The Scriptorium: Found Families

The course. A critical essay-writing course built around found families: forms of kinship that go beyond biological relations, read through queer literature and culture, neurodiversity, feminism, and migration. Students write and revise analytical essays, work with critical sources, and respond to one another’s drafts.

AI in the course. The class opens by negotiating its own agreement on AI use in writing, with one fixed condition: nothing that circumvents the critical writing skills the course exists to practice. Students close-read an AI-generated critical essay beside a human-written essay on the same text, as a lesson in the limits of AI’s critical thinking. If the class agrees, students also ask a language model for counterarguments to their own drafts, then assess how good the critique is.