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Several of my participants expressed frustration with the difficulty of coming back to school after time away. They felt their hurdles were higher than those of their younger peers; however, I found the older women in my study were more likely to seek help to overcome those impediments. In seeking assistance, be it from professors or their peer writing coach, they began to develop self-advocacy. Graduate writers are moving from a student to professional status and part of being a professional is being able to articulate what is needed to someone who can potentially provide resources and/or guidance. Self-advocacy is an essential component of shifting from a student who is learning to a professional who is an expert in their field. When students learn to articulate the project challenges they face and then learn to identify possible solutions, they become more independent researchers. They become experts as they learn not just from whom or from where to obtain the information and/or resources they require to create their own solutions, but also as they learn how to professionally approach people with access to materials/resources they need to address their challenges.
As I worked with my participants as a peer writing coach, I discovered that the peer coaching model has great potential for understanding and articulating the challenges and triumphs of returning graduate women. Setbacks and perceived failures can demotivate and demoralize even the most motivated graduate writers. Effective supports that create opportunities for success can help students persist because successes motivate; even incremental successes are steps towards the writers’ objectives which very often are steps towards access to careers that have long been dreams. As their peer writing coach, I was able to immediately address participants’ writing questions with directed instruction in addition to identifying and helping them through their writing stumbling blocks.
The peer coaching model we co-developed based on my expertise but also on participants’ needs and suggestions, also offered space for encouragement, celebration, and motivation to persist. By building productive academic friendships, we were also able to provide the emotional support of personal connections to mitigate feelings of isolation and imposter syndrome. We built places of safety so the women could bring their true selves and experiences to our sessions; thus, the writing tools we designed and implemented were based on their authentic lived lives and addressed the core of their writing struggles because we got to know each other on deeply personal levels and were able to share our fears, express our anxieties, and admit to being fallible humans. Even after the research phase of this project ended, my project participants and four of my interview participants still work with me because they find having a writing coach an invaluable tool to facilitating progress in their writing activity system.
My experiences as a support for graduate writers continue to demonstrate the importance for universities to continue researching what their specific populations need to facilitate timely completion of projects and degrees. Students, especially older women with myriad competing activity systems, can find their writing goals derailed by a wide variety of challenges, but their trajectories can be corrected with support. The needs and wants of the students with whom I worked varied from person to person; however, I found that every student with whom I worked enjoyed a one-on-one approach because of the flexibility of what I call a peer writing coach model. Other advantages of the model include consistency, accountability, feedback, access to a language expert, direct and customized instruction, and emotional support. I was not able to conduct interviews or work with every graduate student at my university, but through working with an often-underserved sample, I was able to ascertain the effectiveness of a peer writing coach model.