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Teaching Writing to Adult Learners:
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About Adult Learners and ImplicationsWhat We Know About Adult Students and Implications for Practice1. There are lots of them. Forty percent of college composition students are 25 years or older, and adult student enrollment is expected to increase more rapidly than that of students under the age of 25 between 2002 and 2014 (“Postsecondary”). Adult students are often the majority in community college and evening classes. However, no matter where and when you teach, you will be teaching some adult students 2. Adult students are diverse, bringing a range of prior educational, cultural, life and writing experience to the classroom. Like younger students, adult students come from a range of educational and cultural backgrounds. Because of their diverse academic and life experiences, adult students come to the classroom with a variety of prior writing experiences and current writing practices that can effect how they approach the college writing assignments. For example, Alice Gillam shows how women who are used to journaling produce long, unfocused essays while students used to business writing tend to write in short, underdeveloped paragraphs. Randall Popken argues that because adults are familiar with more genres of writing than younger students, the process of learning the academic genre can be more complicated. What you can do: • Asking students at the start of a class about their prior writing classes, their assumptions about academic writing and the kinds of writing they do outside of school will help you make sense of their early papers and understand how to help them master the conventions of college writing.
• Give students opportunities to analyze and move between genres they have mastered and academic genres they are learning.
• Make the most of the diversity they bring to the class by building opportunities for students to write about, share and learn from each other’s experiences
The diversity of their backgrounds and current life situations means any generalizations about adult students will necessarily not apply to every student. Nevertheless, despite their diversity, adult students from a variety of backgrounds tend to be more anxious, motivated, busy and experienced than younger students. 3. Adult students are more anxious than younger students. Research on adult students has repeatedly demonstrated that adults are more anxious about their academic abilities than younger students (Beder and Darkenwald, Kolb 6, Brookfield 27). What you can do: • Confront their anxiety directly and immediately. In the first class, have students talk to each other and tell you about their expectations for the class, previous writing experiences, concerns, and their assumptions about academic writing. Small groups often works best for this. For example, you might have students share or create “writing horror stories” as an ice breaker or show them this one-minute film on writing anxiety: A Painful Glimpse Into My Writing Process (in Less than 60 Seconds)
(http://mag.awn.com/issue11.08/11.08clips/A_Painful_Glimpse.mov) and then ask them how they would depict their own anxiety. Invariably, adult students are surprised to learn that they are not alone in being worried about writing and feel less anxious when they realize that their classmates, whether of the same age or younger, share some of their anxieties and concerns.
• Let students know that writing is hard for everyone. Work to demystify writing by talking about your development as a writer, discussing writing as a process and showing students that writing is hard even for experienced writers. Show examples of early, marked up drafts of your writing and/or published writing.
• Wiant argues that collaborative writing can address anxiety caused by fear of failure and demanding lives by providing a less threatening space in which to develop and practice skills, providing in-class time for writing and providing a support group of others dealing with similar issues (58–60).
• Make them “just do it.” Give lots of low stakes, in-class writing such as free writing at the start or end each class or short group writing exercises. Some students are amazed to discover how much they can write and what they can come up with when they just sit down and do it.
• Get trust by giving it. Write with students, share your in-process writing with them and solicit their feedback.
• Encourage students to use what they know. While adult students may lack confidence in their writing, they often have confidence in other areas of their lives whether that be raising children, building a business or running a marathon. Find out what they do consider themselves expert in and show them how they can leverage that knowledge both for the content of a particular paper and to improve their writing. For example, I had a student who did not get the idea of revision until she saw the parallels to the trial and error process she used to play around with and improve recipes.
• Give up or at least be sure to define composition jargon. We tell our students all the time not to use jargon in their writing. However, we are often oblivious to how much we rely upon jargon when we talk to them about writing. “MLA,” “parenthetic citation,” “thesis,” “split infinitive” and even the parts of speech are jargon to adult students who have been away from the language of writing classes for years. Like any kind of jargon, these words and phrases signal to those who do not know what they mean that they do not belong in our conversation. I have seen students become so anxious when teachers have unconsciously used these terms without defining them that the students stopped absorbing whatever the teacher was trying to communicate.
• Give specific, genuine and generous praise. Telling students, who have very often been told what they do wrong as writers, what they do well is very powerful not only in helping them see how to use their strengths but also in cultivating the confidence they will need to persevere.
• Get in the habit of providing a meta-narrative to your teaching in which you explain what you are going to do and why you are going to do it. Adult students “need to know how the learning will be conducted, what will be learned, and why it will be valuable” (Knowles 201). In particular, always give the reasons for your assignments and your response to student writing.
• Explicitly address the ways writing instruction has changed since your students were last in school and discuss the reasons for these changes. This will help calm the anxiety and suspicion returning students may have of teaching methods that are different from those they remember.
• Make assessment criteria and the reasons for them clear at the start of your course. When possible, engage students in the process of generating criteria and give them options such as being able to choose the papers that will be included in a final portfolio. Clarity, understanding and choice all give students a sense of control over their fates that helps dispel the anxiety grading can generate.
4. Adult students are highly motivated. These students have made a conscious, deliberate decision to return to school, which they are often financing on their own. They are usually motivated to get a degree because of both practical considerations (they need it for a job, their next promotion or to change jobs) and personal desire (they want new challenges, are thirsty for knowledge, want to set a good example for their kids, and want the sense of accomplishment that comes with finally getting their degree). Adult students are necessarily focused on the immediate and practical so they will be interested in how their learning applies to their professional as well as academic work. However, they are also interested in developing as thinkers. Because they are motivated, and despite the anxieties discussed above, adult students want, seek out and appreciate frank, constructive criticism. What you can do: • Enjoy their motivation, and use it to work for you rather than against you. Explicitly point out how they can transfer what they have learned at work into the classroom and what they are learning in the classroom into the workplace.
• Create assignments that allow students to write for work or community audiences.
• Give students concrete, specific suggestions for how they can improve their writing.
• Use conferences, journals, minute papers, midterm assessments and other methods to gather and respond to feedback from students about what they are learning, what they are confused about and what they may be unhappy with.
• Collect some articles on the importance of liberal arts, communication and writing skills in the business world. After you share a few of these with your students, they will soon be sharing others with you and their classmates.
• However, while making the most of their professional motivations, do not neglect or underestimate their desire to be “educated” and do not be shy about talking about learning in terms of personal as well as professional development.
5. Adult students are busy. Adult students are usually barely balancing school, work and families. They lead complicated and demanding lives. Understandably, school cannot always be their first priority. Because their lives are so full, they appreciate flexibility, clear expectations and respect for their time. What you can do: • Give a detailed syllabus at the start of the term in which you indicate all major due dates. Try to stick to the due dates as closely as possible, and let students know well in advance when dates will change. This will help your students plan their work, personal and school schedules.
• Respect their limited time by using it most effectively. In other words, make sure you can articulate to yourself and your students the purpose of each assignment and how it connects to the course goals.
• Do not treat adults like irresponsible teenagers, but understand that they will make choices. Plan for and be willing to accommodate requests to miss class or hand in an assignment late. Consider putting students in study groups and making the group responsible for making sure that the absent gets the class information and hand in his or her work.
6. Adult students are experienced. Adult students bring a variety of life and writing experiences to class. One of the delightful things about teaching adult students is that they usually have a good deal to say. One of the challenges of teaching adult students is recognizing, understanding and helping them understand how their prior writing experiences can hinder or help the development of their academic writing skills. Many returning adults have spent years writing in the business world and see no need to change their writing style when they come to school. Others have preconceived notions about academic writing that get in the way of development and clarity. In addition, many of them dropped out of school for a reason and have had quite negative experiences with members of our profession, so they do not trust us or our red pens. You ignore adult experience at your loss and possibly peril: losing the chance to make allies in the classroom, address misconceptions, understand their writing decisions and leverage their life experiences. What you can do: • Invite students to bring their life experiences into the classroom through discussions, readings and assignments. Doing so allows you to validate their identity, remind them and inform yourself of their expertise, dispel anxiety, and leverage their prior knowledge. Alice Gilliam suggests a really wonderful way to do this by having students create “experience portfolios” at the start of a class in which they document their areas of expertise, review their writing experiences, and provide samples of the kinds of writing they are currently doing whether it is journaling, e-mails or business letters. She goes on to show all of the ways these portfolios can be used to dispel anxiety, create classroom community, generate ideas for future papers, diagnose writing issues and strengths, and discuss rhetorical strategies and decisions. Be prepared, however, to help students navigate the challenges of reflecting upon and analyzing their own experiences.
• Help adult writers see business and academic writing as different genres. In particular, they often need help developing a rich sense of detail, the need to address objections and build support for claims, and the organizational conventions of academic papers.
• Discussing examples, particularly of student papers, is a good way to help them refine the model of academic writing they are carrying around in their heads. Showing, for example, that college papers should not a collection of “big words” about abstractions.
• The first time you go to the doctor’s office and discover that your doctor is about the age of your child, you will understand why adult writers can be initially reluctant, skeptical or even embarrassed to work with a younger teacher. The best way to deal with this is to get right down to business. As soon as the student sees that you know what you are doing, the age difference between you will not be important.
• If you look particularly young, and especially if you are also a woman, do not hesitate to use the trappings of authority for the first couple of classes until you have had the opportunity to demonstrate that you know what you are doing. Simple things like standing at the head of the classroom, dressing more formally than you might otherwise, presenting your degrees, and explaining the theoretical underpinning of your course design can all help establish your authority.
• Cultivate mutual respect for your respective areas of expertise: While you should not neglect your adult students’ maturity and experience, you should also be careful not to overreact to it. They may know a whole lot more than you do about raising children or financial planning. However, they are in your class to learn about writing. New teachers of adult students sometimes assume that since the students are adults, they must know “basic” stuff like grammar. These teachers are often embarrassed to bring up this material with adult students and skip or breeze past it, leaving the adult students who are hungry for this information confused and frustrated. While new teachers sometimes presume adult students know more than they do, new adult students often put their teachers on a pedestal. Disappointment or worse quickly follows as soon as the teacher discovers that adult students procrastinate and write run-on sentences just like younger students, and the student discovers the teacher making a spelling or grammar error when writing on the board. To help prevent this cycle of glorification and disillusionment, be frank about your weaknesses, forthright about your strengths, and use a variety of assessment strategies like the experience portfolio and minute papers to check your assumptions about what your students do and do not know both at the start of the quarter and during classes.
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