When I was working toward my PhD at UC Davis, this is what attracted me to deep, interview-based qualitative inquiry—that I could really, really listen to what people had to say. I still remember one woman on my qualifying exams committee telling me that what she liked most about my research was…that I actually wanted to hear what my interviewees had to say, and that that came across in my research. Wow, what a compliment from someone you look up to!

And it takes a lot of work and intentionality to really, really listen. To re-shape your semi-structured interview as you go to really hear what people are trying to say! To me, methodologically, that is a key question. Do you really want to hear them? Or only yourself? Or only hear the sensationalized ideas that might get you published? If you really want to hear your interviewees, then that shapes your questions/protocol, your interviewing techniques, your analytical practices…everything.

And in the age of AI-generated writing, and AI-generated reading summaries, actually listening to others is more important than ever. Stopping to listen seems rare. Let’s go against the grain, and listen in research and in the office (and at home or at the restaurant or library)!

So, as I sit and listen over and over this week, and remember the joy and honor it is to listen, and hear, these voices on learning with AI…I ask YOU, reader, who are you not listning to? I mean, of all the people you are listening to, who are you not listening to enough? Maybe today is an opportunity to slooooow doooown and hear those whose voices you’ve been missing out on.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes!

Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you like thinking critically with me about AI/digital literacy, teaching and learning, and research!

Photo by saeed karimi on Unsplash

That’s not a framework I want to live under. Because it stops at the rubric. And Gen AI can easily answer whether a student meets a rubric or not, and in some ways, more articulately than I can.

What other options are there?

As John Gallagher noted in his recent post, “The audineces only humans carry” (May 18, 2025), “Students need readers, not grades. Real readers, with limbic systems, not rubrics. I never wanted to impress a rubric.” Students need human interaction now more than ever, and who better than their teachers, their professors, their role models (ideally), to teach them that human interaction and relationship counts more in communication than getting the right words on a page that will lead to a good grade. That’s a radically reductionist view of writing instruction…and one that is slowly taking over the minds of administators, teachers, and students alike due to the Big Tech push to think of good thinking and writing as something AI can do just as good as us.

Is this real life?

But let’s be real—it’s all baloney. AI cannot think (as countless scholars have argued like Shannon Vallor, philisophy professor and author). And it cannot write (as writing scholar Elizabeth Wardle and others have explained). It produces a narrow, limited product, that looks like it has done these things.

So how do we continue to explain and promote REAL writing—as a holistic, inherently human process and reality?

The answer lies in that map, that journey I referred to at the beginning of this post. Where are we taking students? Toward a rubric that AI can answer? Or toward true relationality, humanity, and getting smart and capable as a human communicator and connector.

Get smart

Charles Bazerman shocked me with something he said recently in a Zoom call I was on. “There are some students who don’t just care about grades; they want to get as smart as they can.” Why did this shock me? Because it’s a truth that I was forgetting, being lulled out of in the current Gen AI writing climate. Is the goal to “meet the objective” and then quit?

Or is the goal to grow and to thrive as an interconnected human, serving the greater good of society? If the former, then we stop as soon as we’ve met the criteria (the rubric). If the later, then our learning extends beyond meeting standards, to finding our place in the world.

Jumping into the map

So, leaning into the jounrey metaphor. If you are an educator: consider where you are leading students. What is your goal and why? Where can you creatively imagine futures for your students in their thinking and communicating lives? Where can they go and how can you take them there? Push yourself as teacher to think beyond the rubric, the objectives, and the outcomes that AI can meet, too. Where are these students—as people—going?

A textbook I used to teach from (Becoming a College Writer by Todd Taylor, 2019) pointed out that you can’t be good a running while believing wholeheartedly that you are not a runner. The same is true of learning to write, the authors argued. An effort to teach confidence in writing skill has been a cornerstone of my 15-year higher education teaching journey.

Why? Students have been taught over and over that either they are a math person or they are a writing person. That there is no overlap. So, in the STEM-first era of education we are in, students choose math from a young age, and they choose writing as the thing to not be good at—to fall behind in. Okay, it’s not nearly that simple. There are also students form whom English is their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th language. There are students who have terrible teachers who focus on proofreading, grammar, and minor structural issues only—avoiding students’ ideas altogether. Students often feel that if these minor things are “bad,” then they have no good ideas, no good writing.

In fact, my roommate of 4 years during PhD school resonated greatly with that sentiment—he felt like a terrible writer because he was told, over and over growing up that writing is about having correct grammar and form and that HIS IDEAS, his heart, his story—was not important or valuable to the writing process. I felt terrible for him, being stuck in this mindset that he just couldn’t do it. And yet, this is how so many first-year writing students feel.

How does Gen AI make this worse?

Enter widespread Gen AI. Only 2.5 years ago, ChatGPT took the public media by storm, and we are just now starting to see the big-picture effects that’s having on students.

And the results are in: Students think Gen AI is a better writer than them. And not only that…drum roll please…they think Gen AI is a better thinker than them. This is terrible news for a professor who teaches 5-6 sections of Critical Thinking and Writing per year. How can I teach students to be critical thinkers and writers if they are convinced that ChatGPT—or just “Chat” as they call it—does both of those tasks way better than them?

So, what do we do about this?

It’s time to flip the script. The time is ripe to change our stories about ourselves and AI.

Students are NOT stupid, slow, incompetent writers. They have amazing imaginations and ideas and heart-filled arguments to make—if only we’ll listen, value their voices, and inspire them to keep speaking, to keep writing, to make their ideas known.

So many teachers ignore student’s ideas. It’s time to start over. Students matter. Their ideas matter, their voices matter, and their identities matter. Let’s affirm that daily in our classrooms, in our writing feedback, in our emails, and in our public spheres.

AI is great, but it’s not “smart,” and it doesn’t have heart

As I learned in a recent talk by Shannon Vallor at Santa Clara University’s Markula Center for Applied Ethics, speaking on her book The AI Mirror, AI is not smart. It does not have thoughts. Tech companies have a deep financial inicentive to make us believe they do, and to make us believe they are smarter than us, or getting there soon. But the simple truth is, AI is good at mirroring our ideas, our words, our values, our biases. But it does not think, and it does not have heart.

Students need to know that. They need to see that a smart, real-life professor standing in right in front of them values theirintelligence over artificial intelligence. That’s it.

What’s coming?

Thanks for reading my early posts on substack. If you liked what I had to say here, please subscribe so we can stay in touch. Good ideas are precious, and so far, substack is doing good work promoting that.

Social media photo by Laura Adai from Unsplash

Seeing teaching from a colleague’s angle

As I realize this is my first post on Substack, I think about it as a “Hallway Conversation” with colleagues — a quick chat that occurs by happenstance. But I also think of it as a teaching observation—or, somewhere in between. I want my readers to feel and hear my pedagogy as somewhere in between the two. And hopefully gain some nuggets of wisdom from my angle, too. That said, let’s dive in.

Just a hallway conversation

Leaving my office to fill my water bottle, I run into my colleague who studies Latinx rhetoric in the hallway. We have a nice, brief chat about how to engage students in class. It wasn’t long—maybe 3 minutes? It wasn’t serious and solution-oriented like a department meeting. It was connecting, honest, and real. These types of conversations don’t happen often enough, but when they do, it’s music to my ears. No, more than music. These conversations wash over my whole self—allowing me to feel connected to those working toward similar goals all around me. They find me a community and a work home.

Seeing teaching from their perspective

What often is so exhilarating here is not the actual topic, but getting a peek inside another professor’s world, and seeing the classroom from their angle. I’m then able to see things at that new angle, which allows me to then take certain data points from that new perspective and integrate them into my teaching practice.

Observing a whole class, learning to listen

Recently I observed a colleague teach. Actually, my first time observing and writing a letter for a colleague on their teaching practice. (Feels good to be considered expert enough to do this!) In this colleague’s class, I saw through his eyes, I felt his classroom’s vibes in his shoes. What I mean, in less etherial terms, is I observed things that happened in his class that I would have never really thought of in my own teaching. But now that I have seen it, I can’t unsee it. It gives me a totally new lens through which to see my students and my teaching habits.

The specific angle shift, the actual nugget of wisdom, that I garnered from this colleague’s class was how closely he listened to the actual things his students were saying. Yes, of course, I listen to my students in class. But I’m so focused on the theatre of listening (nodding my head, making eye contact, and rephrasing their ideas), that I don’t always stop to really, really hear and listen what they are saying.

Is “hearing” better than “listening”?

That’s what I took away. Listening. Or maybe, ironically, the word “hearing” indicates a closer listening than the word “listening.” I say “ironically” because listening is traditionally taught to be superior to listening in American grade school. Listening is active. Hearing is passive. But sometimes I “listen” so hard that I cannot hear. I perform listening to the extent it dulls my hearing. What are they saying…not what do I want to say about it. Not am I nodding and smiling and making eye contact. The actual content.

This is important not only because ideas are more important than performativity, but because my students are important. They are people who need to be heard. And hearing them is essential to their learning, because it gives them a place and a person to hear their scholarly voice as it emerges from within them.

That’s it. That’s the post: Hallway conversations, teaching observations, and hearing students.

You hear what I mean?