Reading about AI isn't enough // What to teach in "transportation class"?

 A colleague of mine thinks that in our first-year writing program we should engage students in reading about but not using AI. I am trying to work out why I don't think this is an appropriate stance, and I'm struck on this analogy, which feels both apt and problematic:

Imagine you're teaching a class in transportation. Your students are excited not only to learn about various modes of transportation but also to learn how to transport themselves around their campus, their communities, their world. Since personal vehicles are a common form of transportation, they assume some part of the course will include learning about driving and practicing driving cars.

When students get to class, their instructor tells them that because there are a number of ethical problems with driving--environmental and natural resource impacts, contributions to sprawling development, negative impacts to the nuclear family (since cars increase the distance people can travel from their home/family), etc.--the class will include reading about but not actually practicing driving. Instead, since the ethical problems with bicycles are (arguably, relatively) fewer than the problems with cars, the practice opportunities in the class will focus on biking around the town.

Some students are exited about this focus--they love biking, they have a strong existing identity as bikers, they have a lot of existing knowledge of and experience with this form of transportation, they are fit and healthy. They grew up in a family and a community that had a strong sense of the value of biking. The instructor hears some of their excitement and initially thinks, "I have made a great choice."

The local car dealership also hears about this course and the dealership's general manager sends a letter to the school. The GM is an avid biker, but he wants to share some facts. At the community level, participation in vehicle culture -- as measured in infrastructure investments, customer spending on forms of transportation, employment, miles travelled, etc. -- outweighs biking by 100 to 1. (Actually, that's a conservative estimate.) In his mind, bikes are a less important cultural form of transportation than cars, and the likelihood that students will need to drive cars in their futures is a good reason for you to teach that skill. 

A local fitness instructor at the community rec center also weighs in. Cars may be efficient, but their efficiency is at odds with a healthy society. She thinks that more driving means less walking and biking, and therefore cars should be seen only as a negative contributor to health. She believes this ever though cars also allow many people in the community to access health care they could otherwise not access, and despite the fact that the local gym owner has pointed out that most of his members drive to the gym to get their workout in each day.

An old hippie also has an opinion. He opposes a focus on driving cars in the class because he thinks that car companies and tire companies and fuel companies have too much power. He remembers back in the day, when a major tire company worked behind the scenes to kill a public transportation plan. The tire company wanted to sell lots of tires, so it needed lots of people driving their own vehicles. More buses would mean fewer cars, and thus fewer tires. Even if most people would rather ride bikes, the old hippie thinks that the powerful companies will force people to travel in ways that will benefit them the most. 

One student who's signed up for the course has limited mobility, and they're scared that they'll fail the class because riding bikes is hard for them. Another student who was in a car accident a few years ago is scared that if the class focuses too much on driving, he'll fail the class because he now has anxiety being in cars. 

Everyone agrees that transportation is a valuable part of the culture, which values mobility, exploration, and freedom. There are good reasons to focus on bikes. There are good reasons to focus on cars. One guy even made a strong case for focusing on horses.

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The more I work on the analogy the more I see how I could continue extending it, both fruitfully (as a thought exercise) and frustratingly (in terms of its utility in sorting out my real problem.) One obvious solution in this case of "transportation class" is to make the course title/focus more narrow, so that students aren't misled and disappointed. That solution might work in first-year writing if there was a way to agree on the "right" focus. Working in the field for 2 decades has taught me that the number of things various people expect first-year writing to do is way too many. Even narrowing it to "academic" writing (setting aside civic, professional, and personal goals for writing) still leaves too much space for disagreement and disgruntlement. This isn't to say that narrowing the focus can't be done, but doing so comes at a cost (in the case of FYW at the state's only land-grant, R1, and flagship graduate-degree-granting university), it comes at the cost of pissing off lots of people who don't share whatever narrowed focus emerges as central to the program's approach. 

Oh, and also: The medium is the message, no matter whether we're talking cars or writing. I understand (and embrace) the argument that writing is cognitively formative, that it shapes our ways of being and knowing. James Gee and Bruno Latour and Material Culture scholars convince me to be skeptical of too-strong claims that certain media have certain deterministic impacts -- especially when those claims often fail to account for the potentially negative impacts of those media.