Prompt Engineering with the Rhetorical Situation: Ethical Questions for Students & Faculty
Faculty will learn how to use the rhetorical situation of a particular piece of writing to understand how they and students can greatly influence the output of LLMs. We will get a chance to modify our prompt further to tailor the tone and style. We will discuss how prompt engineering influences our reading and teaching of student writing, then apply prompt engineering to our own work as faculty–providing feedback, assessing student performance on assignments, and project design.
Presenters
Andrew Howard received a B.A. (2005) and an M.A.(2007) in English from Texas Tech University, in 2005 and 2007, and an M.F.A. in English and Creative Writing from Georgia College and State University (2010). His short fiction, reviews, interviews, and memoirs have appeared in numerous publications including Guernica, The Sycamore Review, and Miracle Monocle. Howard has also presented conference talks, not only on his creative craft, but also on topics that relate directly to Composition Pedagogy. Talk titles include “Distance Learning Shouldn’t Distance Learning: Designing Class Outreach for Remote Learning,” “The Unheard Voice: What Do Students Say (and Write) About Developmental English?”, and “Assessment, Continuous Improvement, and Scaling Best Practices.”
Kara Pleasants is a Senior Lecturer for the English department. She received the English Department Writing Programs Award for Social Justice and Antiracist Teaching and Tutoring Award in Spring 2024 and an Excellence in Education Award from the city of Bowie, MD in 2011. A UMD alum, she holds a Master’s of Arts in English Literature, focusing on Rhetoric, Renaissance and Early Modern studies; a Master’s of Education in English Curriculum and Instruction; and a Bachelor’s in Russian Language and Literature. She enjoys writing fiction and poetry, publishing Disenchanted (a Pride and Prejudice remix with magic) in 2020 with Quills and Quartos Publishing. Her poetry has been published in the Raven’s Muse Magazine, Livinia Press, Failed Haiku and The Orchards Poetry Journal. She combines her love of poetry with music as director of the Maryland Palestrina Choir, an ensemble dedicated to performing choral music from the Renaissance.