Students and the desire/motivation to write

I used up most of my words (and spent most of my brain power) on the other post, but I do have a few words about this week's readings.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that most students - even those who profess to enjoy writing - approach freshman composition with great trepidation, dread, and suspicion. It seems that even the students who like to write dislike or distrust the sorts of writing typically done in composition classes. The four students in Durst's study are starting their comp class with precisely the sort of misconceptions we've discussed - preoccupations with grammar, fears that the academy will impose its ideological agenda on them, etc. The message is clear: students don't tend to embrace what we do.
After years of writing center work, having talked frankly, face-to-face, with countless students about their courses and instructors, I can say with some certainty that the vast majority of students do want to succeed. However, very few of them had come to embrace writing as a sociocultural process.

They are motivated, in a sense. But probably not in the sense we want them to be. Stephen North characterizes student motivation quite well:

Students will […] be motivated to finish writing, but only to be finished with writing, to have their writing finished. It does come as a shock when, having been led by your training to expect some deep, unalloyed genuine engagement – some eager wrestler of texts – you meet instead a frightened freshman who seems only to want a super proofreader (11).

This was the case at Durst's institution, where students were quite "clear about not wanting a broad-based liberal arts education" (12). A few years ago, I worked in a writing "centre" (Canadians and their crazy spelling conventions) at a university that, in similar fashion, placed an emphasis on co-op study and professionalization. An overwhelming majority of undergraduate students were enrolled in the Business and Engineering schools. Most of these students had practical, real-life goals, and, consequently, very little interest in writing classes. Occasionally, I would extol the virtues of metacognition and learning for its own sake, but I was met with resistance from both students and faculty. A few students came to me for tutoring help, quite literally outraged about their course requirements. What does writing have to offer them, as prospective engineers or CEOs?

There are several good answers to such questions, but the important thing here is that students are more typically outcomes-oriented, focused on ends rather than means, concerned (in terms of writing) with the product rather than the process. We may want to make students better writers, but many of them are only concerned with writing insofar as they are required to be. No matter what our individual goals are as teachers, I think we would be best served in the classroom by following Sherry's (Durst Ch. 2) lead and "invit(ing)” first-year students into the conversation, rather than “bully(ing) them with a 'you're in the academy now' ethos" (20). Students need an “other” to challenge them, but not to undermine them, especially if they are predisposed to resist new ideas.