In our reading for today, Mike Rose accurately writes that “people don’t proceed through problem situations…without some set of internalized instructions to the self, some program, some course of action that, even roughly, takes goals and possible paths to that goal into consideration” (5). This might seem rather obvious and can seemingly be applied to quite literally any action, let alone what would fall under conventional notions of “problem situations.” But it is especially interesting to think about these internalized instructions when writing is the particular problem situation that a student faces. As I mentioned in my post last week, and what has become a primary theme in much of my thinking about writing pedagogy, is that the identity and associations of the writer has, for many students, become an ingrained force that is both challenged in our specific curriculum but nevertheless held onto with steadfast determination.

Writing is, for many of my students, an unfortunate but necessary part of their grade. Whether they see themselves as writers or not is largely reliant on how much they associate writing with homework and assignment completion. There is probably a duality to what “writer” means to them: the first writer is the temporary writer, a writer solely in the act of working through and completing an assigned prompt or entry, and the second is the writer is who a writer naturally, whose identity is somehow enmeshed with an entire culture and history of chosen or gifted people. When I prompt an alternative to these two, a kind of middle ground in which everyone is already a writer and fully capable of practicing/evolving their writing, the idea doesn’t seem to hold much weight for them. If I say, for instance, that social media posting is just another form of communication and “writing,” they are hesitant. Again, the stranglehold of the schooling they’ve had their entire lives.

So when they actually sit down to write, I imagine that their process would involve these kinds of internalized routines, which inevitably serves as a guide that reminds them, you’re only a writer right now, for this assignment.