I Embraced AI in My Community College English Class — and My Students Loved It

我在社区大学英语课上接受了人工智能——我的学生很喜欢它

My 12-year-old twins can prompt ChatGPT with alarming fluency. They’ve generated AI music, transformed family photos into wispy Van Gogh-style portraits, and built a chatbot that mimics their favorite anime characters. As their mother, I’d love to say it’s because they’re brilliant, and of course they are, but the truth is less flattering and far more important.

我12岁的双胞胎可以以惊人的流利程度提示ChatGPT。他们生成了人工智能音乐，将家庭照片转换成纤细的梵高风格肖像，并构建了一个模仿他们最喜欢的动漫角色的聊天机器人。作为他们的母亲，我很想说这是因为他们很聪明，当然他们是，但事实并不那么讨人喜欢，而是更重要。

My children are AI literate because of a weighted mix of luck and privilege. My husband and I have graduate degrees and jobs that require computer fluency. Their Pennsylvania school district, Haverford, consistently places among the top districts in our state. Their middle school benefits from stable funding, high-quality teachers, and a strong IT department, all leading to discussions about AI in their sixth grade classrooms.

我的孩子们识字是因为运气和特权的加权组合。我丈夫和我都有研究生学位，工作需要精通计算机。他们的宾夕法尼亚学区哈弗福德一直是我们州最好的学区之一。他们的中学受益于稳定的资金、高质量的教师和强大的IT部门，所有这些都导致了他们六年级课堂上关于人工智能的讨论。

It’s a 20-minute drive from their school to Delaware County Community College, where I’ve been teaching for over a decade, and many of our students come from underperforming high schools. My classrooms are filled with recent graduates who have been taught that AI is little more than a contentious cheating machine. One of my returning adult learners told me she’d heard of AI, but had no idea what it was. After class, I gave her a quick demonstration of ChatGPT on our overhead projector. She sighed and said, “Well, now I know why my daughter’s suddenly getting through her homework so fast.”

从他们的学校到特拉华县社区学院有20分钟的车程，我在那里教了十多年，我们的许多学生来自表现不佳的高中。我的教室里挤满了应届毕业生，他们被教导说，人工智能只不过是一个有争议的作弊机器。我的一个成年学习者告诉我，她听说过人工智能，但不知道它是什么。下课后，我给她在我们的投影仪上快速演示了ChatGPT。她叹了口气，说: “好吧，现在我知道为什么我的女儿突然这么快完成她的家庭作业。

This knowledge gap? It’s not just technological. It’s generational, socioeconomic and institutional. And it’s growing wider by the day. As first-year writing professors at community colleges, if we don’t meet this moment with intention, we will leave our most vulnerable students behind.

这种知识差距？不仅仅是技术。它是世代相传的，社会经济的和制度的。而且它每天都在增长。作为社区学院的一年级写作教授，如果我们不刻意迎接这一刻，我们将把最脆弱的学生抛在后面。

I felt this realization as a call to action and I didn’t just dive in, I cannon-balled. Over the past six months, I’ve clocked more than 150 hours building my fluency across multiple large language models. I studied the terminology, immersed myself in the ethics and mechanics of generative tools and leaned on the IT minds in my family. I read books, I listened to podcasts, and I had long conversations with colleagues about what equitable, ethical AI should look like in our courses.

我觉得这种认识是一种行动的号召，我不只是潜入，我大炮。在过去的六个月里，我花了150多个小时在多个大型语言模型中建立我的流利度。我研究了术语，沉浸在生成工具的伦理和机制中，并依靠家人的IT思想。我读了书，听了播客，我和同事们进行了长时间的交谈，讨论了公平、道德的人工智能在我们的课程中应该是什么样子。

In May, I received a grant to provide my fall Composition I students with ChatGPT subscriptions. These students will meet in a computer lab, giving us space to explore these tools in a collaborative setting. With OpenAI access, students will benefit from faster responses, voice-to-text, custom learning tools, and Sora, OpenAI’s image and video generator, to deepen engagement with our readings. Throughout the semester, I’ll collect data and administer surveys to gauge how this access shapes their learning and digital literacy.

5月，我获得了一笔赠款，为我的秋季作文I学生提供ChatGPT订阅。这些学生将在计算机实验室见面，为我们提供了在协作环境中探索这些工具的空间。通过OpenAI access，学生将受益于更快的响应，语音到文本，自定义学习工具以及OpenAI的图像和视频生成器Sora，以加深与我们阅读的互动。在整个学期中，我将收集数据并管理调查，以评估这种访问如何影响他们的学习和数字素养。

And I’ve used grant funding to integrate the AI-detection tool Pangram into my Composition II course this summer. Rather than leaving me to play Sherlock Holmes, scrutinizing student prose for malfeasance, Pangram’s findings offer transparency to both student and instructor. Unlike detectors I’ve used in the past, Pangram identifies subtly humanized AI-generated writing, removing the familiar crutch many students have reached for in the past to avoid the messier process of developing as writers.

今年夏天，我使用赠款资金将AI检测工具Pangram集成到我的作文II课程中。Pangram的发现并没有让我扮演Sherlock Holmes，而是仔细检查学生的散文是否有渎职，而是为学生和教师提供了透明度。与我过去使用的检测器不同，Pangram可以识别出微妙的人性化AI生成的写作，从而消除了许多学生过去所熟悉的拐杖，以避免成为作家的混乱过程。

The most effective tool I’ve employed is the AI Transparency Journal, a shared Google Doc where students track every AI interaction throughout the semester. They log each prompt, how AI responded, what surprised them and where they struggled, creating a record of process, experimentation and growth.

我使用的最有效的工具是AI透明度期刊，这是一个共享的Google文档，学生可以在整个学期中跟踪每个AI交互。他们记录每个提示，人工智能如何回应，让他们感到惊讶的是什么，以及他们在哪里挣扎，创造了一个过程、实验和成长的记录。

In my current summer Composition II course, I started with an experiment: students uploaded our syllabus to ChatGPT, introduced themselves using a custom prompt about their background, goals and past experiences with writing, and asked the AI to identify what they might enjoy, what could challenge them and how the course might help them grow.

在我目前的夏季作文II课程中，我从一个实验开始: 学生将我们的教学大纲上传到ChatGPT，使用自定义提示介绍他们的背景，目标和过去的写作经历，并要求人工智能确定他们可能喜欢什么，什么可以挑战他们，以及课程如何帮助他们成长。

The results were eye-opening. Students reported feeling more prepared and reflective before reading a single assigned text. Even those initially skeptical about AI were surprised by how personalized — and surprisingly insightful — the responses felt. Several students shared reflections that stayed with me:

结果令人大开眼界。学生报告说，在阅读单个指定文本之前，他们会感到更加准备和反思。即使是那些最初对人工智能持怀疑态度的人也对这些回应的个性化和令人惊讶的洞察力感到惊讶。几个学生分享了我的想法:

“The response felt like it understood both the good and the hard stuff about me. It even helped me connect my love for reading the Quran to the diverse literature we’ll be exploring.”

“这种反应感觉就像它理解了我的好处和困难。它甚至帮助我将我对阅读古兰经的热爱与我们将要探索的各种文学联系起来。

“I never expected AI to suggest keeping a personal phrase list to help with my vocabulary. That idea alone changed how I’m approaching this class.”

“我从没想过人工智能会建议保留一份个人短语列表来帮助我掌握词汇。这个想法本身就改变了我接近这门课的方式。

“Honestly, it was like having my horoscope read — but more useful. The AI’s clarity helped me understand the syllabus better than just reading it on my own.”

“老实说，这就像我的星座阅读-但更有用。人工智能的清晰度帮助我更好地理解教学大纲，而不仅仅是自己阅读。

Even those students who didn’t feel their AI’s response effectively captured their learning style appreciated how it offered a game plan for tackling our accelerated course. Most importantly, it inspired metacognition, reflection and writing before we even cracked our first literary text.

即使是那些没有感受到人工智能反应的学生，也能有效地捕捉到他们的学习风格，也很欣赏它为解决我们的加速课程提供了一个游戏计划。最重要的是，它甚至在我们破解第一个文学文本之前就激发了元认知，反思和写作。

I’m writing this as I grade posts from the halfway mark of our six week course: our poetry unit. My students selected their favorite passage from either Langston Hughes’ “Let America be America Again” or Dunya Mikhail’s “The War Works Hard,” and used a free AI image generator to create a picture to capture its themes. They then posted their image and evaluated how well they felt it captured what they held in their imaginations.

我正在写这篇文章，因为我从我们六周课程的中途开始评分: 我们的诗歌单元。我的学生从Langston hughes的 “让美国再次成为美国” 或Dunya Mikhail的 “战争努力” 中选择了他们最喜欢的段落，并使用免费的AI图像生成器创建了一张图片来捕捉其主题。然后，他们发布了自己的图像，并评估了他们对图像的捕捉效果。

Many students are enthralled by the generated pictures and their journal responses are averaging twice as long as required. While a few were disappointed, they were eager to explain why. For the second part of the assignment, I asked them to respond to at least one other image; most opted to respond to two or three different posts.

许多学生被生成的图片迷住了，他们的日记回复平均是要求的两倍。虽然有些人感到失望，但他们急于解释原因。对于作业的第二部分，我要求他们回复至少一张其他图片; 大多数人选择回复两三个不同的帖子。

After we passed the halfway point in my current class, I paused to compare my current students’ progress against those in my same ENG 112 course one year ago, before I had integrated Pangram or any formal AI tools. This summer, I began with 37 students, and 29 are still actively submitting work. Of those, 24 are earning A’s or B’s and consistently completing their assignments. In contrast, last summer I started with 38 students, but by Week Four only 21 were still engaged, and just 17 finished the course with a C or higher, the threshold for transfer eligibility.

在我们通过当前课程的中途点之后，我停下来将我当前学生的进度与一年前同一门英语112课程中的学生进行比较，然后才集成Pangram或任何正式的AI工具。今年夏天，我开始与37名学生，29仍在积极提交工作。其中，有24人获得A或B的收入，并始终如一地完成任务。相比之下，去年夏天我从38名学生开始，但到了第四周，只有21名学生仍然参与其中，只有17名学生以C或更高的成绩完成了课程，这是转学资格的门槛。

That said, there have been struggles with my wide-scale AI integration. I’ve had more Zoom calls with students than any previous semester as I’m walking my less technically inclined students through the many steps required to navigate AI interfaces.

也就是说，我的大规模AI集成一直存在困难。我与学生的Zoom通话比以往任何一个学期都要多，因为我正在引导我的技术上不太倾向于的学生完成导航AI界面所需的许多步骤。

But no one has complained; I have one student in her 50s who shared she’s done little more than use her computer for emailing and Facebook. After one of our longer video calls, she emailed me: “Dr. Ray, Thank you for your time today. I’m so glad you’re showing us all this. I never understood what all this AI stuff was before. I never thought I’d learn how to do this in an English class!”

但没有人抱怨; 我有一个50多岁的学生，她分享了她所做的只是使用她的电脑发送电子邮件和Facebook。在我们进行了一次较长的视频通话后，她给我发了电子邮件: “博士。雷，谢谢你今天的时间。我很高兴你能向我们展示这一切。我以前从来不明白这些人工智能是什么。我从没想过我会在英语课上学会如何做到这一点!“

And beneath all our trial and error, something else is emerging: engagement, community and a newfound energy, an indescribable undercurrent that floats through a positively charged learning space, even a virtual one.

在我们所有的尝试和错误之下，其他东西正在出现: 参与，社区和新发现的能量，一种难以形容的暗流，漂浮在充满正能量的学习空间中，甚至是虚拟空间。

So I leave you with this. Our students need guidance in navigating these new technologies, and if we fail to teach them how to engage with AI ethically and intelligently, we won’t just widen the skills gap, we’ll reinforce the equity gap, one many of us have spent our careers trying to dismantle.

所以我把这个留给你。我们的学生在驾驭这些新技术方面需要指导，如果我们不能教他们如何以道德和智慧的方式与人工智能互动，我们不仅会扩大技能差距，还会加剧公平差距，我们中的许多人都在努力消除这一差距。

It’s time to shift the conversation from fear to responsibility. Our students are ready. We need to meet them here.

是时候把谈话从恐惧转移到责任了。我们的学生准备好了。我们需要在这里见他们。