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Passivity
- 1. STUDENT MOTIVATION AND EMPHASIZING THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING Miriam Wipf
- 2. The “Passive” Tutee To do with “motivation,” or lack thereof Low levels of motivation may stem from: boredom lack of confidence in writing skills Strategies to understand + combat Tutee Passivity within the Writing Center Environment
- 3. Psychological Basis Motivation is inherently a psychological construct First adopt a psychological perspective; study of behavior and mind
- 4. Active Student High levels of “self-efficacy” Don’t freak out… self-efficacy is a person’s belief in her ability to succeed in certain situations or tasks. Identifies the benefits of a writing tutor, instead of simply showing up to a session with no specific goal in mind soure
- 5. Low Self-efficacy When a tutee laments that she is a “terrible writer” Contributes to passivity Reminder: self-efficacy is a person’s belief in her ability to succeed in certain situations or tasks
- 6. Boredom and Interest Caring about work is important. If tutees don’t find work/writing interesting, and also feel that the work is of little value to them, they experience boredom Passive tutees may have little to 0 interest in subject area/writing
- 7. Goal Establishment Deter boredom by encouraging personal involvement aka establishment of goals to be accomplished through writing Encouraging writerly or personal goals may positively influence interest
- 8. We’re all different! How we prioritize the flow of information and our scholastic duty to assignments is referred to as self-regulated learning. Important to realize: there are multiple intelligences– aka different ways to learn and regulate our learning. For many of us here at TWC, writing comes naturally as an intelligence, a way for us to organize our thoughts and ideas, but others may struggle to think this way.
Editor's Notes
- The idea for this paper came about during one of my very first sessions at the Writing Center. Utterly confused by a sentence, I looked at my tutee, who happened to be an ESL student, and asked, “What do you mean by this?” He stared back at me, equally confused, and answered: “Ah.. I’m not sure.” and then then laughed and stared at me expectantly. Flustered and feeling all-too-aware of some weird “power dynamic,” I started hand feeding him information from his OWN paper, trying to construct a sentence that made sense; the only responses I received from my tutee were empty stares and the occasional, “ok,” to my questions. Here is what I have come to identify as “The Passive Student” or, in this case, “Tutee.”
- Just a, uh, forewarning that there are a few psychological concepts used here, but motivation is inherently a psychological construct. I’ve found that in order to better understand the tutee, and examine where she may be coming from, this means examining psychology, aka the study of behavior and mind.
- **I use student and tutee interchangeably** In order to better understand and combat student passivity, I decided to compare and contrast a “passive” student, versus an “active” one. I’ve had plenty of active tutees; a tutee that engages directly with me and his work. An active student recognizes the value of hard work and seeks to fulfill his goals through this exertion of effort. Active students have high-levels of self-efficacy– which is a person’s belief in her ability to succeed in certain situations or tasks. In the Writing Center environment: High levels of self-efficacy mean that a tutee establishes and works towards goals, meaning that the tutee wants to focus on certain aspects within the session, meaning they have a goal for the session. This is nice and usually means less work for us, the tutors.
- On the other hand, Passive students often find little satisfaction in certain aspects of education (in this case, writing), and this contributes to feeling unmotivated to engage with the tutor. Something I hear a lot is, “I’m a terrible writer; I hate writing.” Oftentimes, a passive tutee lacks confidence in her writing skills and this contributes to feelings of low self-efficacy, which leads to lower standards of writing. As tutors, offering small amounts of praise or perhaps discussing what the writing did well may help improve these feelings of low self-efficacy. There’s also other things that lead to passivity.
- I think that an emphasis on writing, including what you’re writing about and the choices you made to get here, as well as the assignment (and what the prompt is asking) may be a way to garner more information about yourself, outside of the field of academia or just simply to receive a good grade. For example, asking “Why are you focusing on the things that you do?” can spark personal inspiration for the tutee. All of our choices are unique to us, and we should be mindful to pay attention to these things that differentiate us. As a tutor, we can point these our to our tutees, especially passive students who may need that extra budge into being involved. What’s “at stake”? All writing does not need to be “good,” “phenomenal” writing—I believe that writing can be used as a vessel of self-expression and exploration, and when the tutor asks questions that not only get at how to write this, but why, then perhaps a passive student may be motivated to step outside the strict schema of academic writing and instead view it as a tool to establish goals and discover his motivations
- Often, as I’ve said, writing is seen as something purely academic, simply a means to an ends, but what I think many students don’t realize is that writing can be used as a personal tool to glean something larger about yourself. I’ve studied writing for the past few years now, and one of the most important skills I’ve garnered is self-expression. Communication is unavoidable in life, and I’ve seen so many struggle to identify and relay how they think and feel to others, even themselves. But something about visualizing and organizing my thoughts in such a concrete form as writing has helped me better understand myself and others. And knowing how to say what you want, helps you get what you want. *wink* Encouraging a relationship between writing ability and real-life mastery goals is a way to link writing to the real world. Writing can be used as a way to link puzzle pieces about seemingly different parts of your life together to form a larger picture, instead of something separate.
- At the very least, tutors can nurture writing and its benefits– acting as advocates for its potential advantages Writing aids in self-expression, formulation of ideas and arguments, and making a well-founded claim; writing improves one’s critical thinking and organizational skills, and stressing this to our tutees should improve the reputation of writing and encourage them to develop and value their writing skills. Returning to the passive student I identified in the beginning of the presentation, he’s continued to see me almost every week this semester …and with each session, I tried to distance myself from the meat of his papers and instead asked broader questions concerning the strength of his argument, and the significance of providing evidence for his claims. I emphasized the importance of using his argument, via his writing, to state something bold about the world, something unique to only his interpretation of the texts. I assured him of the validness and uniqueness of his opinions, as this is what makes us (and our writing) intriguing and important…as long as he makes sure to back up his claims, then he is providing new and interesting discourse, in place of how students sometimes just regurgitate information instead of saying new things in a world of sameness. Encouraging a tutee to take a personal stake in their writing, in order to garner improved communication skills, among other things, may be a way to discourage passivity and emphasize the importance of writing.