Immediacy and inclusion: making students your academic peers

The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://www.chronicle.com) recently published a thought provoking but not entirely surprising article on student reading and writing habits as assessed by their instructors. In this article, (Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers, http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39writing.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en), the pros and cons of whether social electronic media tools improve or diminish a student’s writing ability are examined. The distinction made is between academic (i.e., rules of the game are pre-digital native) and social (rules are post digital-native) writing, and the point (one we’ve all likely heard before) is made that non-academic student writing is largely social. Some professors feel that this outside social writing is promoting inferior student writing in the academic setting.

Over and over again the ideas of social writing, immediacy, and engagement are brought up. The percentage of student writing that is academic is quite low....Students write for an audience; generally this audience consists of their peers….The peer group determines the level of vocabulary, style and general level of authorship, etc., etc. While reading the article, I kept waiting for someone to strategize about how to improve academic writing by actually including the students in the academic peer group, mirroring the audience-based impetus for writing that the article recognizes drives student social writing. Many of the professor commentators in the article talk about how students write for their peers, and voluminously. So how do we shift some of that volume to the academic sphere?

I was particularly caught by the comments of a George Mason professor, Paul Rodgers. Mr. Rogers talks about the immediacy qualities of student social writing, and how this immediacy keeps students engaged because they are “conscious of the effect their writing is having on other people.” Absolutely! Isn’t that why we in academia write? Conversely, when we ask students to write an academic paper, we are basically limiting their audience to one. That takes away some of the immediacy we recognize as an engagement factor for our students. In our own academic communities, when we publish a paper, we do so in properly researched and written, formatted, and cited fashion, with the knowledge that our writing will have an effect on an audience of our peers, not just one person. We are therefore also attracted to social writing, and this social writing is similarly directed to a peer group that determines that our writing style will be properly academic. We're not so different from our students, so it should not be a big leap to see that including them in a social AND academic community is necessary to get them to produce.

In an online course, we have tools that promote this idea. Of course, we have the ability to be a member of the learning community. This learning community should optimally transform itself into an academic learning community under the direction of the instructor. At the same time, since this is a community, the instructor and students should also function as peers. This means that the writing that is done, though academic in form and function, should be seen and reacted to by the entire peer group. The tools in an online class facilitate this—using the discussion thread, the document storage and collaboration area, the grouping function, and the web links library will aid in the community accessing and reacting to member research and writing. The instructor guides and is the final authority when assessing each community member, of course, but if the student is drawn into an academic writing process in this more social manner, we will likely have more success with getting them to adopt the customs of academia when writing for their classes.

I'm going to put this article in front of my Reading Strategies students to see what they think. They will probably write voluminously.

--Vicki Galloway Harsh
Sr. Academic Trainer and Consultant