NCTE Sells Out To AI

NCTE had a chance to choose between human writers and bots. They chose to defend the bots.

The story was laid out at Inside Higher Ed, told by some members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. CCCC tried to produce some critical resources for dealing with genAI, and by some remarkable coincidence, NCTE then decided to "dissolve" the 4Cs (whose members got to learn about the axing of the group of 2,500 members on social media). 

The executive committee of NCTE offered some bureaucratic argle bargle to justify the move-- struggles with “fiscal sustainability, declining participation and governance challenges” and a step "necessary to more effectively serve the college English and writing and composition community and NCTE membership as a whole." But Melissa Ianetta, a CCCC officer, reported she was told that the "culture" of CCCC threatened NCTE's nonprofit status.Ianetts resigned on the spot and posted about the meeting on facebook. This move, she wrote, will allow NCTE "to exert the greater control they desire while maintaining the CCCC revenue stream."

Now, there's no politics like the internal politics of academic organizations, so lord only knows whose toast was burned enough to prompt this. But Jennifer Sano-Franchini , Kofi Adisa , Megan McIntyre and Maggie Fernandes report that the CCCC Special Committee on Generative AI in College Composition and Writing Studies had created two resources around genAI, including

    A primer on generative AI for student writers

    Guidelines for writing teachers regarding issues of academic integrity, plagiarism and generative AI.

Which they then submitted to the CCCC executive committee for review. But instead of immediate feedback from the committee, they report that this happened next. The NCTE presidential team raised "concerns" including concerns about “the reality of instructing students to opt out” of AI use, referencing situations where it may be “impossible or impractical to do so.” But the committee had only recommended that the option be available. And it gets worse:

In addition, the feedback we received requested more guidance to help students use generative AI “in appropriate and ethical ways.” To this end, they suggested that more useful framing might present AI as a “‘coconspirator’ and/or ‘ally’”—a position we find troubling for how it humanizes and encourages trust in LLM chatbots through the use of metaphorical language in ways that had been critiqued within our own disciplinary scholarship. Finally, they held that the documents should be inclusive of the range of perspectives regarding AI given our wide audience and purpose. We believed the documents succeeded in relation to the last point given that they did not encourage one blanket position with regard to generative AI but rather made refusal one viable option, among others, that readers might select.

Sigh. I have some thoughts about trying to use a plagiarism machine fueled by huge ecological and economic costs, but the committee went back to revise their work. They forwarded their revisions and waited in vain for response. However, a few days later, NCTE announced that it was teaming up with Google to award grants to develop a framework for "responsible AI use." Apply only if you are an English language arts teacher grades 6-12 who wants "to shape the future of AI in the field." 

That was December. By the end of March, the two revised documents had been reviewed and published-- with an added disclaimer that the views expressed were those of the authors only, plus a big preamble and call for responses, all features not included in other NCTE documents on other topics. CCCC pushed back, and some of these scalawags even introduced a resolution for the convention supporting the right of students to reject AI. 

Which brings us all of the way back around to the dissolution of the 4Cs. A new "transition team" will handle what comes after the end of CCCC including the work to “create resources for teaching digital literacy as a foundation for generative AI literacy in college writing courses, with special attention to students from diverse educational and linguistic backgrounds.”

As Natasha Singer outlined in Coding Kids, this is the industry model. "Partner" with the people who deliver education so that you can get them to skip right to "how to implement my product" and skip over "is this a good idea" or "how can we teach students to be critically examining the use of this product." It is supremely disappointing to see NCTE selling out to an industry whose whole business model is to undervalue human writing (even as they continue to celebrate the Day of Writing, when everyone is supposed to write something or, I guess, have their AI agent do it for them).