Hull 1
Melissa Hull
Peer Tutoring Internship
Research Paper
Due: Fri, Apr 21st
There Will Be Time:
Countering Students’ Lack of Motivation in the Writing Center
“There will be time, there will be time…
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
~T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
I began my research paper on student motivation last semester by comparing the freshman composition student to Gregor Samsa waking only to find that he had been transformed into a bug. And I can think of no better way to begin this paper than with Eliot’s message of change, the “time yet” for “a hundred visions and revisions.” What I essentially wish to achieve with this follow-up research is a revision with a re-envisioning. I would like to address how, through my tutoring at the University of Pittsburgh, I have found that perhaps writing center theorists tend to ignore the issue of student motivation simply because it is not as much of an issue as one might assume. We often misinterpret the quiet student at the uncaring student or the student who lacks a motive (an inherent need or desire) to learn. I would like to address how sessions can be turned around even if begun under less than auspicious beginnings. And I would like to address the success of the preventative measures taken to counter students’ misunderstandings about what services a writing center actually provides. I will do this by discussing one specific course of action, the Writing Across the Curriculum program. Students may come to the writing center under the false pretenses of proofreading. However, if their writing undergoes a metamorphosis, it is quite possible that students will learn about more than just sentence-level and organizational revision. They may learn to revise their attitudes about the center itself.
Of course, the center may also need an adjustment change toward the student. I began looking towards the problem of student motivation last semester in my Peer Tutoring course. I was intrigued because the literature we read in class often assumed that students would come to the center unwilling to work. Leigh Ryan, in her work, The Bedford Guide to Writing Tutors, paints several portraits of begrudging tutees who “refuse to answer your questions, give halfhearted answers, or otherwise indicate that they do not wish to be there [when they] slump in their seats, avoid eye contact, or avoid facing you” (Ryan 74). Even Stephen North writes of students who, wishing to earn an easy grade, deposit their papers on the counter to be proofread at the center (North 433). Neither North nor Ryan seems to question whether these symptoms could be due to the misconceptions of students as to what learning is. They may have been raised in a learning environment that embraced the banking concept of learning, a passive way of learning where the student acts as an “account” that takes in “deposits” (i.e. facts or lessons). Still, there seemed plenty of reason to fear potential clientele. After all, how much help can you provide a student who does not wish for, or even resents, your attempts to put the pen back in their hands?
In practice, I found that it was the motivation for learning itself that drove students to the writing center in the first place. Though a select portion of the University of Pittsburgh Writing Center’s population came from a required set called Composition Tutorial, most students came of their own volition.[1] Wondering how common it was to see students who seemed genuinely interested in improving their work, I browsed through several Writing Center websites. Temple University’s director, Lori Salem, addresses the issue, writing, “…since we are set up as a voluntary service, getting tutoring presumes and requires some level of motivation on the students’ part” (Salem). She is implying that the inherent structure of writing center pedagogy demands some degree of intrinsic desire to do more than just receive information. Leaving readers in suspense, though, she does not address whether this is actually the case for students. Colgate University’s online mission statement is a bit more specific. It proudly proclaims, “We recognize that a student’s visit to the center indicates a motivation to write. In turn, we are similarly motivated to work with the student who comes to see us” (Opipari). Ben Opipari, the center’s director, indicates with this statement that motivation is a two-way street; it requires that not only must the student be able and willing to work on his/her writing, but so too must the writing center consultant be poised and ready. Opipari’s look at motivation might reflect Kenneth Bruffee’s essay, “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” which speaks of how the tutor’s own motivation to discover new things about writing benefits student writers. Even after these statements, I was not satisfied. It is one thing to presume that, in order to be successful, students must be prepared to work (i.e. participate in the conversation). It is entirely another thing to say that, yes, students do the work and with gusto.
For this reason, I presented our Center’s staff (comprised of faculty, peer tutors and peer interns such as myself) with a survey asking several questions about students and motivation. Unlike the vague written sentiments found in the literature of college campuses, the results these surveys gave me were surprisingly clear. Of the 31 consultants polled, 26 said that students “very rarely” come to the center “unwilling to work!” In other words, 84% of the staff at our writing center felt that students were willing to work! Of those, the largest number (21 staff members) agreed that if students were unwilling to work, it was often because the “students were referred by a professor and/or feel punished in some way to be [at the Center].”[2] This idea was reiterated when, in response to the question “How can you tell if a student is unmotivated,” more than half of the respondents circled the option, “[The students] wish to vent their frustrations at their grade and/or professor.” One must not forget, though, that frustration can be its own motive. Often a student wishes to prove his/her professor wrong by rising to the challenge of improving an originally poor grade.
These results, indicating that outside referrals to the Center often provoke hostile reactions towards sessions may seem overly pessimistic. After all, if students are only unmotivated because they were forced to come here, how can the consultant possibly turn these sorts of sessions around? Tutors who took the survey, however, have kept faith in their internal abilities to remove an external negative stimulus; half of the respondents indicated that a session that began with an unmotivated student could be turned around “very often.”[3] One ambitious faculty member even circled that they could “always” be turned around!
If we look directly at professor referral as a main cause for lack of student interest, however, the problem exists not on a tutor to tutee level, but on a writing center to university level. Stephen North, in his famous essay, “The Idea of a Writing Center,” admonishes professors who would require their students to attend a session:
Even those of you who, out of genuine concern, bring students to a writing center,
almost by hand, to make sure they know it won’t hurt them – even you are
essentially out of line. Occasionally we manage to convert such writers from
people who have to see us to people who want to, but most often they either come
as if for a kind of detention, or they drift away (North 440).
And North is not alone in his battle cry. In my last research paper, I recommended posting a warning as the University of Iowa had done, indicating to professors that they should refrain from making the center mandatory. They felt that “when we are helping students who are motivated solely by extra credit, it can take away from students who are motivated by a genuine desire for feedback for revision” (Severino). If directors would indicate in a very direct manner to professors that their center is not to be used as a method of punitive remediation, a writing “time out” if you will, then professors might catch on to the fact that writing centers function better when students feel it best for them to attend the session, not for their papers to be referred. The punitive aspect of this “sentence” to the writing center may come off as a moral judgment (i.e. the student has done something “wrong” or “bad” by making writing errors) which may, in turn, make the student defensive in order to protect him/herself (i.e. it’s just writing; how much could it matter?)
However, when addressing this roadblock in student motivation, scolding instructors is not the only way. Writing centers across the country are embracing the notion of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs. The University of Pittsburgh is already piloting its program. Implementation of a WAC program links the professor the tutor and tutee together. In order to understand Writing Across the Curriculum further, I interviewed two consultants from the program, asking them about the program’s intentions, the student’s ability to understand the services we provide, and their estimates of the program’s success. I will refer to these interviewees as Tutor #1 and Tutor #2.[4]
Tutor #1 described the program very simply, explaining, “To try and help students understand the importance of writing, the Writing Center teamed up with…a Political Science professor. In his class, students are required to write three papers, [and] they are required meet with a peer tutor at least once somewhere in the process.” Though the unification of the center and the classroom may have seemed like an ideal solution, both Tutor #1 and Tutor #2 expressed trepidation:
Tutor #1: They did not seem all that happy to see us the day we went into the classroom to have the program explained.
Tutor #1: …my expectations were not all that high. I expected a lot of ‘I don’t want to be here’ looks.
Tutor #2:…in many ways, it [the WAC program] doesn’t differ from requiring students to go to the Writing Center. Which is interesting: when it was from the outside in, we were angry (‘How dare a teacher send all of his students to us’), but when it’s our idea, we pat ourselves on the back.[5]
These tutors were understandably concerned; instead of having professors impose their students on the center, was the center simply imposing itself on professors’ classrooms?
Regardless of the tutors’ opinion in this case, students seemed to be reaping writing rewards. Tutor #2 mentioned that upon asking a student what she thought of the program, the student admitted that she might not have come if not for the requirement, but found it helpful. To this, Tutor #2 said, “So, I think that once they get here, they see the benefits.” Tutor #1 also indicated positive results, mentioning that “surprisingly, the three people I have seen have all been really…grateful to be getting help.” She goes on to respond to a particular change brought about by the program, stating, “I feel these students understand that we don’t proofread more than the general body of students who visit the Writing Center.” This is an important distinction, as the student who appears unmotivated often is just experiencing a clash between the services he/she assumed the center would provide (i.e. proofreading) and what the center actually provides (i.e. working one-on-one with a student to locate common patterns of error within a paper and to address the rationale for correcting these errors).
To return to the survey, even faculty outside of the WAC program felt that this clash of expectations was a burden on the session’s productivity. Two-thirds of the respondents felt that students came to the center expecting tutors to “proofread” or “copy-edit” their work “somewhat often.” The last third of the respondents felt this occurred “very often,” and one tutor even felt that this was what “always” happened. There are multiple was to address this misconception. In addition to the strategies of working directly with the professors, writing centers need to work with the students before they even enter the center. Muriel Harris’ “SLATE Statement”[6] addresses this confusion of students towards the center:
Writing center directors frequently find that those outside the center –
administrators, teachers, and students do not have a very clear understanding of
the function of tutorial instruction and tend to think of the center as a place
limited to remediation. … At issue here is the need for clarification and
explanation of a nontraditional form of education to those steeped only in
traditional formats (Harris).
Harris also recognizes that, in addition to students having to overcome this confusion of the center as a punishment or a fix-it shop, they must also overcome other preconceived notions towards writing, such as the idea of the solitary soldier. Harris writes that, through use of the center, “writers are…assisted in discarding the antiquated view of the lonely writer secluded from the world as she struggles to communicate with an unknown, unseen audience” (Harris). Though this D.I.Y. attitude may help some students with initial drafting by giving them a sense of independence, they should know that working with a consultant to improve this draft does not necessarily imply dependence. There are several possible ways to change a student’s mind.
In order to make the center more immediately beneficial to students, one might provide a written explanation of the center’s services. The University of Pittsburgh’s Writing Center, on its informational flyer, includes a reminder that we help students at all levels of the writing process. In addition to this flyer, the Center provides a specific memo addressing proofreading and how the Center’s services differ from that of an editor’s. Darsie Bowden, in her article, “Error: Making and Marking,” reiterates that we can always return the student to the process and reteach him/her the steps. Bowden insists that we should clarify that “revision is a re-consideration of ideas in a draft and an analysis of how those ideas are expressed. Editing, while certainly connected to revision, is concentration on form—looking at word choice, sentencing, and punctuation for correctness, and clarity and attention to discourse conventions” (Bowden). While making these distinctions between concepts like proofreading, drafting, editing, and revision, we should keep in mind the student’s intentions when asking for a specific kind of help. Tutor #2 reminds us that “when a student says, ‘I’m here to get my paper proofread,’...they [don’t] always mean ‘Correct my grammar.’ [S]tudents understand proofreading as revising, workshopping, [and other] writing center work.” Tutor #2 brings us to an important point: the steps of writing themselves are as unique as the people who employ them.
If the misunderstandings of the professors and students can be overcome and the writing center exposed to the public, how else can we motivate the unmotivated? In other words, suppose you are a tutor who is sitting across from a student who “[doesn’t] engage in the session…” “wishes to vent frustrations…,” and “avert[s his/her] eyes”[7] This student clearly understands why the writing center exists and has come of his/her own volition. What could possibly be the problem now?! The problem could easily be the elephant sitting at the kitchen table, so obvious, yet so tempting to ignore. The student could appear to be lacking interest or motivation simply because writing is hard.
Plenty of evidence indicates that the process of writing itself is an intimidating factor, with its many subtleties and stages. Students must begin by understanding the wording of a prompt. They must then interpret the necessary texts to bridge the gap between thought and page. After drafting, they must eventually discover how the existing draft differs from the ideal final version of the paper. Seventeen out of thirty-one University of Pittsburgh tutors listed the complexity of the writing process as an important reason that students are unwilling to work. And DePaul University’s Writing Center director addresses the revision process in the Fall 2005 issue of “Writing Center Quarterly,” stating that “…errors in student writing often frustrate. They frustrate teachers, ofcourse, because errors result in written prose that is unclear at best and illiterateat worst. And—believe it or not—errors frustrate student writers” (Bowden). In such a case as this, the student who seems unmotivated may care even deeper. Even the most professional of writers know the frustrations associated with issues like writer’s block. So how does a tutor go about making the process of writing easier for the student, a task s/he may not even know how to do for him/herself?
There is more than one way to skin this cat (or not to mix metaphors, to acknowledge this elephant). One small suggestion is the same one given in almost every handbook for tutoring writers: try not to tackle too much. Bowden explains, “When tackling error, be selective, [and] consider patterns of error rather than marking every mistake. This way, students can become more familiar and comfortable with the rule and have the time to attend to it in their own work” (Bowden). The other suggestion is to simply acknowledge the fact that writing is difficult. Thomas Mann has been quoted as saying, “The writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”[8] If it is true that students who come to the writing center already have a degree of motivation in seeking help, then this admission may be what frees students from feeling as though they are being reprimanded by the center for comma splices or organizational issues.