Pygmalion or Golem? -- Writing Students and Self-Efficacy

The Parable of the Mote and Beam, Domenico Fetti, ~1619, (c) Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sinned Against and Sinning

I feel that somewhere, sometime, we've all sinned. We've all sinned in criticizing, mocking, deriding students' work. It's a mote-beam, problem, really, as we forget where we come from, where our writing was when we were first year students. Many of us in the teaching professions also come from different economic and literacy backgrounds that can't compare to those of our students today. This is certainly true for many students who attend community colleges such as mine, many coming from lower SES environments, struggling schools, homes with few literacy experiences other than those of mass media and family lore. I don't devalue these last two discourse environments, but too seldom are these discourses are undervalued in the first year course, many instructors adamant that the course is designed to inculcate those middle class values (Bloom) of academic discourse (Bartholomae) and stripping away the deficient, defective language patterns of working- and poverty-class multicultural students. The debate of borderland language -- coming from the non-academic linguistic worlds into the academic world -- is well discussed elsewhere, but what has disturbed me most recently is that sense of derision, even public denunciation of students and their seeming [sic] universal lack of writing/speaking/mechanical skills. "My students can't even write a sentence after 12 weeks!" is not uncommon to hear offices among professionals. To be fair, teaching (and learning) is rarely a stress-free experience, but my attention here is my concern as to how our own attitudes about our students are in fact setting up self-fulfilling prophecies in the writing classroom, resulting in the instructor's increasing stress and perhaps depression, but also an environment unfavorable for real, sustained learning for a human science such as writing.

Golem Among Us

Susan McLeod writes on the Pygmalion and Golem effects, the former with which we're more familiar through study and quaint musical movies. But we're also too familiar with the Golem effect, even if we haven't read so much about that. Yet we're familiar with popular representations of this from such films as Precious and ... as a horror extreme, Carrie. Yeah, too far fetched, I know. But we know what the consistent derision and labeling does to our own spirits, and need to be aware as to how our conscious and unconscious attitudes are interpreted by students. McLeod explains, for example, the Golem effect may be more powerful than the Pygmalion effect, and we shouldn't doubt why.

Consider where our students come from when they enter a community college: they sometimes come to campus by infrequent public transportation, sometimes borrowing a family car or being dropped off by parents or spouses; they are often already in debt and are faced with overpriced textbooks that put them further in debt; too many are in developmental classes, sometimes for multiple semesters, without receiving any college credit -- feeling that all that time in those classroom seats isn't getting them closer to a degree or certificate; many come from households who speak something other than "standard" American English, several haven't read a book in years (if ever), and many do not have access to Internet resources at home; they work long hours to pay their bills, are often sleep-deprived, often have children to care for, and find it difficult to create sustained peer study groups with so little social consistency on community college campuses; and they have little rhetorical efficacy in their own student experience on campus -- administrators make all their decisions for them.

And then a writing instructor wonders why some work isn't submitted on time, or appears not to have been edited half a dozen times to eliminate "errors," or a revision looks very similar to an original, or the student hasn't read the assigned text for this day's discussion. Instructors, failing to consider the real lives of our community students, find it easy to blame the student for her deficiencies. After all, "everyone can speak English, right?" and "everyone can learn to write, right?" I wonder -- even for myself -- when I see a student fail to utilize a strategy in his writing that "I know we covered in class," if it's so much the student's deficiency and instead my own lack of effective instruction presentation and assessment of learning before we go to another strategy. In other words, I might identify the mote in a student's eye and fail to see the beam in my own. I'm supposed to be the expert, the one who knows the disciplinary theory, best classroom practices, assessment strategies, and so forth. In an overcrowded writing classroom of 25 students, should I label students so quickly as "deficient" when I haven't in fact seen students' practice work, consulted with each, ascertained understanding?

McLeod explains how this works in the writing classroom:

To understand how and why teacher expectations can affect student motivation both positively and negatively in the writing classroom, it is useful to look at the phenomenon through the lens of achievement motivation and attribution theory (Weiner). Attribution theory explains achievement behavior in terms of the perceived causes for outcomes: based on their experience, students develop a set of beliefs about the reasons for their own success or failure. They might attribute an outcome such as a good grade on a paper according to whether or not they thought it was due to internal or external factors ("I'm good at writing" vs. "I was lucky this time"), or according to factors over which they either had some control or had no control ("I worked hard" vs. "The teacher must have liked this piece"). Teachers also form attributions to explain student outcomes. (372)

We forget, I believe, that our students come not only from literacy-deprived environments, but often from socially healthy environments where they are valued for their character and contributions to relationships, instead of shallow environments where physical appearances, this season's shoe styles, or even music tastes are validated. These latter validations are so ephemeral for adolescents (and post-adolescents) that when something as personal and intimate as sharing the writing experience with this stranger instructor is a very high risk activity. And then for the student to have her paper returned with more red strike-throughs and 20th century alchemical editorial marks -- she has yet to disassociate her work from her person. She feels that this harsh criticism of her work means a criticism of her.

Sitting Alone

Last week I was working in our Writing Center and noticed a young man sitting alone at a table, staring at a paper returned from his professor. The student had opportunities to ask for help from the center tutors, but hadn't. Neither had he really lifted a pen to write. As I walked from one student to another, I noticed this student simply staring at his paper, an empty expression on his face, his hands in his lap. I finally intruded and asked if he needed help. I learned quickly that he's a multicultural student enrolled in the first semester course. He said meekly that he was working on "fixing" his last paper and I asked to look at it. Two pages, and the first page alone had probably 80 red marks on it. I didn't bother looking at the second page. Each mark noted some mechanical "error" or stylistic "error" and nowhere was a comment on the student writer's ideas; not one positive comment anywhere. [An aside that comes to mind now: I used to play golf when I lived in Memphis. I never was good at it. I was glad when my clubs were stolen from my truck because it gave me the excuse not to purchase new ones. But each time I went out to the course, my golfing buddies would only criticize something about my stance or swing, etc. A game became joyless because of unnecessary competition; warm sunny days in Memphis's beautiful parks became drudgery. I think this student felt something like this when he looked at his paper]. Here, the student was labeled a Golem -- deficient, his language broken, though of course in spoken conversation I could carry on a perfectly intelligible discussion and as we worked through the red marks, he was able to identify many of his choices. We also discussed his ideas and some clever comparisons he had made and one sentence that made me laugh because of his astute observation of American mainstream.

Empathy and Self-Efficacy

McLeod alludes to Mike Rose's experiences recounted in Lives on the Boundary when -- after a series of negative labeling -- he concluded that he didn't belong in the academy. McLeod calls upon writing instructors to exercise sincere empathy with our students. Somewhere, that's not in the learning objectives of the course, though, nor have I seen it ever mentioned in job descriptions, nor has the question of empathy been asked in my participation on job search committees. Empathy, of course, requires risk on our parts -- exposing something within us that others can take advantage of. Empathy also requires sharing our best qualities with (often) adolescents who might not have developed empathy yet. Empathy also can be seen as weakness by some who want to take short cuts when they can. I know this. But as Rose and McLeod point out, we have little other choice. We must consider our writing students first as anxious, often frustrated, too often under-prepared students who enter the writing classroom needing to un-learn many ideas of writing, needing to un-learn their antipathy based on secondary writing that sometimes is designed to stifle the writer's voice for the sake of standardized testing. We must change our labels from seeing students as Golem and more as colleagues, team-mates, fellow-scholars-in-learning.

Critical pedagogy is one of the means to build an empathetic writing course, one where the student's literacy and language experiences are seen as expert material to guide the discussion, analysis, and writing for all of us. The banking model by definition labels students as deficient and broken. Asking students to inform me about their language use and then finding means of centering their expertise into the course material changes the label from deficient to expert. We should also remember that the writing we expect is in fact very different (I hope it is very different) from the writing students have been practicing for 12 years. Unlike moving from pre-Algebra to Algebra, our discipline's understanding of writing can be worlds apart from the legislated curriculum in struggling public secondary schools. They are often entering new waters. Using new labels such as "learner," "student," "emerging writer," "occasionally brilliant rhetorician" and sharing these labels with our students will bring a sea-change in the course, the classroom, and in the department overall.

swskeptic. "Vintage Spectacles." Flicr.com, 2012. Web. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/swskeptic/8321428854/>

Resources

Fetti, Domenico. "Parable of the Mote and the Beam." New York City: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1619. Painting. <http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/436301>

McLeod, Susan H. "Pygmalion or Golem? Teacher Affect and Efficacy." College Composition and Communication (1995): 369-386. PDF.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared. New York City: The Free Press, Macmillan, Inc, 1989. Print.

Weiner, Bernard. An Attributional Theory of Motivation and Emotion. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986. Print.


Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
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