Beginnings and Endings

Sharing a draft of the intro and conclusion for my sabbatical project, "A Healthier Approach to Writing"

Over the last few weeks, I completed the initial draft of the manuscript I’ve been working on during my sabbatical—and just in time! It’s nearly the end of the year, which means I’ll be getting back to teaching very soon. (Already having dreams of being in the classroom again!)

I will still need to work on revising several chapters in early 2026, but I’ll also be sending out proposals to various presses. It’s been awhile since I’ve tried to publish, but I’m fairly proud of the manuscript, so…fingers crossed!

If anyone is interested in reading the full thing, please reach out (especially if you’re also willing to offer some notes!)

Thanks for reading, everyone—and happy holidays!

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Introduction

When I first started teaching composition at Delaware County Community College in 2010, I thought the central purpose of my role was to present students with provocative critical-thinking challenges, or to “induce intellectual struggle,” as I liked to think of it. By grappling with complex ideas, I believed, both via writing and discussion, students became better thinkers, and that was what college was all about.

I was surprised, frustrated, and disheartened by how hard it was to get students to play along. In my own college experience, debating thorny arguments and figuring out just what I thought and how to best say it had been exhilarating. Intimidating at times, and often exhausting, but ultimately rewarding and satisfying. Why weren’t these students up for it? Why did it not appear, to them, to be worth the effort? Why did so, so many of them give up at the first sign that what I was asking them to do might be harder than anything they had done before?

I didn’t believe it was because they were “lazy” or because they “didn’t want to learn.” Something was motivating them to give college a shot, and for many of them, they were the first in their family to do so. They were taking on a good deal of risk (and debt) as they walked through the doors, with no guarantee that it would work out for them. Nearly all my students had one or more part-time jobs, and some worked full-time while also taking four or five classes. They were hard-working, and they knew how to do hard things. So why, when college turned out to be hard, was it something that so many gave up on, before really giving themselves a chance to adapt?

As I got to know my students during those first years on the job, I began to get a sense of what was going on, including the major differences between my own college experience and what many of my students were going through. I didn’t believe that the contrast was primarily generational or class-based; I wasn’t that much older than most of my students, and I also had been a first-generation college student from a working-class family. It had more to do with our earlier experiences with schooling. Like many people who end up pursuing an academic career, I had been a fairly nerdy kid. Reading and writing were things I did for pleasure (as well as to cope with stress), and so I did them often, developing strong literacy skills as a result. School happened to place a high value on such skills. So even during my high school years, when I struggled socially to “fit in,” I nevertheless found school work to be essentially affirming. I was good at it. Sometimes it was dull and tedious, but I could do it. It made me feel competent. By the time I got to college, I was eager to show what I could do, to learn to do more, and to use my creativity and curiosity to propel me forward. I was also lucky enough to attend a college where I had a ton of freedom in choosing the classes I wanted to take. The challenges I was taking on were largely challenges that I wanted to take on–they weren’t merely hoops that needed to be jumped through to fulfill requirements.

For most of my students, their experience in school had been quite different. They are a diverse lot, so it’s hard to generalize, but for many, the academic side of school had never been the affirming experience that it was for me. Perhaps they had a class here or there that played to their strengths, or a teacher or two who saw something in them. Perhaps they excelled in sports or the arts or formed some great friendships, and those experiences gave them some positive memories. But much more common were stories of feeling restricted, bored, judged, and labeled. School work was largely about doing what one was told: completing formulaic assignments, doing well on tests, and teacher-pleasing. The things that they were good at or most interested in had no place or value in school, and so many did just enough to get by, and looked for pleasure and fulfillment in other aspects of their lives. Others found that no matter how hard they tried, it never seemed to be “good enough,” and they concluded that they just weren’t “book smart.”

For such students, the start of college doesn’t feel so much like the “start of a new intellectual adventure” as it does an intimidating, but necessary, endeavor that they hope they can survive. Some may approach it more optimistically, hoping that college will be more meaningful, inspiring, and relevant than their prior schooling, but even then, underneath that hopefulness, lurks the fear that it will be more of the same: tedium, drudgery, judgment, feeling inadequate. A book that opened my eyes to this fear was Rebecca Cox’s The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another (2009). Cox’s interviews with students document how common it is for community college students to expect failure due to their prior experiences with schooling, class-based ideas about who college is for, and the inability of many faculty and staff to help students feel welcomed and “at home” on campus. “The many students who seriously doubted their ability to succeed, however, were anxiously waiting for their shortcomings to be exposed, at which point they would be stopped from pursuing their goals” (25). This “fragile and fearful” mindset is as much (if not more) an impediment to learning and student success than any skill deficiencies. Every assignment, test, or even act of classroom participation threatens to confirm such students’ fear: that they aren’t cut out for college; that they can’t succeed here; that this dream of upward mobility through education is not for them. Such persistent fear of failure and of being “found out” as an “imposter” can lead to a variety of self-defeating behaviors: not turning in assignments, not showing up for exams, skipping class. I believe that these are more often the result of an unconscious strategy to avoid the shame of being “exposed” as “lacking” than the result of laziness or flippancy.

These were the students walking into my classroom as I, a new professor, devised ways to “induce intellectual struggle.” Little did I know how likely they were to perceive such struggle as confirmation that they didn’t belong in college. And I had no strategies in mind for helping them reframe their struggles or believe in the possibility of their own success. I needed to learn much more about who they were, where they were coming from, what they were dealing with, so that I could reinvent my teaching in a way that would help foster a new way of seeing themselves and their relationship to school.

While some of what I learned came from reading books by scholars like Cox, I learned much more directly from students themselves. By inviting them to talk and write about their prior school experiences and other personal challenges, I developed a sense of the emotional baggage that many of them were carrying as they embarked on their paths as college students, as well as how that baggage often got in the way of them achieving their goals. In addition to the myriad ways that their prior schooling has made them feel disempowered, disenchanted, and “less than,” so many of them had stories of personal trauma and family crises, often as the result of things like domestic violence, sexual assault, addiction, homelessness, incarceration, or mental illness. As students opened up to me (and often each other) in their writing, I began to see how “struggle” was something they were very familiar with, and not something that I needed to artificially introduce into their lives. I also began to see how grappling with their struggles in their writing–making struggle meaningful–was a process that fully engaged them and often resulted in personal growth, healing, and powerful writing.

One particular prompt that I often presented to students, which I called the “Silver Lining Essay,” asked them to tell a story about a negative experience while trying to put a “positive spin” on the events–to reframe something “bad” by emphasizing the “good” that came out of it. When explaining this assignment to a friend, who is also a licensed therapist, she responded by saying it sounded a lot like “narrative therapy”--something I had never heard of. This conversation turned out to be a fortuitous planting of a seed: What sort of other therapeutic writing techniques might be out there, and how might they be adapted as exercises and assignments for first-year college students in composition courses? What would a writing class look like if we placed “mental wellness” at the center? Could doing so help students deal with their school-related anxiety, fear of failure, feelings of inadequacy, past traumas, and other stressors that so often get in the way of learning, growth, and student success? Could it also help them transform their relationship with writing–to see it as a useful tool to help them manage difficult feelings and arrive at personal insights, rather than an anxiety-ridden chore fraught with the threat of judgment?

Such were the questions that prompted the research and writing that led to this book, as well as a radical overhaul of how I teach writing. Recent trends have confirmed, for me, that teaching writing with an emphasis on student well-being is necessary more now than ever. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm were all on the rise among young people. And for many students, the pandemic made everything much worse, bringing with it more fear, trauma, loss, and social isolation. Over the last few years, I’ve had many students self-disclose their own mental health challenges. Many of these students have been impressively driven and skilled writers, a fact that they attribute to the role that journaling, poetry, and other forms of writing played in their therapy. They had experience that told them that writing–in the right context–can make them feel better and think more clearly. When it came time for these students to write for school, that experience transferred–they believed in themselves as meaning-makers.

I know many would argue that helping students manage emotional and psychological barriers to learning is better left to counselors and therapists–not writing instructors. Of course, a mental-wellness focused composition course is no substitute for actual therapy, and we must be careful not to give students the impression that what we are doing in class is therapy (or a viable replacement for it). Students who are struggling with serious symptoms should be encouraged to seek out the help of mental health professionals–not to attempt to “write their way” out of pain all on their own.

I am not advocating that professors “play therapist” with their students, nor do I condone turning our classrooms into “group therapy” sessions. But I also would argue that therapy and education do share some common goals–such as the examination of core beliefs about oneself and the world–and that it should come as no surprise that therapeutic techniques might also prove useful in education. If a student has, among their core beliefs, one that says, “I’m a bad writer,” very little can be done to help that student grow until that belief has been challenged. If a student is too anxious to share their work due to the fear of a bad grade, how can we even begin to help unless we address that fear first? Teaching writing effectively necessarily involves more than just teaching skills and enforcing standards–it involves teaching writers to believe in themselves, to believe in the process, and to believe that all the effort involved is worthwhile–that they have ideas and stories worth sharing and that it can be meaningful and rewarding to do so.

To do any of this well, I believe, requires us to remind ourselves that we’re not just teaching writing; we’re teaching human beings. That means realizing that their health and well-being are a crucial part of their capacity to learn. If we are invested in their learning, we must also be invested in their wellness. Teachers are not therapists, but both professions are, in my view, caring professions, and thus ought to be practiced with compassion. Professors Melissa Dennihy and Zivah Perel Katz, in their book on “innovative, inclusive, and compassionate pedagogy,” make this point eloquently in the context of re-evaluating students’ needs post-pandemic: “Post-pandemic pedagogy reimagines college classrooms as flexible, accessible, and inclusive spaces that foreground students’ needs, including their need for compassion from their instructors. As such, faculty approach students with care and compassion and seek to engage and rebuild classroom communities using culturally relevant and other innovative pedagogies, while also acknowledging the day-to-day challenges and crises of our students as human beings with lives outside of our classroom” (7). The need for a “pedagogy of compassion,” so clear during the pandemic, persists after it. We are still in the midst of a mental health epidemic in this country, and many of our students face daily threats from a government that seems focused on stripping the rights of immigrants, transgender people, low-income families, and other vulnerable groups. Helping our students thrive should involve empowering them with the skills to manage the stress of such threats, and to meaningfully make sense of and resist such threats. It should also involve examining and eliminating any of our attitudes or policies about education that are inflexible, arbitrary, or judgmental, and that unnecessarily add stress and discouragement to our students’ complex and challenging lives.

Long before I started researching and adapting therapeutic writing techniques into my classes, I made various other changes that helped students feel less stressed and more empowered. The most impactful of these changes, I believe, was pivoting away from points and rubrics when it came to assessing student writing, and embracing a holistic grading system that focuses more on incentivizing the behaviors that lead to growth (showing up, practicing, creating, revising, collaborating) and less on my own subjective judgments about the relative value of students’ drafts. As a result, students feel more in control (and thus less anxious) about their grades–since grades are straightforwardly tied to things they can do–and far less worried that their writing won’t be “good enough.” This opens up space for students to be able to take more risks and experiment in their writing, knowing that if something doesn’t “work,” there will be no penalty–only guidance about how to move forward or alter their approach. Not only is this good for students’ mental health, but it’s good for their writing. As with any creative endeavor, practitioners need the freedom to play around with new techniques, new genres, and new forms–often with messy results–in order to grow and to produce truly original work. When looming assessments are too narrow and/or too high-stakes, students typically produce writing that is more generic, formulaic, and far less interesting due to the inhibitions and self-censorship that understandably arise.

Other changes have included giving students more choice in determining their subjects and genres (also allowing them to modify prompts or invent their own), giving them ample time in class to write and revise, and generously extending deadlines when students need even more time due to unexpected obstacles, emergencies, or crises. While some instructors might fear that such changes could lead to a decline in accountability, from my experience, the result has been not so much a “decline” as a “shift.” When students aren’t writing for a grade or to please their instructor, they start writing for themselves. They develop their own goals for each project, taking back ownership over their work. They realize that authoring something means that they–not I–are the ultimate authority over their own writing, and they get to make the final decisions about how a piece should evolve from one draft to the next. Thus, students become accountable to themselves as authors, striving to produce work of which they can be genuinely proud.

Instead of “the inducer of struggle,” I now see my role more primarily in terms of support, guidance, and encouragement. I’m a writing coach, not a critic or an editor. I don’t itemize mistakes, flaws, or weaknesses; instead I frequently offer words of appreciation and admiration, and when desired, helpful suggestions. I try not to start my sentences with “You need to…,” instead using phrases like, “You might want to try…”

I’m not interested in being a gate-keeper or an enforcer of so-called “standards.” I’m a teacher, which means that I’m committed to practices that facilitate learning, not those that inhibit it (or reduce it to merely “learning how to follow directions”). We learn best not when we’re striving for the best possible grade or striving to please an authority figure, and certainly not when we’re paralyzed by a fear of failure, convinced of our own deficiencies, or coerced into work that we don’t find meaningful. We learn best when we’re intrinsically motivated to learn; when we believe we’re capable of learning; and when we’re both encouraged and supported along the way to try new things–especially hard things–that have the potential to be meaningful and transformative for us. This book is an attempt to describe a model of composition pedagogy that can facilitate that kind of learning.

This involves not only helping students experience true authorship over their own work in a supportive environment, but also helping them experience writing as more than just the production of thesis statements and supporting arguments. It involves helping students see writing as a process that can help them deal with the chaos of the world and of one’s own feelings–a practice that can make reality more manageable and comprehensible. It can also help with clarifying to oneself and others one’s own core values, and serve as an opportunity to connect with others who share our values and inspire them (and ourselves) to take action in alignment with those values. This means understanding how writing can be an important part of what Dr. Pooja Lakshmin calls “real self-care”--the reflective work that we all need to do to live a life that is purposeful, sustainable, and meets our emotional needs.

In the first chapter, I provide an overview of what I believe to be the most widespread causes of mental health challenges impacting young people today. While the causes of mental illness are too complex and diverse (and beyond my expertise) to cover comprehensively here, I focus less on risk factors that are specific to individuals (traumatic experiences, genetic predispositions) and more on those factors that are present in nearly every young person’s environment these days (traditional schooling and technology). I argue that although many of the features of traditional schooling have long become normalized in Western culture, they are nevertheless frequently damaging to the mental health of young people. I also argue that smartphones, social media, and other forms of digital entertainment have become highly addictive, unhealthy coping strategies for young people, further exacerbating the psychological challenges inflicted by traditional schools.

In the second chapter, I outline a series of pedagogical guidelines that writing teachers can adopt in order to challenge the norms of traditional schooling and create healthier learning environments in their courses. This includes alternatives to some of the most damaging aspects of traditional schooling (testing, grading, coercion, authoritarianism, etc.) as well as specific practices that can help students rediscover the things that can make writing pleasurable and meaningful in a more liberated context.

In chapter three, I explore how diverse therapeutic journaling techniques can be adapted for a variety of in-class writing exercises. I discuss how reflecting, in writing, on lived experience–especially our most painful and traumatic experiences–has been shown to lead to positive health outcomes (both physical and mental), when practiced under the right circumstances. I also show how journaling about one’s writing process can help one work through common emotional blocks that get in the way of one’s creativity and productivity. Finally, I examine how reflective writing about one’s own learning can help empower students to take ownership over their own educational journey and to hold themselves accountable for their own growth and learning.

Chapter four examines how narrative-based writing projects can be used in composition courses to help students gain a sense of coherence and meaning over their most difficult and disruptive experiences, or to express their gratitude and commitment to the people, places, practices, and values that give their lives meaning. Special attention is paid to how instructors can best guide students through the construction and revision of such narratives, in order to promote healing, learning, and autonomy. I also present some ideas here about how students can be encouraged to share and respond to each other’s stories.

Finally, in chapter five, I show how evidence-based writing projects can be crafted that prompt students to use research in order to improve their own behavioral patterns and/or address problems that they see around them in their communities and schools. These projects are meant to provide an experience of research that is not merely academic, but also personally meaningful, and an experience of writing that has a real-world impact in people’s lives. This chapter also includes a section on how literature-based writing projects (and the discussions that accompany them) can utilize some of the principles of bibliotherapy in order to shift the emphasis away from examining literary texts as “aesthetic puzzles” and towards the use of such texts as catalysts for a deeper examination of our own thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about a diverse array of human themes. The goal here is not to formulate and defend a “correct” (or even “plausible”) interpretation of a literary work, but to answer the following questions: What can this text (and a rich discussion of it) reveal to me about myself and the world around me? What new view can I discover by reading, discussing, and writing about this work?

In the conclusion, I try to contextualize how this approach to writing can address the “panic” that has emerged in the wake of AI-powered large language models. In order to address the question of “How can we get students to write when a machine can do it for them?”, I suggest we consider a shift away from thinking of composition as “document production” and towards seeing it as an ongoing practice that generates experiences of discovery and connection. When the purpose of writing is no longer about producing a document that conforms to a set of externally imposed expectations, but about discovering new insights about things that matter, while also connecting to real readers in the real world, the value of doing the writing ourselves becomes visible, making it far more likely that we’ll find the motivation to do so.

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Conclusion

When I tell people that I’m an English professor these days, the most common question that I receive is, “So how are you getting students to actually do their own writing now that there’s AI?” Before AI, the questions tended to focus more on how did I get students to read or stay engaged in class when they were constantly glued to their devices: texting, scrolling on social media, watching video after video after video. These concerns about technology are important, but I think that both within educational circles and in the culture at large, we are not quite coming at them in the best way.

There are bigger questions that I believe we need to be asking. What is it about writing (or the kind of writing we teach–or the way we teach it) that makes so many students want to avoid it at all costs? What is it about so many of our classrooms–or the way our whole education system is structured and managed–that our students are so eager to “check out” by way of their devices? I hope that this book has provided some insights about these questions, as well as what individual instructors can do to help students begin to see writing differently, to experience more freedom and empowerment in the classroom, and to use writing as a way to find meaning and purpose in their lives.

The panic around AI may turn out to be productive if we use it as an opportunity to rethink what exactly we want students to get out of composition courses, as well as what students themselves would like to get out of these courses. If we continue to take a product-centered approach to composition–meaning our assessments focus more on the production of a certain kind of document, even if we simultaneously claim to be “teaching process”--then students will continue to be tempted to use AI to generate those products. And why wouldn’t they? If well-designed documents lead to good grades, and good grades are what school is all about, and a machine can produce a well-designed document in seconds, then why not take the most direct path to the goal? Why spend infinitely more time and labor producing something “original” if it’s unlikely to be (according to the rubrics that determine value in such scenarios) as good as what one could produce by simply prompting an AI to do the work?

I, like all writing teachers, see the value in going through that laborious and messy process of generating original writing (though when it comes to proofreading and editing, I think there is absolutely no reason not to let AI help us–and our students–do the heavy lifting), but I think that if we want our students to see it, we need to back off from the potential hypocrisy of claiming to value process but only (or mostly) assessing products. This seems to me to be the only way to get students out of the mindset that the goal of a writing class is to produce drafts that earn good grades. It is also necessary, I believe, to liberate students from the fear of “making mistakes” or “saying something that’s wrong” in their writing. Such fears are self-defeating, as they inhibit experimentation and innovation, practices which are necessary for writers to grow.

When we let students know that authenticity and consistent practice are what matter most–and we reflect that in how we assess their performance–then we have the opportunity to change the game. When students are no longer afraid of being harshly judged or graded based on their products, they are far more likely to be willing to invest time in cultivating their own ideas and writerly voices. Motivating such behavior–behavior that fuels learning–seems far more important to me than determining how well students’ drafts compare to so-called “standards.”

Once students are willing to make such investments, a door opens for them. The opening of this door means the possibility of once again finding meaning (and maybe even pleasure) in writing. It means the possibility of developing enough self-confidence to believe that what they have to say about certain things matters. It means, when faced with important questions in the future–both on campus and off–that students will be motivated to figure out what they think, rather than simply asking an AI what it thinks.

I’m not so naive to think that all students will have such a transformative experience if they are able to take part in the kind of progressive, “wellness-focused” composition course that I’m advocating for here. It’s true that some students will not “buy in” to the idea that writing can be meaningful and rewarding, no matter how we pitch it. Some students will avoid writing at all costs no matter what we do. But in my experience, such students are actually quite rare. And sometimes students who seem to fall into this category early in the semester end up “converting” by the end of the semester, as they observe what is happening around them.

Moreover, I don’t believe a more coercive pedagogy would yield better results for such students. If someone is adamantly opposed to investing any significant amount of time into writing, they are not going to learn much regardless. If anything, the presence of such students should make us reflect on whether or not it makes sense to compel all students to take composition. Because, as writing instructors, our livelihoods are tied to such courses being requirements, it may be difficult for us to check our biases on such a question. As someone who believes that education is only truly meaningful when it is consensual, I am generally opposed to coercing students into taking any courses that they do not want to take. On the other hand, I like having a job.

What I’m trying to get at here is that, in the age of AI, most people will only write if and when they want to write. Using carrots and sticks to motivate students to write was never a particularly good strategy, and moving forward it will be even less effective. If we want students to value writing, we have to create opportunities from them to experience what makes it truly meaningful and rewarding, and to minimize or eliminate all the things that we’ve been doing that make them dread it.

It is somewhat fortuitous that many of the things that writing can offer (moments of quiet reflection, personal insights about one’s values and purpose, deeper connections with others) are among the things that many young people most need for their continued social and emotional development. At a time when so many of us are feeling overwhelmed, disempowered, unfocused, stressed, anxious, and alienated from one another, writing can help us slow down, pause, gather our thoughts, think through what really matters, and reach out to others to find common ground and purpose. Once students get a taste of that kind of writing–writing that they do in their own way for their own purposes–there’s a much better chance they will value it and continue to practice it after they leave our classes.

And isn’t that ultimately what we should be aiming for–students who embrace writing as a practice that can facilitate both lifelong learning and self-care? After all, if students produce original work only for grades–and avoid outsourcing that work to AI only out of fear of being caught–then how likely are they to do their own writing once such extrinsic motivators are gone?

I know that for some, encouraging students to spend so much time writing about themselves (their experiences, their feelings, their values, their interests) sounds like it could lead to navel-gazing. Combined with social media culture, which similarly encourages a kind of narcissistic fantasy that we are all aspiring celebrities competing for public attention, this could be a legitimate cause for concern. Yet I think, to a certain degree, encouraging students to focus on and build up their self-worth is necessary to help them overcome the many ways in which school often makes them feel inadequate as writers and thinkers. For many students, their personal lives may be the only subject about which they feel qualified to make bold assertions.

But that doesn’t mean we self-focused writing is the only writing that should happen in a wellness-focused composition course. Our relationships with others, a sense of mattering to others, and a sense of belonging and purpose in our community are also all key elements of well-being, and several of the exercises and projects in this book prompt students to look “outward” as well as “inward” to bridge that gap between self and others. This is also setting a foundation for students so that when they move on to classes where they are asked to write about more abstract or remote questions or problems, that such topics don’t feel so remote or abstract that they seem irrelevant. Feeling confident in themselves as meaning-makers, they can stop and reflect, how does this connect to my beliefs and values? How do my experiences inform the way I relate to and view this issue? Students who haven’t experienced writing as a validation of their capacity to generate new knowledge or as a relevant exploration of their personal values will have a harder time believing that they have anything to contribute to “bigger questions.”

When students experience writing as not only a practice that can help “build themselves up” and understand themselves better, but also connect with others about things in the world that matter, they are on their way to developing a healthy relationship with writing that will pave the way for future learning. Large language models may be able to produce ever-increasing amounts of well-organized, thoughtful, “error-free” text, but they cannot generate the experiences of discovery and connection that we have when we do our own writing. By placing those experiences at the core of our composition courses, we do our best to show students what writing really has to offer.