The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Essays by the 2018-19 Faculty Scholars

LAURIE NARDONE, PH.D.
English
Owning their writing: An investigation of students
in a year-long, first-year writing class
In an annual teaching reflection for the Writing Program, I wrote about my
desire to be “patient with my own learning.” This was harder than I thought.
As a classroom teacher, when there is a problem, my impulse is to fix it
immediately, rather than observe, explore, and study it. But what might
happen if I held it in my hands for a bit, if I turned it over, looked at it from
different angles, in a different light?
I teach a two-semester, required first-year writing course in Northeastern’s
General Studies program. This program supports a population of about
100 students: athletes, city scholarship students, TORCH (first-generation)
scholars, international students, and students from the general population
who may benefit from extra support in their first year. It’s an enrichment
program that offers a transitional year for students whose admissions
statistics may not match those of the incoming class, but whose “potential
for success” with extra support is high. Many of these students, however,
appear to lack both confidence and preparation, manifesting itself in
students seeming uninterested or inconsistent in their writing projects.
I realize my consideration of inconsistence is based on a linear notion of
progress, but with carefully scaffolded assignments, I do expect students to
move forward with certain skills and confidences.
Here, I turn to Yancey and her colleagues who discuss “signature
pedagogies” in the context of First-Year Composition (FYC) classes; they
ask, “How we might help students think like writers?” (Yancey, Robertson,
& Taczak, 2014, p. 4). My impression is that students arrive in my class
without conscious writerly identities; instead, they arrive with rules about
writing that seem separate from themselves, and they see writing projects
as tasks or barriers—a hoop to jump through, something isolated and in a
vacuum. And so each project or assignment becomes a completely new and
separate opportunity. This makes me wonder: How might they understand
or recognize their identities as writers? How might they see writing not in
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