Challenging the Transactional Mindset

As part of a recent series on “Teaching Gen Z,” at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Beckie Supiano and Beth McMurtrie covered the problems of students struggling to work independently and the downside of school being viewed as a transaction where students are customers and schools are service providers. 

Both articles are deep and perceptive, drawing on the experiences of both students and faculty as well as providing insights from different people trying different things to address the problems.

I think these issues—students lacking agency and also viewing school through a transactional lens—are significantly related, and if we are going to do something about it at the course level, we should see them that way.

At the risk of stating the obvious, let me suggest that these problems are nothing new, though they may be growing more acute year to year, and because of a combination of pandemic effects, a broader loss in institutional confidence and the introduction of technology that makes it easier than ever before to outsource schoolwork to someone (or something) else, we may be at what feels like a crisis.

But again, not new. I know it’s not new because these are issues I’ve been writing about as long as I’ve been in this space, and I was concerned about them well before I had this outlet to air those concerns.

Back in 2013 I published a post, “A’s for Everyone!,” in which I described a class discussion in which I give students a hypothetical bargain: I’ll give everyone an A, but class never meets, there are no readings, discussions, assignments, conferences, etc. … Literally no work will be completed, so, by definition, nothing will be learned.

At the time of my writing, around 70 percent of students said they would take that bargain. By the time I stopped teaching full-time, it was 90 percent, meaning only one or two students per section said they would stick with the course in order to do the work—and presumably learn something.

I was doing this exercise several years before I had an opportunity to write about it, so let’s say that it has been at least 15 years since I was at least somewhat concerned about students bringing a transactional attitude into their first-year writing course.

When I write about issues of pedagogy, I try my best to be helpful, but before pivoting to that mode, I want to acknowledge that the systemic barriers to pushing back against the transactional mindset are somewhat overwhelming. Students of this generation have absorbed the message we’ve been communicating: School is only important as a credential that will allow you to one day get a job and presumably lead to a prosperous future.

These are the young people who experienced “college and career kindergarten.” We have signaled to them that school is not about the present but is instead built on the promise of indefinite and future reward. Grades matter, learning doesn’t.

Inside this kind of system, securing a grade without doing the work is a rational, perhaps even defensible position, particularly in a world where some students are looking at the additional burdens of working while in school and the looming threat of postgraduation debt. An education must literally pay off.

Now, I don’t think most students particularly enjoy or eagerly embrace this worldview. In fact, I think this is why many students are simultaneously disengaged from and stressed out by school. One of the reasons I would do my hypothetical exercise was to introduce the idea that learning to write is a challenging and worthwhile endeavor for its own sake, that they would benefit from and even enjoy the work in the course, should they choose to opt in to the experiences.

The difficulty of working independently dovetails with the transactional mindset, because students have not had sufficient practice at making choices about and within their own educational experiences. This starts at the big-picture level, where they attend college and career kindergarten and then follow a defined path toward “college readiness,” where the most important metric is the GPA.

But it also exists at the course level in things like my personal bête noire, the five-paragraph essay, which turns writing into a templated script devoid of doing the necessary work of making choices inside a rhetorical situation. Fundamentally, learning requires problem-solving, but students arrive in college not as problem-solvers but activity doers.

Those activities, significantly guided by teachers (or even scripted algorithms nowadays) are rewarded with grades. Students are judged proficient for having completed those activities, but the highly prescriptive nature of the activities leaves them unpracticed at the kind of work we expect in postsecondary education.

This becomes upsetting for all parties involved. Instructors feel that students are unprepared for the rigors of college. Students are some combination of stressed, disoriented and disengaged by the work being asked of them.

In a terrible irony, it is schooling itself that prevents students from being ready for what many professors expect of them in college.

In Supiano’s article on students lacking independence and agency, instructors report students seemingly being unable to read with any acuity and not knowing how to study. How can we do any work if what seem to be the basic skills necessary for college-level courses are not in place?

I had these worries about my first-year writing students 10, even 15 years ago, but what I came to realize was that we didn’t have a smarts or skill issue, but an attitude and experience problem.

My students didn’t necessarily hate writing. They were simply utterly bored by it. Churning out five-paragraph essay after five-paragraph essay had made them numb to the task. They didn’t necessarily lack the skills necessary for writing well; they just didn’t have the kinds of experiences with their writing practices that would allow them to attack the problems I was asking them to solve.

This is going to get too long to go into detail on some approaches I experimented with and therefore do (or don’t) recommend in any detail, but let me list some of them out capsule style as a marker for greater, future exploration.

Don’t: Try to convince students they need your course for future classes. (Even if it’s true.)

This was my go-to initially, particularly for first-year writing, but all I was doing was trading one transaction for another. It had some effect of conscripting additional attention, but unless and until a student opts in to engaging with a course as a volunteer, there’s going to be a (lower) ceiling on what they learn.

Do: Address the transactional mindset and lack of agency head-on.

Getting students to admit to me that they would take an A and learn nothing forced them to confront their own attitudes toward my course and college in general. They still may choose to embrace a transactional mindset, but at least this is now text rather than subtext.

Don’t: Substitute a new prescription for an old one.

At first, I thought I could substitute my (good) prescription for academic writing with the (bad) prescription of the five-paragraph essay. All I did was shift their lack of agency to a different set of parameters—parameters I was now in charge of.

Do: Provide structure and context instead of prescription.

Once I hit on the framework of the writer’s practice and started assigning writing through the lens of experience, everything fell into place. I provided the playing field and equipment. Students were in charge of what they learned based on their degree of engagement and willingness to reflect. What was my problem was now theirs, as it should be.

Do: Suggest that pleasure and even joy can be found in learning.

This is true even of learning to write. This is where I’m going to start next time.