English Literature
Promoting Critical Thinking in American Literary Cultures: A ‘Crowd-Sourced’ Final Exam
Dr. Tara C. Foley
The growing trend amongst students to use AI tools to think, read, and write critically has left humanities faculty grappling with how to revitalize student writing and promote critical thinking in their classrooms. Faced with these concerns, I have restructured my writing assignments in American Literary Cultures to protect—and promote—skills of critical analysis. For this article, I’d like to share the final exam that I’ve designed for the course and the positive student outcomes of this assessment.
For the final, students write an in-class cumulative essay during the two-hour exam period with prompts that they have written together as a class. This student-centered approach not only assesses students’ ability to develop and defend an argument with textual evidence (without relying on AI), but it also fosters creativity by allowing students to generate the questions themselves.
To prepare students sufficiently for this exam, I hold two preparatory class sessions. In our first session, we review the basic tenets of persuasive writing, such as developing effective thesis statements and constructing well-developed paragraphs that support one’s claims. Since students have been thinking, reading, and writing analytically in class all semester, this review session serves as a confidence booster. For the second review session, I divide the class into groups of four to five students and distribute a list to each group of all the primary texts that we’ve read for the course. Next, I ask them to find common topics or themes amongst these texts that they could turn into potential essay questions. Once each group has a list of topics, I teach the class how to write open-ended questions that promote critical thinking rather than posing questions that elicit a yes-or-no response. Finally, each group takes a turn sharing an essay question that they’ve crafted, which I record on the board. Working together as a class and with my guidance, students help each other revise these questions. By the end of the review session, students have generated six to eight questions, two of which they know I will choose for their essay exam.
Students tackle this activity with enthusiasm—they are excited to learn that their voices will shape their final exam. They take great care in thinking through their choices, making sure that the questions that they’re crafting could be supported by texts from the beginning to the end of the course. And since every section of American Literary Cultures that I teach has its own personality, the questions that they write differ from class to class.
On the day of the final exam, students choose one of the two essay prompts that I have selected from their class list. While writing their essays, students must quote directly from at least six texts that we’ve read all semester. In order to do so, the exam is open book. No notes are permitted, though; students can only use copies of the primary texts, which I check at the beginning of the exam period.
By allowing students to design the final exam questions, I have found that students write much more authentically. Instead of writing what they think the instructor wants to hear, students reflect meaningfully on American prose and poetry that has made an impact on them. Most importantly, I can “hear” my students’ voices and personalities in their writing, which sound nothing like a chatbot.
Bio: Tara Foley's research interests include American literature and urban planning, medical humanities, and literature of the American West. Her work has appeared in The Howellsian and Enarratio: Exposition, Recounting, and Conversation. Her current book project analyzes the contributions of American writers to urban planning initiatives in major American cities at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Investigate Partner: GenAI in the Literature Classroom
Dr. Jennifer L. Hargrave, Associate Professor of English
English-language literary magazines first appeared in Britain and in the American colonies in the 1730s. These eighteenth-century predecessors to contemporary publications such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker provide contemporary scholars with invaluable insight into eighteenth-century reader responses to diverse publications across the disciplines of history, philosophy, political science, and literature. The reviews published in these literary magazines—such as The Monthly Review, or Literary Journal or The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature—often exhibit the interdisciplinary conversations that students in ENG 2301: British Literature are asked to initiate in class discussions and writing assignments. However, students’ appreciation for these eighteenth-century literary magazines is curtailed by a lack of cultural and/or historical understanding. This is where I argue GenAI may be used to inspire students’ engagement with these relevant, if somewhat inaccessible, archival materials.
Within my 2000-level surveys, I have students complete all writing assignments in class. My reasoning is twofold. First, when it comes to GenAI and writing, my mantra is “students must learn to walk before they can run.” Students must know how to recognize and to create an effective thesis statement before asking GenAI for assistance. Students must know how to engage with literary texts to evaluate GenAI’s suggested literary analyses. Students must understand how literary analyses are structured before they can recognize GenAI’s hesitancy, for example, in taking a strong argumentative stance. So, I have students practice the various aspects of a literary analysis in their in-class writing assignments, from close reading to archival investigation to essay construction. Second, especially for students not majoring in the humanities, they perceive GenAI language as more fluent and more competent than anything they could produce. Many students doubt their written communication skills even more than their analytical skills. By having students complete their writing in class—many quite successfully—I demonstrate that they do not need to seek immediate recourse to GenAI; they are fully capable of articulating their original ideas coherently and persuasively.
Through in-class writing assignments and text-based class discussions, my students gradually develop the reading and writing skills necessary to engage with GenAI both inquisitively and critically. After reading the novel The Female American (1767), I ask students to read the only two known reviews published in eighteenthcentury literary journals, working in pairs to determine the tone and intended audience for these reviews. Students then discuss what context would allow them to understand these reviews more fully. They devise questions about the political leanings of the literary magazines, prevalent attitudes toward female writers, and British knowledge of North American indigenous cultures. Using either ChatGPT or Claude, students pose their questions as well as follow-up questions to discover one insight into the reviews’ historical or cultural contexts. In turn, they then ask GenAI to write a short eighteenth-century style review of The Female American with particular attention to the context they unearthed. Using their knowledge of both the novel and its historical and/or cultural context, they then examine the AI-generated reviews, looking for the characteristics or content that they believe GenAI overlooks or misunderstands. By identifying these discrepancies, students discover what makes eighteenth-century reviews unique. The class concludes with students writing their reviews of the novel, using the insight that they have gleaned from this activity. Using GenAI to enrich and to complement their critical inquiries, students leave class with a nuanced understanding of how an author’s historical or cultural biases (even when that author is inanimate) shapes their reception and understanding of a literary text.
As my pedagogy continues to develop in response to GenAI, I seek ways to use this technology to further my students’ engagement with literature, moving them toward using GenAI for active learning rather than the thoughtless production of seemingly polished pieces of writing.
Bio: Dr. Jennifer Hargrave's research explores Britain’s global encounters across the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the Romantic era. Her research has focused primarily on Anglo-Chinese relations prior to the first Opium War. Her nearly complete book project—The Romantic Reinvention of Imperial China, 1759–1842—recovers a history of intellectual exchanges between the British and Chinese empires. Most recently, her studies have turned toward British understandings, representations, and constructions of Islam.
Her publications appear in such venues as 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and The Wordsworth Circle. She has served in editorial roles with the academic journals Global Nineteenth-Century Studies (2021–2025) and SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 (2023–2024).