Last week, New York Magazine published an article proclaiming: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College: ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.” In speaking with several students and college lecturers across the US, the story explores how students are relying on AI to structure and write their essays, answer interview questions, code assignments — essentially everything required to tick the boxes in order to obtain a degree.
Many scenarios in the article feel familiar, and the piece prompted much discourse and digital head-nodding. But this is not really new. The writer, James D. Walsh, actually makes this point in the piece’s third act, which is worth quoting in full here:
The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end […] In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core.
I keep thinking about this as I reflect on the past academic year that I have spent as both a teacher and a student. AI makes the job as a teacher more difficult, frustrating and to be quite honest, uncomfortable. I obviously wish its use was not as prevalent for many reasons. But I do find the concept of chiding or chastising students for using it to be rather unproductive — that horse bolted long ago. I’m more interested in the analysis of how we got here, and how the university’s transactional nature is partially responsible for AI’s usage and flourishing.
One student in Walsh’s piece, Wendy, recounts using ChatGPT to write an outline for one of her essays. When Walsh asks to see the assignment, he is “surprised” to see that the topic is critical pedagogy — the radical philosophy of teaching and critical thinking pioneered by Brazilian revolutionary theorist Paulo Freire, which I wrote a little about here.
This caught my eye. The encounter, like a couple of other scenes in the piece, feels slightly designed to evoke a kind of disdain for students using AI. Silly Wendy! How could she not recognise the irony of using a machine to write an essay about critical thinking!? She didn’t even understand the question when challenged by the journalist!
I am, of course, being a little facetious here, but you catch my drift. However, this anecdote is useful in illustrating the very point that Freire makes. Wendy uses ChatGPT because “it just gives you straight up what you have to follow,” and she is characterised as prioritising good grades.
And why shouldn’t she? Wendy’s conception of her educational process, like all the other students in the piece, and really, all students, is a product of the banking education system that Freire was critiquing in his manifesto Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where “education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor”.
Unfortunately, this banking system has become the bedrock of the neoliberal techno-capitalist institution that is the university. An emphasis on marking rubrics and criteria has led to a fixation with ‘doing well’ when it comes to the graded product. Students are not culpable for this state of affairs. In education and beyond, we are socially trained to think this way; as I referenced in an earlier edition, we are all “often obsessed with a product rather than the process by which it was made”.
I have felt myself slipping into this mindset too. When I was accepted to study my MA at SOAS the day after I applied, I knew that the unusual efficiency of this administrative process was not because I’m a stellar student (look, I may be good, but not that good). It’s in large part because SOAS, like many other cash-strapped institutions around the UK, wanted my £12,000 in tuition fees. I’m under no illusion about that, and I don’t think anyone pursuing higher education should be either. That doesn’t take away from the fact that I have loved doing my degree and have gotten so much enjoyment and learning out of it. But I have found it fascinating how much talk there is about ‘adding value’ and ‘enhancing student experience’; in my observations, ‘student’ could very well be swapped out for ‘customer’. The reality is, we are.
Seeing education from both sides this year has been conflicting — both rewarding and alienating. As a teacher, there have certainly been days when I thought, Christ, I don’t think I’m cut out for this. No one likes to admit failure, but I felt I was failing my students. Only now with a bit of time having passed do I realise that I was also being failed: by understaffing, under-resourcing, and my capacity being stretched beyond its limit. This is by no means unique to me, as I think many people working in higher education recognise these feelings — and leave the sector because of them.
At the same time, there have been incredible moments of joy and discovery. Despite all the above, I still retain great belief in how expansive, transformative and liberatory classrooms can be — if they are enabled to exist in that way. I have returned to bell hooks’ work, particularly this passage I have previously shared that invokes Freire’s words: “The students — no longer docile listeners — are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher.”
Guided by these thinkers, I have really tried to put these principles into practice with my MA Journalism students on a new ten-week module I designed this year, focused on reporting on identities and underrepresented communities. I proposed this module after reflecting on nearly a decade (!) of my own experiences as a journalist and the tools I wish I’d been equipped with earlier on in my career. The students were brilliant: curious, open-minded, critical, thoughtful. I feel proud that this module has played a small part in their year, and hopefully one they felt was worthy of their time.
It was certainly imperfect, but I also feel proud of the approach I took to building the module. This included asking alumni for feedback on my curriculum ideas, and co-creating resource lists, assessment criteria and a module manifesto together with students (exciting developments on this in the ‘updates from me’ section below). After each session, I wrote a little reflection about what went well and what I would like to change. I wonder how I will feel when I read these back in seven months’ time, as I (hopefully) prepare to deliver the module again, and try to think about how we can agitate within a system designed to focus on end product.
Radical and engaged pedagogy has an urgent task to do — the moment, both including and beyond AI, demands it. In the UK, we are living in a political climate where the government of the day has discarded any veneer of morality, intent on trampling on the rights of migrants, trans people, disabled people and generally those most vulnerable in society.
As heinous as this is, I think it’s perhaps an easier, unconscious choice to let one’s heart becomes hardened or disengaged, apathetic or cynical in these times. To me, the far more difficult, more active decision is to soften and persevere, to embrace experimentation openly, and to think about alternative ways of doing things. I think of the days since October when I considered leaving the teaching job. This would have been the easier decision. But in private exchanges with students, in reading their reflections, in listening to their critiques and concerns, in seeing the people they are becoming, I am reminded of the immense responsibilities and rewards that teaching carries, and of hooks’ words, buoying me forward:
The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility.
Three Leaves
This May marks the 77th anniversary of the Nakba. Please join in an action as part of Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s week of actions if you are able. I will be at the national demo in central London this weekend — my messages / comments are open to arrange meeting up, especially for anyone who would like to go but doesn’t want to go alone, or is going for the first time.
A few weeks ago, I saw When the clouds catches colours, a poignant verbatim play about two queer Singaporeans navigating life as older people. It was part of the Queer East film festival, which is ongoing and has some brilliant events upcoming over the next few weeks.
A very simple pleasure, but regular readers will know that I am an avid aficionado of Brockwell Lido. The warmer weather has enticed me (and the rest of south east London) back there again. It is sheer bliss to spend time in the sun in solitude, inhale a pizza from Four Hundred Rabbits, overhear snippets of other people’s conversations and watch the hours pass by.
And updates from me
I have lots to share in connection with the theme of this week’s edition! I have collated the co-created resource list for the MA module and have made this publicly accessible via this link here. My hope is to build on this each year, inviting contributions from the students at the start of the module (and maybe at the end as well). I also wanted to share this great story by Laura Avetisyan in Dazed MENA — Laura developed this meaningful story as part of the module and it’s so great to see it published.
In more exciting news, I’ll be presenting at my first ever academic conference at City on 3 July — my presentation is titled: Teaching to transgress: a case study in co-design methods in City’s Journalism Department. I am also starting a new module (as a student) as part of my Postgraduate Certificate in Education this month. The learning never stops, baby!
I’m mega excited to be doing a new event on 27 May: The City in South East Asian Cinema will be a visual lecture at experimental film cooperative Atlas Cinema! Join me on a journey through Manila, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur (with a brief stopover in Hong Kong) — I’ll be sharing research and ideas from my MA, and will be talking accompanied by moving images made by the region’s filmmakers. Huge thank you also to the incredible illustration by Daryl Rainbow — take a look at the details!! The support I receive from paid subscribers to this newsletter makes it possible for me to do these kinds of projects, so thank you very much.
Last month, I cross-posted this piece I wrote for April’s
newsletter. I’d like to share it again here in the hope that you’ll read it if you missed it the first time. I’ve never written anything like it before and am really proud of it. In the piece, I also mention a new project that I am working on with INQUEST over the course of this year on the memorialisation of those who have lost their lives to state violence.
This was a meaty one, and I really enjoyed putting it together for you. If you are a student who has been in the classroom with me over the last year — thank you for reading this, and for teaching me.
Until next time,
Suyin x
I really enjoyed reading this Suyin (and your own enjoyment of putting it together definitely shows through the writing)! I’ve caught myself thinking “I’m so glad I wrote my dissertation before ChatGPT existed” because I know I would’ve been tempted to cut corners. But you’re so right, the system itself is one that rewards output and not process, so why wouldn’t you choose the most efficient route to get there if it’s going to be evaluated against the same criteria regardless? This has left me with much to ponder, thank you 💭