The Unessay Answer to the AI Problem

by, Roy Edward Jackson

Over the last year, one topic has dominated faculty, department, and personal conversations: AI. We cannot get away from it — from the Secretary of Education erroneously calling it "A-1" (like the sauce) and perpetuating the myth that AI could replace teachers, to how we policy and police student use of AI on our campuses. To be clear, I am not anti-AI and fear replacement by it nor am I interested in policing students. With every new movement and pendulum swing in education, I find myself landing somewhere close to optimistic caution. And with every quick fix education offers, I know that nothing replaces human interaction between student and educator.

Still, I can't deny that AI has changed the classrooms — and the students — I work with. Over the last three years, AI-generated essays submitted to my learning management system have increased. So has the number of students feeding assigned readings into AI for a summary instead of doing the reading. This has changed how I teach. I no longer trust the homework I receive. I print articles for in-class reading, ask for devices to be turned off, and carve out reading time in class — forfeiting class time in exchange for actual student comprehension and not AI summary.

I am more analog than ever. In my first-year Academic Voice course, handwritten in-class assignments are now the norm, and this year I'm leaning into that more than ever. As an elementary literacy specialist, I follow neuroscience research that shows the physical act of writing cements literacy skills in young minds. I think the same holds for the still-developing brains of eighteen-to-twenty-six-year-olds. Handwriting in class has also given me something else — a baseline sample to compare against any suspected AI generation.

Students' use of AI isn't, in my experience, flagrant disrespect toward educators. It often comes from fear, tangled time-management demands, and imposter syndrome. But I can't help wondering if something else is driving it too: engagement. Before AI, I wonder how many students were merely compliant — filling in the formula I'd handed them, the standard three-part essay, then the speech — without ever being engaged.

As a lifelong learner who recently completed my own doctorate, I'd put my career-long split between compliance and engagement at about fifty-fifty. I've often found academia formulaic, short on creativity, box-checking at its worst. Certainly, after a year of dissertation writing, formula dominated my own prose. My brother, a retired higher educator recently said the decline in college enrollment is that curriculum is not aligned with student interests and needs. He may be right. 

I was tasked with redesigning our first-year Academic Voice course at my institution this summer. By chance, I was at a conference on liberal arts in higher education when the "unessay" crossed my eyes. At the conference, a presenter described it simply: an assignment that asks students to demonstrate what they've learned in whatever form best fits the material and the student, rather than forcing every idea through the same five-paragraph mold.

I was hooked immediately — but not for the reason you might expect. I am not interested in policing students. I don't want to spend my semester as a detective, running essays through checkers, treating every student like a suspect until proven innocent. That's a losing game, and it teaches students nothing except how to be better at hiding and outsmarting the system. What the unessay offered instead was a redirect: if compliance is what invites AI in, then the fix isn't a better lock on the door. It's giving students something worth doing in the first place. 

So I built one. Unit 4 of the redesigned course, "Show Us," replaces the traditional final paper or speech with a live demonstration: something the class experiences in real time, built around the hobby or pastime each student has spent the semester researching. There's no template to fill in. A student researching tennis might teach the class how scoring works and then run a live match using real data. A student researching cooking might walk the class through a technique while explaining its history. The only rule is that the audience has to do something, not just sit and listen. Students still propose in writing the idea before they build it and reflect on it after they present, so I can see the thinking on either side of the performance, but the performance itself can't be generated by a chatbot the night before it's due. It has to be defended live, in the room, in front of people who will ask questions. AI isn't banned from this unit, either. In one exemple of it, built around redesigning an unaccommodating space, I ask students to use AI to help visualize their redesign, then show the class exactly how their own research corrected what the AI first got wrong. That, to me, is the actual skill worth teaching: not avoiding the tool, but knowing enough to catch it when it's wrong. 

My foray into the unessay comes from the work of Daniel Paul O'Donnell (2015). O’Donnell noted that, ”the essay form, which should be extremely free and flexible, is instead often presented as a static and rule-bound monster that students must master in order not to lose marks…far from an opportunity to explore intellectual passions and interests in a personal style, the essay is transformed into a formulaic method for discussing set topics in five paragraphs” (para 4). 

O’Donnell stated the unessay is designed to reverse that damage. He noted it scraps everything we’ve been taught about proper essay form throughout your schooling and asks students to build the assignment around their own intellectual interests instead. They pick the topic, decide how to present it, and get evaluated simply on whether it's compelling and effective. 

In the past, I overemphasized writing in first-year courses. In the post-No Child Left Behind era, students who were over-tested and taught to write short constructed responses came to college with limited exposure to research and academic writing. That's no longer the constraint. The technology has shifted the problem entirely. Most students will use AI tools for efficiency and time management, whether we like it or not — the box is open, and it isn't closing.

Last spring, I sat in on an AI ethics meeting filled with students, administration, and faculty. The former editor-in-chief of my campus paper laid out the paper's no-AI policy. When pressed on how they verify it, there was no process — just policy. Policy without process or verification feels unfulfilled to me. How could the editor be sure the article or op-ed submitted was free from AI without some sort of checker? It seemed a performative blanket statement without weight; words without action. I didn't want that for any of my classes.

So I examined what students actually need now. And that is the oral and auditory side of encoding and decoding, more than ever before. AI tools can assist with the reading and writing side of that equation, but they only get a student through the door and into the interview room. An AI-assisted CV, resume, or cover letter is an entrance, nothing more. If a student can't express themselves cogently and creatively once they're in the room, the job will stay out of reach. That's where the pivot has to come from — from everyone who works in English Language Arts. And that is where the unessay comes into play. I hope my students are engaged with what they already love to do in life, share it with others, and express themselves both orally and in writing cogently and creatively without the assistance of any AI tool. 

Roy Edward Jackson is an educator, librarian, and writer with 27 years of experience spanning K–12 and higher education. He began his career in Atlanta Public Schools, where he served in multiple roles including classroom teacher, school librarian, and instructional coach. Currently, he is an associate professor of education at Goshen Collete. He is a regular contributor to School Library Journal as a book reviewer and shares his expertise on young adult literature pedagogy through essays for Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday. In addition to his academic work, Roy is a published creative writer. His fiction has appeared in The Louisville Review, Uncharted, and The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, while his essays have been featured in The Gay & Lesbian Review, Beyond Queer Words, and Verdad. His debut novel, Reel Around the Fountain, was published by Lethe Press in 2026.