Pedagogy Apr 2024

“This Weird Thing I'm Discovering”

Chris W. Gallagher

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses a pervasive but undertheorized literacy practice: ghostwriting. Drawing on a five-year interview study with undergraduate students, I describe the many ghostwriting tasks that participants were asked to perform for their co-op jobs and how they perceived those tasks. Overall, students were bewildered by ghostwriting and found it very different from, and in some ways at odds with, their academic writing. Given the ubiquity of ghostwriting and the likelihood that much of it will be offloaded to artificial intelligence in coming years, I call for and begin to outline a critical pedagogical approach to ghostwriting grounded in critical language awareness.

Journal
Pedagogy
Published
2024-04-01
DOI
10.1215/15314200-11030776
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Topics
writing pedagogy graduate education qualitative research artificial intelligence literacy studies
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