Students Emotions on assignments
I liked reading this study! It is refreshing to see a teacher recognizing how students might feel about this stuff. Multimodal projects or sharing things for others can be scary for students. For example, early in the text “Exploring First-Year Writing Students’ Emotional Responses Towards Multimodal Composing and Sharing Academic Work with Online Public Audience.” She talks about a student of hers. As stated, “Julie explained that she was stricken with doubt about her ability to construct a multimodal text. She seemed highly anxious about sharing her work with “real” audiences online.” I picked this out of the text because it is something that I can relate to.
When I first came to college, I had no idea what a multimodal text was. Even when I was reading this, I had to search for the term up in order to refresh my memory. I feel as though when students come to college, professors think students already knows the stuff that they are teaching. Not to mention a lot of the time they will glaze over the explanation or go over the topic passively since they guess that this term is already in your vocabulary.
This ends up causing several students within their classrooms to feel anxious or scared to do the assignment. To see Melanie Gagich taking both those factors into account leading to conducting a whole experiment on the emotion of students when they are given such a task is a unique sight to see but not an unwelcomed one. I loved seeing the results towards the end, where she showed the students’ emotion before and after the project. Seeing that many students were relieved to get the paper done while also showing some even excited to get their assignments shown was a nice thing to see was well.
People Hate Writing? Understandable
Another thing that I would like to address is how she brought to light the “hate” towards writing. When I read this part in the text it got me thinking. “Many have strong emotional reactions to writing. Some claim that they “hate” writing and dread the thought of sitting down to write, while others admit to (eventually) appreciating the writing process.” As an English Major, whenever I tell anyone that I always get the same response. People will always say: “Oh! I hate writing” or “I don’t know how you write all day.” There is always a negative emotion towards writing. Which is something I don’t really blame them for thinking.
Writing in an academic space can be tiring at times. When we write for school, there are all these rules that we must follow when writing a certain article. Mix those rules with constant rubrics as well as teachers’ expectations, and you get constant mental warfare. Even though I love writing I still get scared to turn papers in. In my opinion there really isn’t a correct way to grade writing or anything that has to do with thoughts or opinions. It could be fiction, non-fiction, informational, or whatever but it’s hard to put a grade on something that was created by another person’s brain!
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