What Can Students Tell Us about “Skill- Building” in Canadian Writing Studies?

This paper comes from narrative research that I did with ten former students who reflected on their experiences with writing both in a first-year writing class and beyond. As the participants and I worked together, it became clear that there was the tension between the way they described process and skill building in writing pedagogy. They emphasized that process and scaffolding were integral to their learning, but they equally emphasized the one-off, skills-oriented components of our work. Many conversations in Canadian writing studies have focused on dismantling or resisting the skills narrative, but the tension in the participants’ responses prompted me to think about this differently. The paper explores the tension between skills and process to argue that perhaps skill building has its place in our contexts, and that we as writing teachers and scholars must think about it differently in order to articulate the value of the work that we do. If we can use the skills-oriented components of our courses to open spaces to discuss the less quantifiable elements of our work that often get overlooked (i.e., scaffolding), then we may put ourselves in a better position to advocate for increased resources and funding.

the course didn't have so many quizzes or smaller assignments demanding time and attention. There seemed a distinct break between the skills-oriented nature of the first nine weeks and the final five where we dealt with the final project.
The issue was that there didn't seem to be enough of this dialogic, process-oriented work. In my own teaching, I experienced the tension between skill-building and process writing, and I focused on the imbalanced way they came together in this course. The course seemed to prioritize checking boxes of atomized skills over developing student writing over time. I found myself wanting more scaffolded projects and fewer quizzes. I questioned what the students were getting from the moments where I taught from concept to concept rather than teaching the writing process itself. I wondered whether students were actually developing their writing skills or just keeping up. I wasn't sure if I was helping students or just getting them through their first-year writing requirement.
Before this project, my attitude towards the skills narrative was influenced by many of the prominent discussions in our Canadian writing studies community about skill-building and our marginalization in many post-secondary institutions. I tended, like many in our circles, to resist or at least lament the prominence of skill-building discussions that surround writing pedagogies, particularly at the first-year level. My negativity was exacerbated by the environment in which I taught first-year writing, where the program seemed to prioritize atomized skill-building. Many days felt as though I were teaching a service course that, to quote North (1987), amounted to doing "academic dirty work" (p. 13) rather than helping students build meaningfully through the writing process.

Working with Students
I wanted to understand how the course was helping students develop their writing. Specifically, I wanted to know what elements of the course allowed students to build their writing toolkit. Did they, like me, dismiss the more skills-oriented and quiz-oriented components of the course as little more than items they needed to complete for the grade? Did they see the same value in the scaffolded final paper that I did, or was I overestimating the value of feedback and the writing process despite all the literature touting its merits?
To explore these questions, I invited my former students to participate in research that reflected on their experience in the course. The course outline and interactions with colleagues often pointed to things that students should be able to do by the end of the course, what they do and how they react to certain elements of the course, and what each unit does for students. What often gets left out of that the participants have with the interviewer and the questions asked. In this project, they also arose from the previous relationship that participants had with me (as their former instructor) and their interactions with other participants during the focus groups. Analyzing their responses, therefore, involved "a form of negotiation and active participation in social discourse s a way of constructing new social discourses" (Striano, 2012, p. 153). Through active participation in the analysis, participants could develop and redevelop their ideas and versions of the narrative at various stages of the research process. Early in the project, this happened more implicitly as participants continued to reflect upon their experiences after the initial interview, as they interacted during the focus group, and as they experienced new writing situations in their courses.
During the third and final stage of the project, this negotiation and participation became more overt. After the initial interview and focus group, I developed a preliminary narrative for each participant. This narrative was framed around an analysis of their responses to that point in our interactions. After this narrative was developed, I sent it to the participants to review. We then met to discuss the narratives, and we used this meeting (approximately two hours) to examine the narratives and scrutinize the analyses. The participants had an opportunity to redevelop or revise any version of the analysis. I also asked them questions about particular analytical points in the narrative to clarify elements or develop them more extensively. Together, the participants and I reshaped their narratives and expanded the analyses. Rather than having a single interpreter of human experience, the research process became more relational and co-constructive.
While some of these discussions and changes were made in the narratives themselves, the coconstruction of ideas also expanded into the fourth stage, a second individual interview. The participants and I would use the analytical discussions of the narrative to reflect upon their other experiences with writing both before and after the course. The result was another opportunity to scrutinize their responses from the initial interview and focus group. The participants were doing what Harvey (2015) called going beyond member checking to actively participate in the analytical process. The analysis was a collective experience wherein every participant had a chance to contribute to the knowledge building process that derived from their narratives.
Are there other ways that these could be implemented as part of orientation? Perhaps. But it is more likely that first-year courses will continue to be handed these skills-based units that students must be taught. It is therefore useful to understand the value that these elements provide students and the knowledge that can be built. By giving students the tools to dissect the language, understand its components, and use this knowledge to develop a structurally sound paper, they receive more tools for building, thinking, and articulating their thoughts in a critical way, not just in the first-year writing classroom but also in their disciplinary coursework.

Discussion and Conclusion
I would like to end this paper by reflecting upon how skills-oriented pedagogies and process-oriented pedagogies impact teaching practices and how we in the writing studies community might think of these narratives that seem always to be in tension. It's true that responses from ten students from one course at an Ontario college won't revamp the way we think about the skills narrative. The discussions that I had with former students, however, have made me reflect on what skill-building might mean in my classrooms and the value that the elements I have so often mitigated/dismissed might play in student learning. This has led me to reconsider the way that the skills might impact my pedagogies and complement rather than restrain the writing process.
Negativity about skill-building seems to pervade many corners of Canadian writing studies, and I'll concede that I still struggle to come to terms with skill-building narratives even after reflecting with my former students. That said, my conversations with these students helped to reframe the way that I thought about the role of skill-building in first-year contexts. The scaffolded writing process is a primary learning tool, and, for many of my participants, it was the process that stood out the most as they reflected on their experiences in my course.
But this process was enhanced by many of the smaller units on grammar, syntax, formatting, and academic integrity. These smaller ideas built into the larger processes in ways that I had never considered before. For Victor, this meant revisiting core grammatical concepts that could help him express his thoughts as the papers became more complex. And as much as Clara and Kara emphasized scaffolding as central to their learning, students like John and Sam highlighted the role that stylistic elements played in helping them not only to develop their ideas in our class but to also meet the expectations of their other courses. It seems that, in this first-year context, atomizing certain skillscitations, syntax, grammar-was an important stage in the early parts of the course that allowed many students to develop more nuanced and complex papers in the latter stages of the course. These Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie Volume 30, 2020 http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw elements also gave students a foundation in certain "basics" that many of their other classes assumed they already knew.
Despite the reservations that still linger when I think of my teaching as "skill-building," I am more willing to explore the necessity of these elements. If students don't learn skills that may be considered the basics in my first-year writing class, will they be able to maximize their learning and writing when they do get to process-oriented writing? Student responses in this context offer a layer to begin scrutinizing how these pedagogies might work in unison rather than against each other. Student responses from other courses, particularly first-year classes at the university level where student demographics are different, contexts where a single syllabus doesn't span dozens of sections of the same course, first-year university classes, and contexts beyond the first year where students should already grasp the fundamentals, would offer new dimensions to understanding how the tension between skill and process plays out in Canadian writing studies.
Perhaps dismantling a skills narrative is not necessary or even desirable. Instead, it might be better to strive for a rebalanced narrative. It would be useful to achieve more balance where scaffolded pedagogies receive more prominent recognition. The writing-as-a-skill and writing-as-aprocess narratives may not be as antithetical as they seem. Perhaps instead of negating one narrative, we would benefit from understanding and showing how these varying pedagogical approaches can coincide to enhance both student learning and our pedagogies in the process.