The Role of Core Classes in the Professional Writing Program: A Student Analysis

Sarah Merryman

“What does the professional writing program have to become to be useful to you as a professional?”
This question posed by my college instructor surprised me. Not necessarily the question itself, but the fact that it was being asked at all. Teachers didn’t usually inquire for my opinions on what I thought about the quality of my education, in fact they never did. Besides, with him being the grownup in the situation, shouldn’t he be telling me?

It quickly became clear that easy answers of any variety were not to be found in my professional writing capstone course. When the professor poses questions like “does rhetoric hold up airplanes” and urges you to “fail spectacularly,” on your first day of class, you know the conventions of a traditional college class will not apply. The very word “failure” shriveled the souls of every student in the classroom like kryptonite.

While this wasn’t the first class I had taken that employed the “let's drop the students off an academic cliff and see if they can fly” method, this was the first time I ever heard an instructor refer to the education system as an “institution that infantiles you [students]” and promotes “learned helplessness.” Or say that “[students] have grown accustomed to things being assigned,” a state of mind which leads to “the myth of the external expert who is coming to save us,” where students rely on the guidance and expertise of an outside entity to determine their movements.

Ouch.

Within a few minutes, all those years of being conditioned to ask the teacher for help, attend office hours, contact help centers, and ask questions were rendered as useless as a turkey-quill pen in a Best Buy store. I had been taught to always run to the experts whenever I hit a mind block, now I was being told that once I received that illustrious diploma and entered the workforce I was the expert.

Call me stupid, but somehow the thought never occurred to me before.

It also didn’t sit well with me that functioning well as a student of professional writing had little communicative value to functioning well as an actual professional writer. From all accounts, employers want thinker, innovators, problem-solvers – all those fancy buzzwords colleges promote in their brochures and on their bookstore t-shirts. Given this information, shouldn’t someone have started weaning me of this “learned helplessness” earlier??? Wasn’t waiting until senior year of college to say “you’re the expert” cutting it a bit too close?  

On the outset the solution seemed obvious to me – professional writing courses needed to start pushing students away from learned helplessness earlier. But the more I reflected on past course experiences within the professional writing program, the more I realized these courses had been preparing me for real world situations in various ways. The problem wasn’t with my program, it was that I only taking course within my major until my junior and senior years of college.  

For this reason, I dare to contend that “What does the professional writing program have to become to be useful to you as a professional?” is not the root question that needs to be answered so much as “What must college courses taken before entering the professional writing program have to become for professional writing to be useful to me?” I propose that the trademark features of the professional writing program should be incorporated into core courses within the College of Liberal Arts. Stick around long enough and these “trademark features” will be defined later.

Learned Helplessness Versus the Independent Expert

The deeply complex question of “what must core classes become for students to succeed” cannot hope to have a short or simple answer, but I do have a few proposals that may help in taking that first step towards a resolution. The first is reevaluating the functionality of the learned helplessness model inherent in undergraduate institutions.

Is this learned helplessness a necessary part of education and if so, to what degree?

My knee-jerk reaction was to ditch learned helplessness altogether, but in the interest of fairness, it does have its uses. Students learn to meet deadlines, answer to a superior, collaborate with peers, verbalize concerns, and so on and so forth. These skills are valuable to employers, but more importantly they give students the tools needed to learn in a rigorous academic environment different from their previous high school experiences. Most incoming freshman don’t understand how to function at a college level and cultivating a “learned helplessness” that encourages them to seek help from faculty and peers can help combat floundering. But once those lessons are learned, don’t they become debilitating rather than edifying to students? Do the initial tools students are given to succeed in college become a crutch when used too often? At what point does “teaching students to be good students” take a backseat to “teaching students to be good professionals?”

Instead of maintaining the egregious “learned helplessness” system up until entry into professional writing courses, I believe that college should shift to an “independent expert” model, preferably beginning no later than a student’s sophomore year.

This isn’t to disparage my experiences with non-professional writing courses or of the teachers who taught them. I learned an enormous amount from these classes that have served me well in college and life. Aspects of the “independent expert” model have even popped up occasionally; however, these were usually in isolated instances, such as a single project, and not an inherent component of the classroom structure. It is this deliberate incorporation of practices which promote independent efficiency that I believe must be implemented.

Declarative Knowledge versus Procedural Knowledge

At its core, learned helplessness is declarative knowledge – facts and rules that give students a formulaic path to achieving academic success. Follow the rubric, answer the questions, memorize the formulas, ask the teacher, and then spit it all out at the end of the semester. All useful skills in and of themselves but potentially mind-numbing when paired together. The independent expert model involves procedural knowledge where the emphasis is placed on experience of learning rather than demonstration of knowledge. Procedural knowledge is harder to measure, harder to teach, and even harder to define than declarative knowledge, but it is infinitely more satisfying to learn.

So, procedural knowledge is in and declarative knowledge is out, but if procedural knowledge is so hard to pin down, how do colleges incorporate more of it into their curriculum? What does this transition from declarative to procedural knowledge look like?

So glad you asked.

In my college experience, the key difference between declarative and procedural classes is in the way they look at problems. Declarative-based classes focus on problem solving, but procedural-based classes focus on problem finding. I can count on one hand the number of times I have experienced a class where the professors weren’t just looking for solutions, they were looking for questions.

In problem-solving classes half of the work was already done for me. Professors would make up artificial problems, and even if the problems were hard the setup was predictable and my role in the equation was clear. There was a definitive starting point and it was my job to find a definite ending point. Cause and effect, problem-solution, beginning and end. Everything neat, clean, and symmetrical.

Yeah, well life’s not like that.

Problem-finding classes took a whole new approach. Common scenarios were “here is a real-world situation: xyz is your goal, now identify the problems and how to solve them” or “this is an example of xyz project, without any guidelines or experience construct your own version of xyz but make it better.” I was no longer given a problem, sometimes I wasn’t even given a solution. The security of having a linear model was taken away and replaced by mini snapshots of life’s complexity from which I was supposed to extract some sort of logical meaning. Projects got complicated, scenarios were messy, but they were interesting, and more importantly they offered a glimpse of what working in the real world – where problems are rarely clearly defined – is like.

Probing even further into this analysis, I have concluded that problem-finding classes contain at least one of the following elements: two-sided versus one-sided dialogue, mentors instead of teachers, experiments instead of rubrics 

All three of these elements do not have be present at the same time, or even present at all for a class to be categorized as problem finding. However, these are the common features I have observed that differentiate problem finding from problem solving courses.

Let’s unpack these one at a time.

Lectures versus Conversations

In the traditional classroom set-up, the instructor invariably starts off the semester by laying out the objectives of the course material, essentially saying “this is what you are going to learn.” In conversation-based classes the dynamic changed to a two-way dialogue where the instructor asked, “what do you feel you need to learn?” In these instances, the professor gave me the credit of assuming that I was aware of the strengths and weakness within my personal skill set and could identify the areas I needed to work on.

This isn’t to say my professors didn’t guide what I learned, but they made me an active participant in choosing the subjects that I needed rather than what was prescribed by the course. Not only did this gesture of respect establish feeling of trust between my professors and I, it also forced me to take ownership over the direction of my professional development and evaluate skills I needed to develop to achieve my professional goals.

Mentors Instead of Teachers

At some point should teaching take a back seat to mentoring?

Teaching is an admirable and necessary role in higher education, but it puts all the burden of ideation and expertise at the feet of the teacher and renders the student as a recipient of their expertise. This relationship is a crucial contributor to the learned helplessness model and “myth of the external expert who is coming to save us.”  Mentorship shifts the responsibility of experiential learning onto the shoulders of the student and allows them to invest and take ownership of their education.

As students, we are aware of our skills and our previous accomplishments, but instructors have the bird’s eye view of our potential – not just what we have done but what we could do. But the only way students will discover this is to push the boundaries of assignments. The way to push these boundaries is through experiential learning; however, genuine experience cannot be taught, by its very definition it can only be experienced.

Professors and Rubrics

Are students afraid of failure? Most definitely. But more importantly are teachers afraid of failure? This question plays a crucial role in the continued usage of the rubric.

Rubrics are helpful because they define expectations, which students love. Unfortunately, they also impose constraints that can be detrimental to experiential learning and innovative problem finding. One of my past instructors abandoned formal rubrics altogether because he believed they impeded student potential. His reasoning was that rubrics laid out the minimum requirement for the student to achieve a grade; whereas, if a student was given only the barest of requisites on a project then he would be forced to see how much he could accomplish instead of what he was asked to accomplish.

Instead of providing a written document, my instructor verbally stated the features he wanted us to demonstrate and set us loose to experiment on our own. No page count, no point evaluation system, no boundaries. This thinking has merit. Students can meet and even exceed the expectations of a rubric, but we can never break the limits set by them.

While I certainly don’t suggest discarding rubrics completely, I feel that is necessary to reevaluate why instructors rely on them so heavily. Are rubrics designed to minimize the anxiety of students or professors? After all, they make things simple and easy for instructors and provide them with an insurance policy when inquiries are raised about seemingly arbitrary grading decisions. These aren’t bad things, but doesn’t micromanaging student assignments create unnecessary boundaries that narrow student potential? And aren’t breaking boundaries inherent to the creative innovation so desperately sought after in college graduates? Perhaps less truly is more when it comes to rubrics.

The Pain Is Almost Over (Also Known as a Conclusion)

In case you’ve forgotten the point of this blog post here is a quick summary:

To better prepare students for the structure of the professional writing program, changes should be made to the core classes that come before professional writing courses. The change should be replacing the learned helplessness model of education with the independent expert model by shifting from declarative knowledge to procedural knowledge. Procedural knowledge requires the mindset of problem finding instead of the traditional system of problem solving. The trademarks of problem finding classes are using two-sided dialogue, employing mentoring instead of teaching, and replacing rubrics with student-directed experiments. Implementing these practices will better prepare students in the professional writing program to independently think, analyze, and innovate both in school and in the workplace

Keep in mind that the trademarks I have discussed are only recommendations, not hard facts. In the words of my former political science professor, “I’m not here to tell you what to think, I’m just telling you what I think you should be thinking about.”

Leaving you with these words of wisdom, I will now exit my soapbox.