What Makes Writing Meaningful to Students?
What Makes Writing Meaningful to Students?
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Logan Putansu
Introduction
Introduction
Have you ever felt a writing assignment was unnecessary and feel as if you don’t really gain anything from completing the assignment, besides the grade at the end? I experience this myself with most writing assignments that I have had in my later schooling. My motivation and desires really are directed towards the sciences and math. However, I do believe that I am not motivated to write because of previous experiences with reading and writing. I believe the way a writing assignment is structured can either help or hinder a student’s motivation to complete the assignment. For example, in the current writing class I am taking in college,
it has given me a lot of freedom to write about what I am interested in, and also allows me to connect my writing to my everyday life.But in some of my previous writing classes in high school, every assignment was very structured, and the product had to be very specific to meet a certain prompt, which made me really frustrated and not motivated to complete it. My personal experiences have led me to question what aspects of a writing assignment or writing class make it meaningful to the student?
Finding the Transfer Value in Writing
One idea that can help change the way a student thinks about an assignment is through writing transfer. Dan Fraizer, the author of the article, Towards a Model of Building Writing Transfer Awareness across the Curriculum, says this a concept that is able to, “Illuminate the writing abilities, attitudes, and assumptions college writers bring to a writing assignment, but faculty members across the disciplines may not have the tools for understanding what the students in their particular classes bring to their particular writing assignments (Fraizer).” This idea is important because it takes into consideration how writers are impacted by past experiences with writing. The expectations a student brings into a writing class are hidden from their instructors, which really leaves the instructors in the dark about how the student truly feels. As a first-year college student, the expectations that I brought into my writing class was, “Why do I need to take a writing course in order to become a pharmacist?”
Another crucial piece that goes into the idea of writing transfer is the openness to change, both student and instructor. Frazier writes, “Instructors across the disciplines may be less interested in creating the time and space for students to negotiate these new expectations, in part because they may be more interested in covering prescribed course content or in dictating more superficial issues such as format correctness (Fraizer).” Without this openness, a student’s expectations of writing will never change, and they will never be intrinsically motivated to write.
This expectation acted like a straight-jacket for the first few weeks of this semester. I felt restricted and frustrated, like I did in high school with writing assignments because I believed they didn’t have anything to do with what I was interested in; but I then realized that I had a lot of freedom with the writing assignments in the course and writing in general.
This is the feeling that I have felt for most of my writing experiences through my years of schooling. I have felt restricted by writing prompts, writing a certain number of words, or reading a certain number of pages. Restrictions like these ones have hindered writing experiences, and it has created a stigma for all writing for lots of students. This stigma creates extrinsic motivation. In Laurie Mcmillan’s book Focus on Writing: What College Students Want to Know, she touches on the ideas of extrinsic motivation and how expectations take away from intrinsic motivation, “I’m not certain if I would complete an annual activity report if I weren’t required to do so… I know it doesn’t need to be a grand masterpiece but instead simply just needs to be complete (Mcmillan 44).” Like Mcmillan’s experience with the annual report, students including myself struggle to find intrinsic motivation because of the restrictions created by instructors, certain curriculums, and genres of writing. That is why it is important to have an openness between students and instructors, in order to feel what they each want to get out of the course and each assignment.
How Is Transfer Found?
How Is Transfer Found?
To see how writing transfer was effective in practice, an experiment was conducted by Fraizer, where he had students reflect on questions proposed by himself and other faculty. “In these conversations, faculty were able to express their goals in assigning the writing and sometimes relate those goals to particular professional, disciplinary, or course outcomes. I sometimes added questions to surveys based on those on-going conversations with faculty about the assignment (Fraizer).” I think this is an integral part of this experiment and should really be implemented into every classroom setting. In my writing class, my professor makes it very clear that he wants this class to open and have student-led discussions, which allows the class to contribute to the curriculum, which Fraizer is trying to express in his ideas of writing transfer in his article. The transfer through writing that Fraizer suggests is having almost what some may consider a ‘conversation’ in the classroom, which allows for students and instructors to share ideas which are meaningful to them. This meaningfulness will then allow for transfer to another aspect of each of their lives; whether it be their families, work, or their leisure time.
This meaningfulness will then allow for transfer to another aspect of each of their lives; whether it be their families, work, or their leisure time.
Expectations regarding writing and writing courses can be changed for the better with open mindedness from both the instructor and students. An open environment where students and instructors can both contribute equally with no structures allow for motivation to put towards furthering ideas presented in the classroom. Fraizer writes, “In this model of faculty development, student reflections enabled faculty to learn from and adapt to student strengths and needs. Instructors adjusted the way they assigned and taught writing in ways that made sense to them based on what they learned from this process (Fraizer).” I believe when an instructor is able to adapt to a student’s needs and wants in a class, the student is able to benefit and become motivated to write intrinsically, instead of extrinsically. This is important for a healthy learning environment, and writing transfer can help create better relationships between students, writing, and their instructor, so that they are all able to reach their full potential and goals.
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