Research and Writing – Teaching Hub

The Rise of ChatGPT Can Make Student Writing Better

March 8, 2023

The 5-speed gearshift pattern, which may indicate the metaphor for "shifting gears."

by Amy Dayton and Amber Buck, English On campuses across the US, faculty, administrators, and students alike are talking about ChatGPT. If you haven’t heard, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence tool that mimics human conversation and writing using predictive text. It can expound on almost any topic, from climate change to literary criticism. It can write emails, sonnets, stories, and brochures. It can suggest revisions to specific sentences and phrases (such as resume bullet points). And it can write academic […]

Four Short Tutorial Modules for Teaching Students About Research (Thanks, UA Libraries!)

January 10, 2020

by Sara Maurice Whitver, University Libraries A new semester is always around the corner. You may be requesting library instruction and thinking about how the session(s) will support your students’ research, but sometimes students need a little extra help. Have you seen the University Libraries’ Roll Tide Research learning modules? Roll Tide Research is a series of interactive tutorials and other multimedia resources focusing on concepts and skills essential to academic research. The tutorials can be completed in any order. […]

Supporting Successful Graduate Thesis and Dissertation Projects

December 13, 2019

by Delores M. Robinson, Geological Sciences How do we best help our graduate students graduate on time? This is a question the Department of Geological Sciences asked ourselves in 2013. We had quality graduate students, but the time needed for them to reach graduation seemed excessive. The Graduate Program Committee identified the problems and began to change the graduate program to address the problems. Another post is required to outline the problems; however, one specific problem was that the MS […]

Why Workshops Matter for Professionalization, Productivity, and Life!

September 30, 2019

table with people's hands, pens and paper

by Jenny Shaw, Department of History One of the most important skills graduate students learn is how to receive, assimilate, and act on feedback from peers and mentors. Often, as with peer review, feedback comes anonymously, and in written form, so responses can be contemplated and thought through. But at conferences, seminars, and public talks, scholars have to respond in person and in real time. Similarly, giving feedback in written or oral form is another essential skill and one that […]

The Intersection of Early British Literature Surveys and Anti-Racist Pedagogy

June 14, 2019

by H. Austin Whitver, Department of English Recent political and cultural movements anchored in ethnocentric ideological beliefs pose a grave, if sometimes overlooked, threat to the English literature classroom. In his opening chapter of Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Charles W. Mills writes, “Ethnocentrism is, of course, a negative cognitive tendency common to all peoples, not just Europeans. But with Europe’s gradual rise to global domination, the European variant becomes entrenched as an overarching, virtually unassailable framework, a conviction of […]

Teaching Through Re-Reading

April 2, 2019

main web page view of mill marginalia online

by Albert D. Pionke, Department of English Although not specifically designed with the classroom in mind, Mill Marginalia Online offers instructors in philosophy, history, law, Classics, and English and European literature and culture the opportunity to incorporate Digital Humanities research results and methods into their courses. Each of these major subject areas is amply represented in nineteenth-century philosopher and liberal theorist John Stuart Mill’s personal library. Mill Marginalia Online seeks to digitize all of the handwritten marks and annotations found […]

Writing Across Media: A Hands-On Exploration of New Literacies

February 25, 2019

by Donna Branyon, Department of English In English 313: Writing Across Media (WAM) fall 2018, we examined modes of communicating, identified the conventions of media, and created several multimedia presentations. We looked at new media theories, including topics such as process, authorship, affect, design, and multimodality. Additionally, we spent a great deal of time exploring the intersections between various media: print, film, images, sound, social media, and web design. We considered the ways writing (and communicating in general) is shaped […]

Under Pressure: Four Ways to Enable Academic Integrity

January 24, 2019

by Alexandria Gholston, Department of English Imagine you are an Olympic athlete, and you are about to compete for your country. Imagine the pressure of having your family, friends, teammates, and your country all counting on you to represent them in front of the world. How would you handle such pressure? Would you fold, or would you embrace the moment and seize the opportunity to put all of your hard work on display? Athletes competing at the Olympics spend four […]

Living to See Another Day: Survival Through Academic Integrity

January 24, 2019

Happy young woman under a banner saying "Vive la vie"

by Khadeidra N. Billingsley, Department of English In Imperial China, from the 17th to the early 20th century, individuals who wanted to pursue a career in civil service were required to pass a series of rigorous exams. These tests were only offered every few years and the results could literally change people’s lives. It goes without saying (but I will say it), that the consequences associated with cheating on such a high-stakes examination were severe, including the possibility of the […]

Teaching Citations as Part of the Writing Process: Student Voices

January 17, 2019

by Lauren Fleming, Undergraduate English Major Why do students violate University academic integrity policies? As an English major, I began to wonder about the root of this campus-wide issue. I am often subject to the woes of my non-English-major-but-still-have-writing-assignments peers and have noticed one common denominator: interactions with quotations and citations. Often, a conversation might go like this: Friend: My professor gave me my assignment back and said the citations were wrong, but I am allowed fix them and give […]

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