TTT 08.28.2024 Using AI to Promote Students' Right to Their Own Writing

Since the release of ChatGPT we have focused a lot of our collaborative energy on developing tools for AI on the platforms that we have been developing and where our students work.
In January 2024, we launched a writing platform, writingpartner..., that integrates several AI features. Our work together has involved teachers and students in learning how to use prompt engineering to frame, shape, and control the output of AI models.
As our work grows and our understanding of prompt engineering deepens, we want to find ways to use AI to promote student voice. A real concern that many teachers and not a few students share is that AI will rob our students of creative, necessary struggle and will flatten their voices.
A teacher at SLA at Beeber in Philadelphia, Bonnee Bentum, and Christina Cantrill, Director, Community Partnerships National Writing Project and I are keen to develop AI tools that allow students to hold onto their voices. In particular, we want to develop “linguistically inclusive” Writing Partners that will support students to get their writing publishable without unnecessary correction.
We think we can use prompt engineering to create Writing Partners that students can employ next to their writing that will nurture their cultural word choices and organizational patterns. We want to find ways to stop AI from cancelling the language that can flow from our African-American, Latino, and English-Learning students.
Given our experience with prompting we think that it might just be possible to provide students with AI tools that will enhance their voices instead of robotically correcting them out of existence.
We are guided by the work with Students’ Right To Their Own Writing and Hannah A. Franz's new book A Linguistically Inclusive Approach to Grading Writing. Hannah Franz will be joining TTT next week, September 4th at 8E/7C/6M/5P. This week we want to get the conversation -- and the work -- started.
This week on TTT, we are planning to launch a mini-project of creating linguistically aware AI Writing Partners.
Please join us on Wednesday evening, August 28th at 8E/7C/6M/5P in Kumospace.com/youthvoices.