Call to Action: Centering First-Year Writers
written by Theo Grayer, Joseph Petchauer, Jake Rothman, Gian Zaninelli
A specter is haunting the writing center: the specter of first-year students. Indispensable to the goals and maintenance of the program itself, first-year students are an essential aspect of any well-formed writing program outreach strategy. However, to effectively reach these students, their motivations and needs must be well understood. But first, why are they so crucial? Aren’t first-year students like any others? No! First year students face the unique challenges of transitioning to college along with the difficulties of continuing to grow. They are also the future of the writing program. The students whom WAs can make a good impression on are more likely to return to the program in the future and speak well of the program to others. More importantly, students will have the potential to benefit over a longer time span, making it easier for the WA program to effect change on their writing abilities.
We would be remiss to ignore an equally important aspect of first-year writers: their mentality and interests. As Crystal Tsang explains in her inquiry project, first-year students primarily view the writing center as a vehicle for achieving good grades. One student notes that students “mentioned that they would come [to the center] if it would guarantee them an A.” Rather than immediately dismiss this claim as “selfish,” or “grade-grubby,” we ought to take this interest seriously. First-year students are entering college from high school environments that prioritize grades above anything else. Many members of this group remember staying up all night to get an A on an assignment. Moreover, it was these very instincts, this grade-centered attitude, that helped us get into an institution with an acceptance rate as low as Swarthmore.
While it is up to the larger Swarthmore community to correct for this as first-years enter the college, at the writing center we, too, have a responsibility. During our first WA conferences with first-years, it’s up to us to initiate a paradigm shift from external to internal motivation, from writing as a means of achieving good grades to writing as inherently valuable within the learning process Swarthmore and the writing center seek to cultivate. By focusing on the writing process and strategy rather than simple corrections and other “grade-focused” issues for an individual paper, our goal is to instill a love of writing in first-years that shows them what they are capable of even early on in their college career. As Aly Ye explains in her inquiry project, students want to focus on big-picture items like content, argument, and structure in their conferences, so it seems clear that below the grade-centric orientation of most first-years, there is also a latent desire to become better writers and students as a whole that we as WAs can help realize.
Here is where our call-to-action comes into play. We think that to effectively assist first-years in their writing processes, and discover themselves as writers, a two-fold plan is necessary: first, we need to bring first-years into the writing center. Having more professors require their first-year students to attend the writing center would expose them to more intimate and peer-led discussions about writing. And second, as WAs, we can focus these meetings less on helping students with their papers, but rather assisting them through the relaying of helpful writing practices, and suggestions that they can use during their next few years of college. We’d essentially be tailoring these sessions more to the writer than the paper (which is already a concept that we WAs are familiar with, but we can lean more heavily into it when dealing with first-year students).
First-year students are new to the college experience; some guidance can go a long way. We can be the people to provide that guidance.