To Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn About Autoethnography
Saurabh Anand, Franklin College, English Ph.D. Student, 2nd Year
I am a Writing Studies Ph.D. student who is an English composition instructor with a background in Autoethnography. I often taught autoethnography as a research writing genre and realized my students had no prior knowledge. Therefore, I introduce an activity sheet titled “AI Prompt Assessment Activity Sheet to Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn About Autoethnography” to generate writing awareness and use AI as an intentional pedagogical resource.
I’d recommend writing teachers consider exposing their English composition students to prompt engineering for two pedagogical motives. First, while attempting prompt engineering, writers consider a particular audience in mind, focusing on purpose and learning to edit prompts by developing rhetorical awareness to fetch the intended output from AI. The above-stated elements of examining the quality of their ChatGPT prompts followed the same implicit and explicit principles to foster critical thinking/writing skills in any writing classroom, especially across the disciplines. Second, as an Assistant Writing Center Director, I see this artifact could also be an educating moment for the college writers to recognize ChatGPT as an on-demand tutor. We all know that student writer questions for clarifications/doubts arise during the writing process, especially when the instructor is unavailable and/or the writing center is closed. Therefore, utilizing ChatGPT as a 24/7 bot tutor resource could help writers anoint their knowledge, explore content organization, and focus on quality over quantity without feeling the stress of lack of guidance in the moment and without altering writers’ voices. Learning prompt engineering skills could be very beneficial for student writers to access thematic resources, brainstorm ideas, and clarify genre conventions, which in my teaching context was Autoethnography both as a genre and/or method.