Writing Assignments: A Relatively Emotional Experience of Learning to Write in one Baccalaureate Nursing Program

This article specifically reports findings from an interdisciplinary case study that explored classroom experiences of learning to write across one baccalaureate nursing degree program in Canada. A combination of rhetorical genre and situated learning theories and institutional ethnography methods were used to help document student and instructor experiences of learning to write two recurring writing assignments called the scholarly paper and journal of reflective practice, which students composed in each semester of their program. Data included 38 classroom/student observations, 22 assignment instruction documents, and 39 voluntary, semi-structured interviews with 34 students and 5 instructors from 4 courses. Interviews focused primarily on perceived enablers and constraints during the process of learning to compose these two recurring genres. Findings revealed that learning to write was a dynamic relational and emotional experience for students as well as instructors. Enablers and challenges were directly influenced by the student/instructor relationship and the degree of competitive/cooperative relationships in the learning environment. Factors that enabled students’ learning to write included peer mentoring programs, where lower-year students learn to write from upper-year students, and instructional rapport with nurse educators and professional nurses, where students learn to write content from a nurse with experience in the content area. Challenges to students’ writing included developmentally inappropriate assignment design and writing supports, inconsistent instructor preferences and expectations, students’ inability to identify and articulate their own writing needs, and students’ tendency to apply the same writing style or strategies to different, evolving genres across the years. An unexpected finding was that students across all years self-reported reading deficiencies that impeded their ability to read assignment descriptions and to differentiate genres. The importance of this surprise finding is that it appeared to have an adverse affect on self-directed learning and students’ desire to communicate with instructors about learning to write the scholarly paper or journal of reflective practice. The article concludes with a discussion of ways that relational cultural theory and narrative pedagogy have better potential than rhetorical genre theory to explain the emotional dynamics that constellate around writing assignments and why the student-instructor relationship is a critical component to writing-to-learn/learning-to-write approaches, especially in writing intensive curricula like this one. Participants’ suggestions for improving writing assignments and instruction are in the appendix.

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