THE MEANING OF THE MEANINGFUL WRITING PROJECT

INTRODUCTION — WHY MEANINGFUL WRITING?

Normally, I don't have the opportunity to write about a topic I'm interested in. Also it gave me a chance to be creative with format and wording.

— Electrical engineering major

I was able to pick a topic that speaks to me related to government on a personal level as opposed to working toward the professor's topical expectations.

— Government and politics major

This is a subject that is important to me and that I chose independently. Hopefully, this will help me with my future employment as well.

— Environmental science major

When asked to describe the most meaningful writing projects they wrote as undergraduates, over seven hundred seniors across three very different institutions — a private, urban Catholic university (undergraduate enrollment: ~15,700); a private, urban university known for experiential learning (undergraduate enrollment: ~17,400); and a public R1 institution (undergraduate enrollment: ~21,000) — told us stories of the powerful roles writing plays in their personal, academic, and professional lives. These stories are at the heart of The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education; our research is grounded in students' experiences and the many ways they make meaning of those experiences.

Our effort to better understand students' meaningful writing experiences draws, in part, on Herrington and Curtis (2000), who recommend that writing researchers "look across writing tasks and across the curriculum at the range of kinds of tasks we set for students, and at how students use this writing" (85). We took up this charge in the primary research questions that motivated our work:

• What are the qualities of meaningful writing experiences as reported by seniors at three different types of institutions?

• What might students' perceptions of their meaningful writing experiences reveal about students' learning?

• What might faculty who offer the opportunities for students to gain meaningful writing experiences conclude about the teaching of writing in and across the disciplines?

To address these questions, over a two-year period of data collection and another two years of analysis, we engaged in a variety of strategies we describe later in this chapter. Our analysis of the data consisted of identifying patterns of similarity and difference within and across student participants and faculty responses, a grounded-theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967) we believe yields new understandings of student learning and the contexts and teaching methods in which it thrives.

In brief, here's what we found: meaningful writing projects offer students opportunities for agency; for engagement with instructors, peers, and materials; and for learning that connects to previous experiences and passions and to future aspirations and identities. Students described the power of personal connection, the thrill of immersion in thought, writing and research, and the satisfaction of knowing the work they produced could be applicable, relevant, and real world. Faculty who teach courses in which meaningful writing takes place often deliberately build these qualities into their teaching and curriculum, expressing their goals and values for writing through specific practices.

We came to these findings through a process at times fraught with methodological, practical, and analytical challenges. But we also felt great excitement as we learned about students' meaningful writing and learning experiences. We will offer a detailed description of our research methods in this chapter, but we want to note here why the concept of meaningfulness is important to us and how we developed it in this project.

Because all three of us are engaged in the enterprise of supporting writing at our universities — and have made careers in doing so, both in writing centers and in writing-across-the-curriculum programs — in designing this project we worked to keep a big-picture question in mind: what kinds of writing experiences are undergraduate students really having? However, rather than collect a list of assignments and students' texts in response to those assignments, we wanted to learn whether undergraduate students found their writing experiences rewarding, instructive, significant, or meaningful. We chose to ask about meaningful writing and invited students to name and describe a meaningful writing project even if it had occurred several semesters previous to our asking (and students could offer this description with ease, it seems, although no one had ever asked them before) but also to describe why a project was meaningful. This question was remarkably generative. In order to call something meaningful, we must have an opportunity to reflect on its significance to us or to make meaning through reflection (Yancey 1998). Over seven hundred students told us they truly understood the question as they focused on what was meaningful for them — not for their parents, instructors, or employers.

Students' accounts of meaningful writing run counter to the narratives dominating discussion of higher education — not only currently but historically (e.g., the "Johnny can't write" phenomenon of the 1970s and its periodic reoccurrences). One view is that students are "academically adrift" (Arum and Roksa 2011), reporting less time spent reading and writing than their predecessors, and those who make it to graduation face dim job prospects and crushing levels of student-loan debt (Grafton 2011). At the same time, more and more pressure is on institutions to assess outcomes, whether driven by outside accreditors, legislative mandate, or program improvement.

This strong narrative of crisis and the assessment methodologies used at all levels of education, however, often leave out the study of "incomes" (Guerra 2008) or an understanding of what students bring to their learning experiences and the important meanings they might derive. To date, few studies of students' writing across the disciplines, especially on the scale of what we have done, have made it a concurrent goal to consider how students use (or do not use) those "funds of knowledge" (Moje et al. 2004) or how they "repurpose" out-of-school knowledge (Roozen 2009, 2010) in disciplinary learning and writing.

In terms of book-length studies, Beaufort (2007), Carroll (2002) Herrington and Curtis (2000), Sommers and Saltz...