When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It, and the Future Ain't What It Used to Be: Lessons in Living with ChatGPT

This paper addresses the pedagogical implications of incorporating ChatGPT into the college English classroom specifically and, more broadly, into any college course with a focus on writing and research. Historically, advances in technology in the college classroom have characteristically promoted two juxtaposed reactions: relief and anxiety. Students customarily exhibit relief that a new technology will lessen their workload and embrace it wholeheartedly. Conversely, faculty often experience anxiety at how some newfangled computerized application will impact student learning. This juxtaposition creates barriers to an effective integration of new technology into the classroom. What students view as a cool new tool faculty see as a platform that promotes student slacking or, at worst, cheating. Such is the case with ChatGPT. I review generally the ethics of using ChatGPT as a classroom tool to conclude that the potential for advancing educational equity among students outweighs any potential for misuse of this quickly evolving technology. Relying upon established principles of classroom instruction as well as significant trial-and-error experience, I propose a pedagogical framework that allows for limited application of ChatGPT in selected scaffolded assignments. I further offer specific lesson plans to show how incorporation of ChatGPT into the college composition classroom can align with universally accepted goals, objectives, and student learning targets in both freshman composition and traditional literature courses, all while removing barriers and promoting equity. This paper provides faculty who are not already well-versed in ChatGPT with information to evaluate its efficacy for their courses and a flexible framework to include into their pedagogy easily modifiable ChatGPT-based lesson plans that present challenging yet fun scaffolded assignments for any writing or research curriculum.