Meghan O'Rourke on Creativity, Teaching, Writing, and Generative AI

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A few weeks ago, in our first speaker series event of the 2025-2026 academic year, our community heard from Meghan O'Rourke, the award-winning author and cultural critic who recently wrote a thought-provoking New York Times op-ed on Gen AI, writing, and learning. During her talk and in the discussion with faculty and staff that followed, we explored the rapidly evolving relationship between generative artificial intelligence, learning, creativity, and the art of writing. For those who couldn't make it, here are some of the key insights.

Articulate the value of our human experiences as writers and learners

O'Rourke opened her talk with the James Baldwin quote, "When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway." O'Rourke described the writing process as messy, often meandering and confusing, for even the most experienced writers. We feel the agony of confronting what we don't know. We don't like writing, but we like having written. Slowing down and feeling the difficulty helps us bridge the gap between what we know and what we can express. O'Rourke asked what processes and "feeling of thought" we want to preserve, observing that what makes us human is that we feel the thinking happening. We experience the texture of consciousness itself. Our embodiment allows us to creatively describe the world we move through, an especially important point she explores with her students.

Distinguish between the promise and the risks of Gen AI

Ask, is Gen AI "facilitating, augmenting, or replacing learning?" as a guiding question. O'Rourke  suggested we explore the affordance of Gen AI for cognitive offloading, with potential benefits of focusing one's energy on high-value tasks, while avoiding cognitive debt, the overreliance on Gen AI which diminishes memory and critical thinking. She described cognitive debt as creating an "illusion of competence where fluency is mistaken for learning."

Consider the context that incentivizes Gen AI use

Rather than thinking of Gen AI use as a personal choice of individual students, O'Rourke suggested that we think about structural forces that influence its use. These forces can serve as points for design and intervention that encourage the kind of Gen AI use we want and disincentivize the uses that we don't. O'Rourke observed that Gen AI is capable of superhuman amounts of labor and learning, which is very appealing to the busy and high-achieving students at places like Yale and Dartmouth. She recommended that we reevaluate a culture in higher education where high achievement is often defined as doing more. How can we emphasize the learning process over the final product?

Utilize strategies that preserve what we value

O'Rourke explained that our job is to remove the temptation of using Gen AI, and also to articulate clearly the VALUE of writing, sitting and thinking as a friction-full and insecure process. She recommended that instructors set up structures that directly support and preserve what we value and minimize the contextual elements that incentivize Gen AI use. Examples include:

• Emphasize process over product.
• Normalize the challenge of the writing/learning process.
• Offer spaces that remove the temptation to use Gen AI: Reading rooms, writing labs.
• Talk with students about Gen AI: how do they use it, what is their experience, what are their views?
• Promote office hour usage (acknowledging this impacts faculty time)
• Share our ideas for teaching in a collective repository.
• Discuss how institutional leadership can deemphasize individual choice in Gen AI use by setting up structures that support faculty in teaching what they value and students in engaging with substantive learning

In O'Rourke's creative writing classes, she has implemented several strategies to preserve the value that she intends for the learning experience. She has students memorize poems. She leads a close reading of a poem in class every week, with poems students don't see in advance. She also assigns pairs of students to discuss a specific piece of writing, in front of the class, without using notes.

O'Rourke left the audience with a core message: "As a poet, I have shaped my life around the belief that language is our most human inheritance: the space of richly articulated perception, where thought and emotion meet. Writing for me has always been both expressive and formative - and in a strange way, pleasurable."

Further opportunities to engage with DCAL/LDI

The 2025-26 Teaching and Learning Speaker Series will highlight one speaker each term. We hope you will join us for our Winter and Spring events. Look for our announcements in Vox and our newsletter for further information.

As always, DCAL and LDI are available to discuss teaching strategies/practices and course design. We encourage you to reach out and talk to our team.