Tuesday, April 28, 2026

An interview with Nina Morrison, faculty member in the University College for the Link program.
By Eleanor Granstrom

 

NM: Hi, I'm Nina Morrison. I am an instructional faculty member in the University College for the Link program. The link program is designed to act as a bridge between high school and college for students who have been provisionally admitted. It used to only be for athletes, but now it’s for any students who are right on that border of being admitted; maybe they’re missing some test scores or they have one semester of grades that brought down their overall GPA, things like that where life just happens. It's really easy to see why it happens with so many athletes, because they're concentrating so intensely on their sport, and it requires a lot of travel, that they're not able to engage academically in the way that they had hoped to. 

 

So, they agree to take my first-year seminar that lasts the entire year. It’s not just one semester. My mission in the course, previous to this year, was to strengthen their critical reading and writing skills through giving reading assignments, having rigorous discussions, and then doing a lot of low stakes, short writing assignments. I'm a playwright by training. I went here to the playwright's workshop. I have strong feelings that you only get to be a better writer if you just write a lot. So, that was my mission prior to last year when there was an extraordinary amount of material handed into me that was clearly not really generated by the students. There was so much use of AI, so much use of finding summaries... even the absolute best students would just not read. They would not read outside of class. There's lots of theories for why that is, but I haven't done a ton of research because I feel it experientially; I can see, you know? They're just not doing it, for whatever reason. 

 

Since the mission of my course is so supportive, it’s not useful to the purpose of the course to add stress and work outside of class. So, in conjunction with the writing center, I did a lot of research on how professors were handling AI and decided to change the class to a “medieval classroom.” 

 

OWC: Why do you believe it's important to avoid using AI in your classroom?   

 

NM: If students come in and are planning on leaving the University of Iowa with a degree, they should be able to take in material of any form, think critically about it, and then effectively communicate what they've observed. AI interferes with that completely. If first year students are already relying on AI... I don't even know if I would call it relying, but simply that they know it exists, and it's a faster, easier way to get things done... I respect efficiency, but you’re at college. When you leave this university, you need to be different. That's important. It's important to have that confidence behind you that, well, I have practiced, and I have read, and I have written a great deal, and I know how to deal with material. That goes for every single profession ever because everyone has to communicate. Everyone has to be able to be handed something, look it over, and say, I know what to do with this. 

 

OWC: What do you define as a medieval classroom? What does that mean to you?  

 

NM: A classroom that involves no technology. Everyone writes everything by hand in my classroom and we read off paper. There's no reading online. I'm not even sure if this is medieval or not, but it feels medieval to me; each section is its own self-contained bubble where the students know each other. They talk to each other in a way that is nonjudgmental, and they create a space that I help facilitate that’s about learning to communicate with one another. 

 

OWC: I’m curious about the practical parts of a medieval classroom. Do you print out all the readings beforehand, or do you ask the students to do that? Do you assign any homework?  

 

NM: No, no homework. I don't want there to be any stress associated with the work that we do. I'm really lucky that I'm working for the Link program, because our mission is fully supportive. If I were, say, in rhetoric, I would probably be held to a very different standard. I would probably not be allowed to have a syllabus like I do and run a classroom the way that I do.  

 

OWC: You said you worked with the writing center on your research?  

 

NM: Yes! Every year I take their Teaching with Writing seminar that happens in January. They’ve given me so many great tools, stuff that I use in almost every class, and taught me how to shift my focus from a very traditional syllabus to one where I create a lot of lower-stakes-but-higher-in-quantity assignments. So, last year in their working group they invited us to talk about AI and I said, I am desperate for AI busting strategies. They said, well, why don't you just do the presentation? And I was like, oh, perfect. 

 

OWC: How is this style of teaching going for you so far? Have you found that this has been a more successful strategy for improving students’ writing and communication skills? 

 

NM: The change has been pretty stunning. It's shocking, you know? The quality of the work has risen so high. The quality of our discussions has risen so high. The luxury of having a classroom filled with people who have done the reading, and who have already written about it... When we’re reading a novel, they’re reading in class, and I give short essay questions on each couple of chapters. So, once we’re discussing things, they’ve read the material. They've already written about it and thought about it critically. There’s always the question of anxiety, but if they’re anxious about speaking in class, they can simply read off their paper. They don’t have to pressure themselves to come up with something spontaneously.  

 

The huge compromise is that you only get through about half of the material that you would get through with a regularly structured syllabus. Is it really a compromise if they didn’t read any of those things though? I find there to be no compromise at all. I would so greatly prefer to go slowly and know that they are coming out of my classroom having practiced these skills in a way that is so repetitive that it got easier and easier for them to do it.  

 

My supervisor keeps sending me articles from the Chronicle of Higher Ed and similar publications where other teachers are doing this now, and the pushback is obvious. It's what you would expect it is, like, these are college students and they should want to learn. It’s just a bit more complicated than that. If they have at their fingertips a way to make their life easier and for work to go faster, so that they can do all these other things that are really interesting at college... We either have to accept that there’s going to be a classroom mostly full of people who did not do the outside reading and work that way—which is what I was doing—or you’re going to need to make it a priority and have it done in the classroom. I think it’s worth it. But the pushback is real, especially for an institution like this that is so huge and old. Let’s say the rhetoric department decided to go to this model fully, which would make so much sense; there’s a possibility that people would ask, well, how is this accredited? If students aren’t asked to do this outside work and they’re not developing those time management skills, I think there’s potential for that question to come up. However, as far as I can tell, the benefits just wildly outweigh the costs.  

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Want to learn more about how a medieval classroom is run? Professor Morrison recommends that you check out the following list: