical strategies that value “the mess and chaos of learning.” Further, Warner writes that “Elbow argued that discovery and differentiation was the highest calling of the learning process, and that writing was an excellent vehicle for fulfilling this calling. This requires one to get comfortable with discomfort. For some reason this is serially viewed as a kind of threat to school, rather than what it should be, the focus of the whole enterprise.” He concludes by asserting that “One of the gifts of the existence of large language models has been to demonstrate the gap between machine prose and that which can be produced by a unique human intelligence. In a way, this only revalidates Elbow’s original insights of Writing Without Teachers, that we, as humans, have a higher purpose than producing school artifacts for a grade. I’m not giving up hope that we can accept this gift.”
As the week of sessions reaches an end, we sum up the moment as one of risk to human engagement with language, whether through “close” reading of what other human beings write in a conscious, purposeful act of accepting an invitation into language or research, allowing us to enter the Burkean parlor to join a conversation, or writing as an invitation we offer first to ourselves to explore and discover (some say they write “to discover what they think”) and then to readers to form a relationship with us through our words.
Want Ad: Seeking PWR Buddies for the new cohort to check in with them about their PWR 1 courses and Hume tutoring. Their PWR 1 courses: Mikhail, Writing’s a Carnival: Dialogue and Multiple Voices in the Essay; Kenneth, Parlous Parlors: The Rhetoric of Digital Identification; Viola, Games Writers Play: Improvisation and Research-Based Writing; Peter, Freewriting’s Just Another Word for Something More to Use.
