Anne Reznicek's Launch Post - Making the Transition from school to the workplace starts in college
In Chapter 8, Chris Anson and L. Lee Forsberg talk about how they decided to take the initiative to start cases studies of students at University of Minnesota who gained internships in fields related to writing. They followed six students who were studying English or Journalism-related studies who had internships in the Minneapolis area. The internships for writing were with big companies, small companies, newspapers, and other areas. The students came enrolled in an interview class with the reseachers, and participated in a workshop type class where they received help and advice from the researchers on both their writing and the workforce rather than creating a structured classroom environment. They then had the students participate in interviews with the researchers, conduct self-recorded monologues, and keep journals about their emotions and experiences in the workplace with their internship.
During the beginning of their internships, expressed in their student interviews and monologues, the participants complained of frustration and confusion, because they felt that they were going from a highly structured place (school) with structured guidelines and expectations, to a completely different setting with little structure or explicit expectations (internship). They complained that their superiors would give them little to no guidance on what they wanted from their writing assignments, and would then in turn give them little to no feedback on pieces that they did write and did not have them redo. "[The supervisor] needed three releases done and in five hours I didn't even finish one. I felt totally incompetent by the end of the day. [The supervisor] didn't seem to think it was a big deal. She said I shouldn't be so hard on myself - that it would come in time. This comment was no help at all. ... What do they actually want? What is the most important part of the release? ... Am I doing this correctly?" (Peeples, 398).
Anson and Forsberg discuss how much these problems arise because the "contexts, writers and texts are in a dynamic state of evolution and mutual influence holds much promise for a fuller understanding of what Brandt (1986) has called the "public conditions" through which writers in professional settings must try to share meaning"(Peeples, 390). It is important to understand the context of every work environment in a specific sense and in a whole sense. The working environment is entirely different from the educational setting. How are professional writers supposed to "share meaning" with each other their company in the business world if they don't understand the setting, the environment and the context in the first place?
I think the biggest problem that professional writers run into when delving into the professional world is when they expect to be treated the same way they are treated in the educational world. Educators, in my opinion, tend to coddle students in the sense that provide great structure and "hand holding" while going through each exercise to increase their students' education and experience. Whether this structure comes from the educator wanting the students to get specific experience out of the exercise, specific skills, or have specific personal limitations that do not allow them to accept a broader interpretation of their expectations, the end results is that students have to come to expect their every step to be gently guided from point A to point Z.
It is obvious that the student interns are going through this very same expectation crisis while in their internships. They have never had opportunities to explore their own creativity, to explore their own interpretations of the expectations and really never to explore their own intelligence. Their confidence in their "intelligence" and writing ability is coddled by the very specific expectations of the education system. Thus, they grow frustrated with their employers and work situations and experience upsetting emotions.
In order to change this, educators at the university level need to change their system of feedback and grading. In addition to giving assignments, educators need to give students more freedom and challenge them to think of their own interpretations of the assignment, and then have them be able to back up their reasons for their interpretation and execution of the assignment based on skills taught and practiced earlier on. These types of "systems analysis" and other classes are discussed in more detail in Patrick Dias, Aviva Freedman, et al's paper in Peeples on pg. 423. But as participant Rachel said at the end of her internship, this "rulebook" of guidelines and expectations that she had anticipated on finding when first starting her internship was actually found through "(a) trial and error, (b) learning to read the context in which she was writing, and (c) both unconscious and conscious assimilation" (Peeples, 404). This is why, I think, that restructuring the way we organize education at the university level will benefit professional writers going into the workplace, because they will have already learned to adapt and to look for and identify different contexts.
Anne Reznicek
Team Protagoras
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