Is writing in social studies dead?
Generative AI can make writing effortless—literally. Type in a few simple prompts and—poof! —an essay appears like magic. Does this mean that writing research papers, arguments, and DBQs is now obsolete? Should we even spend valuable instructional minutes teaching writing in social studies classrooms? And if we do, how do we help students understand how, when, and why to use AI during the writing process?
We’re not the only ones wrestling with these questions. From teachers’ lounge conversations to higher education journals to our own community forum, educators everywhere are looking for answers. An Australian publication even beat us to this blog post’s title (or a version of it!): “In the Age of AI, Is the Essay Dead?” At OER Project, our focus is on you and your classroom—so here is our best thinking about how social studies teachers can assign and assess writing, given that AI is a ubiquitous (and useful) reality.
Writing isn’t dead. It’s evolving. And social studies teachers are uniquely positioned to teach students how to think, argue, and write using AI as a tool.
What is the purpose of writing in social studies?
Writing is a mechanism for thinking. It’s thinking through the end of a pen. It’s a technology that allows us to record our ideas, interact with our reasoning over time, test our claims, and deepen our use of evidence. Through the writing process, we might approach an argument from a new angle after stress-testing our logic. Writing a claim and defending it requires that we argue with ourselves and incorporate counterarguments.
In every social studies classroom, students are constantly making, testing, and defending claims. While we encourage talking through an argument in discussion, debate, or turn-and-talks, we assess students’ skill through writing. This mirrors how historians, journalists, and even concerned parents display their thinking. When students write, they aren’t just communicating their thinking—the process itself helps shape their thinking. As Eric Hudson, an educator who runs AI workshops for teachers, writes in “AI and the Teaching of Writing,” “The process of composition is the part of the writing that matters most for student learning.” The cognitive value of the writing process is essential to the humanities. You’ve seen this in action. When a student shifts their claim mid-draft after an a-ha moment when rereading a source, their thinking becomes clearer. When peer feedback stirs up ideas to more-strongly communicate the historical significance of an event, students push each other. And it’s these moments of productive struggle, when students assess complex ideas and synthesize a variety of inputs to create a unique and well-reasoned argument, that sets social studies apart from other content areas. These critical humanities skills can’t be outsourced to technology.
Yet, we know writing is hard. And AI can make it feel much easier, providing a typo-free, grammatically correct, relatively well-structured essay with evidence that’s been combed from the entire internet. For students who are struggling with understanding nuance in content, who are having a hard time putting their ideas in writing, or who are simply looking for a way to do anything but write, it’s a huge temptation. So, here’s a question: If we don’t want students to waste their time prompting ChatGPT to produce an essay to try to trick us into thinking they wrote it, what do we want them to do instead?
We'll be transparent: OER Project believes students should have access to AI tools that hone their historical thinking skills—including their ability to form and communicate their own arguments and historical reasoning. We’re not experts on all things AI, and we see these tools as being similar to those used by historians who’ve adapted their methods for the digital age. Educators, like historians, must maintain a human-first model of writing, one in which students make claims, express disciplinary understanding, and exercise critical thinking before they spar with an AI agent or have it evaluate their writing. A gut-check to avoid overreliance on AI in lesson planning is to ask, “Who’s doing the thinking?” If evidence of student learning isn’t front and center, then we’ve colored too far outside the lines and it’s time to go back to the drawing board. There is a role for students to collaborate with AI as a reviewer or “sparring partner” to strengthen their thinking, but let’s ensure we're not supplanting cognition.
Will AI usurp the role of the essay as we know it? And is that a bad thing?
Our argument is that it’s now time to rethink writing assignments in social studies classrooms. AI may strengthen students’ final products but uninhibited use risks stripping the learning from the assignment. Rather than shaming students for turning to AI to complete tasks, let’s examine the tasks themselves. We agree with Dr. Meg Brayshaw’s argument that instead of raising the alarm, we should see this development in education as an opportunity to move away from outdated formulaic writing. If readers can’t tell the difference between what AI produces and what our students turn in, then what is the purpose of assigning that task? Teachers’ creativity in evolving writing assignments will ultimately answer Hudson’s question: “How are we acknowledging that the act of writing is changing while advocating for its core value?” Rather than asking students to repackage existing knowledge or approach writing as a task to complete, we must design assessments that get to the heart of historical thinking. It’s not the product of a DBQ itself that is valuable. It’s the learning that goes into it: combing through sources, making inferences based on context, using historical thinking skills to make a claim and elaborate on evidence—the cognition that’s shortchanged when students turn to AI to compose the essay for them. And in all honesty, the daily skills adults use don’t get packaged into five-paragraph essays. What we must prepare students to do is less prescriptive and more adaptive: to synthesize logic with a point of view, drawing on evidence from different areas that we can use to make decisions and communicate effectively to different audiences.
Maybe writing a five-paragraph essay is an anachronistic record of thinking. In a twist on Baron de Montesquieu’s quip, quoted by David A. Bellin the New York Times piece “A.I. Is Shedding Enlightenment Values,” the point is not to make students write, but to make them think. We’ve seen plenty of five-paragraph essays that required very little thinking to complete, and some of them we may have authored. It’s not hard to imagine a variety of assignments that could spark student thinking, and many social studies teachers have embraced the Universal Design for Learning framework to design assessments with a firm learning goal and flexible means to reach that goal. Teachers are already asking questions like “Does this need to be an essay?” when planning for their own classrooms. And OER Project has plenty of writing prompts and supports for teachers to grow student writing skills—we're not abandoning writing in history class, but we are expanding our perspective when it comes to what “counts” as writing. We see a case for critical thinking on the part of the teacher, asking themselves questions like:
- Why am I assigning this writing task? What’s the big question I want students to wrestle with here? Does this prompt get at why this learning matters?
- How else could a student demonstrate this thinking? Could students communicate their argument in outline form or in a slide deck? Do I need to see a full revision of the last essay, or could students demonstrate their reworked claims in a voice memo or video clip?
Why should teachers apply a critical lens to assigning writing? Because we are at a pivotal moment in human history. As Angie Basiouny writes for the Wharton School’s business journal, without guardrails, generative AI can harm education by creating a “crutch” that "deteriorates” student skills. And researchers at Stanford and Arizona State University caution that students without training may outsource their thinking to AI. Even so, we can’t ignore AI and revert to blue books and in-class writing. We wrote in August that the humanities prepare students for the future skills their employers will demand. That won’t be the case if we ignore the existence of generative AI, rather than guiding students to build AI literacy alongside historical thinking skills. There’s a danger in ignoring AI, and there’s a danger in leaning too heavily on it without guardrails. Bellin flags an issue that we would call AI illiteracy: If we don’t adapt our instruction and learning methods, students will (unwittingly) outsource their cognition to the machine.
However, there are methods of working with AI that can enhance student thinking. OER Project offers guidance for teachers to use AI with students, so you don’t have to step into this new world alone. Psst. Your students are already there. Or at least 54% of them are.
Ultimately, these shifts remind us about the power of the teacher. And teachers, you’re as essential to student learning as you’ve ever been. Keep doing what you do: cultivating habits of mind and historical thinking skills that endure. When students learn to think critically with and about AI, they don’t just produce better writing, they strengthen their mental muscles.
Yes, a real person wrote this
OK, before we get to the end, I’m going to get a little vulnerable with you. I’m not gonna lie—this blog post was hard for me to write. And I’m a former English major—I think of myself as someone who loves to write! Even so, it was very tempting to kickstart my thinking by chatting with ChatGPT. As alluring as the promise of an enthusiastic writing partner with endless language combinations was, I did not collaborate with AI to generate my claims in this piece. I wanted to ensure the ideas here are my own. If I expect another person will read my writing, I want them to encounter my thoughts. I'm going to need to defend this work to our editorial team, my boss, and educators in our community. This essay is an argument I’ll need to be able to sum up in a sentence in response to “Why did you write this?” or “Can we cut that section?” or “How should we describe it on our blog page?” The real-world skill of taking a stance is one that will endure, and it is much harder to defend ChatGPT’s argument than my own. I am convinced that the act of writing can help me explore, shape, and share my thinking. What’s the point if what I end up writing looks identical to what you could pull out of your own chat with an LLM in 30 seconds? In fact, in the research I did to write this piece, a rigorous test emerged for me: Am I expressing ideas that are more meaningful than what ChatGPT would outline and synthesize for me?
I confess I did spar with AI to review my writing after generating my original ideas, and its critical feedback (from the role of an experienced social studies educator) pushed me to write a clearer argument with a more logical flow. Just as students must own their ideas while collaborating with AI in their writing, I had to decide which notes to take and how to revise. This tension I felt represents the negotiations teachers and leaders go through to define when it’s okay (or to be encouraged) and when we should hold off. Many school systems and workplaces are developing new guidance, and the Harvard Business Review’s “Gen AI Playbook for Organizations” suggests a human-first approach to making disciplinary decisions.
So, back to the central question: Is writing in social studies dead? We think it’s a resounding “no.” Yet there needs to be more deliberation around how we will teach and assess writing. It’s more important than ever to critically examine what writing tasks we assign, why we need a written argument, and how students use AI in the writing process. There will be times when more “traditional” writing is the right fit to draw out the type of thinking and communication our students need. And there may be just as many times when students can submit a record of their thinking in other forms: a podcast outlining their argument, an ad campaign to promote the value of a primary source, a quick 1:1 conversation to show off their claim testing, or a transcript of their sparring session with a chatbot. Yes, moving beyond the traditional essay is a daunting challenge. We’re right there with you to think through how we can adapt.
While intimidating, imagining how the humanities can survive artificial intelligence is also invigorating. Rather than pedagogy dictated by past practice, we seek new ways to express ideas. If it’s our creativity, ingenuity, and humanity that will give today's students an edge in increasingly competitive and potentially unstable job markets, then our instructional methods must cultivate those uniquely human traits, and our assessments must measure them.