Composition Studies

The composition studies field built itself on the idea that writing takes time. Process pedagogy. Recursive revision. The discipline's commitments have always, in some way, been arguments for slowing down.

In a review essay in Issue 53.2, Jason Tham reads three recent books on AI and writing as a chronological record of how the field responded to generative AI. Duin and Pedersen built ethical frameworks before ChatGPT launched, with room to think carefully about what technological adoption would mean. Dobrin published practical guidance nine months after, when instructors were rewriting syllabi mid-semester. Buyserie and Thurston's 2024 collection draws on a full year of classroom experimentation. Its contributors can report what they tried and what happened.

Each book gets more grounded in what actually happens when AI enters the classroom. Tham's argument is that all three accept the same premise: pedagogy should accommodate AI's capabilities. None asks whether the accommodation itself runs counter to what writing instruction was built to do. He calls this "acceleration culture" and proposes slow pedagogy as the counter-position: extended prewriting and revision that can't be compressed. Time with difficult ideas long enough for them to change shape.

His claim is specific: critical thinking depends on confusion, struggle, and gradual understanding. Those are the processes AI is designed to skip. And as the editor of Computers and Composition, he isn’t writing from the margins either. Tham is writing from the center of the technology-and-writing conversation.

Read the full review essay: https://bit.ly/53-2_14 .

Shawna Shapiro's Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom starts from a question most grammar instruction sidesteps: whose language norms are we teaching, and what does enforcing them cost students who don't already speak them?

In a review for 53.2, Ananta Khanal walks through Shapiro's framework: a Critical Language Awareness pedagogy built around four pathways. The sociolinguistics pathway treats language variation as a lens for identity and injustice. The critical academic literacies pathway challenges deficit-based models of academic writing. A media and discourse analysis pathway asks students to become critical consumers and ethical producers of public language. And a communicating-across-difference pathway draws on psychology and conflict resolution to build more dialogic classrooms.

Each pathway comes with unit structures, essential questions, and assignments—"Media Show-and-Tell," "Linguistic Sleuthing," "News Media Autobiography"—for bringing abstract concepts into the classroom. Khanal notes that the book's feedback guidelines ask instructors to respond to rhetorical clarity and intentionality rather than correctness.

Read the full review: https://bit.ly/53-2_16.