States, Traits, and Dispositions: The Impact of Emotion on Writing Development and Writing Transfer across College Courses and Beyond.
Drawing from a five year longitudinal data set following thirteen college writers through undergraduate writing and beyond, we explore the impact of students' emotions and emotional dispositions on their ability to transfer writing knowledge and on their overall writing development. Participants experienced a range of emotions concerning their writing, but those emotions could be broadly categorized as generative, disruptive, or circumstantial. Students managed these emotions in different ways, with some approaching their learning less emotionally (rational interpreters) others moreso (emotional interpreters) and a final group using metacognitive practices to manage their emotions (emotional managers) Our results suggest that metacognitive concepts of monitoring and control are keys to students' navigation of the complex emotional landscape of writing in higher education. Our discussion posits ways that faculty can help students become emotional managers and work with students' emotions in the classroom, and it suggests further avenues for research. Introduction We didn't anticipate we would study emotions. We set out to understand how students learn to write across a fiveyear period, following thirteen students as they encountered various writing situations and examining how they discussed their writing and learning and how they engaged in writing transfer. Then we met Alice, whose writerly development was strongly tied to her emotions, and Abby, who carefully monitored and changed her behavior to avoid negative emotions. Despite the fact that none of the questions in the study were explicitly geared toward students' emotions, the emotional connection to learning and transfer became an important part of these students' stories. Further, in the broader landscape of higher education, many commentaries have recently been published discussing students' "trigger warnings" and "lack of emotional resiliency" for common college stressors (Gray; Wilson) Given the exigency of emotions in higher education, then, the question of how emotions impact writing development and transfer is a critical one. One of the foundational assumptions in educational systems is that knowledge, processes, and skills learned in one context will be transferred, adapted, transformed, or built upon in new contexts. That is, over time a single learner engages in a trajectory of literate development that builds on and interacts with previous learning. While researchers call this term "transfer," we recognize that this term is an inadequate metaphor for the messy reality of learning that involves not just knowledge or skills but dispositions, identities, and social and cognitive processes. Despite the contention of the term, in the last decade writing researchers have begun to carefully tease out the mechanisms that drive students' writing transfer or lack thereof. While substantial attention thus far has been focused on prior knowledge, genre knowledge, pedagogies, and thinking processes surrounding transfer (Rounsaville, Goldberg and Bawarshi; Beaufort; Robertson, Taczak and Yancey; Wardle; Driscoll; Downs and Wardle) research into the personal, internally held characteristics that students bring into learning situations including their emotions is much less defined. One way that such personal characteristics have been addressed recently is through a growing interest in dispositions, which are the internally held characteristics, like self efficacy or persistence, that students possess and that manifest in learning environments (Driscoll and Wells) The question of how these internal characteristics impact learning and writing transfer is still very much underexplored (Wardle; Driscoll and Wells) This is likely for several reasons: first, internal characteristics are difficult to observe and directly measure; second, they are wide ranging and each deserving of careful examination; third, the criteria for classifying a disposition are debatable; and finally, the question of uncovering what's going on in our students' heads may, frankly, terrify us. The present study examines how temporary emotional states, persistent emotional traits, and students' overall emotional dispositions (our term, see below) occur in students' writing experiences over a five year period. We explore how these emotions impact students' ability to transfer learning across college writing contexts while influencing their writerly development. Role of Emotion in Learning and Writing Transfer{1} Composition research has a long history of privileging students' social processes over cognitive or emotional ones (Driscoll and Wells) And yet, more broadly, failure to learn or succeed in school has been largely attributed to aspects of academic preparation rather than more nuanced features, such as emotions (Christie et al. In the last decade, however, researchers from cross disciplinary fields have begun to tease out the relationship between education and emotion. Recent learning research suggests that students' emotional connections to the material and instructor constitute a critical factor for success (Scherer; Efklides and Volet) Positive emotions, such as liking or excitement, have been shown to improve students' academic achievement and learning over time (Efklides and Volet; Linnenbrink Garcia and Pekrun) while negative emotions such as hatred or frustration have been shown to be largely detrimental (Pekrun) Positive emotions have also been shown to facilitate transfer of learning while negative emotions have been shown to hinder transfer, although none of these studies have examined writing (Brand, Reimer, and Opwis; Harper and Mayer; Gegenfurtner) Research has also shown that teachers play a role in constructing environments that are safe and foster positive emotions, but teachers are often unaware of this impact (Markopoulou) Limited research in composition has highlighted how positive emotions can impact students' ability to learn how to write, although long term transfer and development have largely not been considered (Brand; McLeod) Negative emotions have been explored in terms of students' rhetorical abilities (Quandahl; Stenberg) and in assisting students in overcoming failure in a writing classroom (Gross and Alexander) Given the few studies on emotions, a gap exists in the research on the role of emotions and emotional dispositions in long term writing development and writing transfer. The connection to emotion, however, appears to be implicit in several studies examining transfer. One of the most thorough examinations of emotions and learning development is Herrington and Curtis's Persons in Process, which explored upper division students' development of literate identities tied clearly to the development of a sense of "self." Herrington and Curtis found that writing had "much less to do with any particular sequence of writing tasks or teaching methods than with how students felt they were expressing themselves and being responded to as people" (13) Their work makes a strong case that, for the four students studied, emotions matter a great deal in response to writing challenges and, potentially, for long term development and transfer. Building on this previous work and addressing the gaps noted above, our study examines how emotions impact thirteen students' transfer of learning and long term literate development. Core Concepts: States, Traits, Dispositions, and Metacognition The research on writing transfer and emotions presents us with a number of concepts that we have interwoven to present a comprehensive picture of the role of emotions in writing transfer. This section provides working definitions of the following: state and trait emotions, emotional dispositions, generative and disruptive aspects of emotion, and metacognition. Emotional states. In a synthesis of the literature on emotion, Scherer suggests that emotions are "episodes of coordinated changes in several components in response to external or internal events of major significance to the organism" (139) Emotions are typically considered as episodic "states" in that they occur for a fixed duration of time and occur because of a specific "triggering event," which can be either externally driven (a bad grade on an assignment) or internally driven (making an association with previous negative experiences) While many equate "feelings" with emotions, according to Scherer feelings are the "subjective experiential components" to an underlying emotional state (139) Emotional traits. Researchers examining emotions have long distinguished between a "state" and a "trait" (Spielberger et al. An emotional "state" is a single, temporary emotional condition; a psychological "trait" is a persistent and stable emotion felt consistently over time. A comparison helps illustrate the difference: a student has emotional anxiety during one assignment because she is faced with what she perceives as an insurmountable writing challenge versus a student who has anxiety about every writing assignment that she has to complete. In the first example, the student is experiencing a temporary emotional state due to a particular circumstance; in the second, the student experiences the same emotional trait in each situation. Scherer concludes that psychologists now have consistent evidence showing that these traits can have "powerful effects on cognitive processing of various types," including "memory, learning, thinking, and judgment" (155) Emotional dispositions. A third category, and one that we define for this study, is emotional disposition. In drawing upon the dispositional literature in transfer studies, dispositions, more broadly, are "not intellectual traits like knowledge, skills, or aptitude, but rather determine how those intellectual traits are used and applied dispositions determine students' sensitivity toward and willingness to engage in transfer" (Driscoll and Wells) Emotional dis