"Cogito Ergo Scribo: Applying Self-Schema Theory to the Composition Classroom"

About the Author

Joshua Cruz is currently studying literacy and higher education at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught reading and writing skills classes at the community college level while attaining a master's degree in English from Rutgers University. He plans on returning to the community college to continue teaching literacy to at-risk and marginalized students.

Contents

Introduction to Student Alienation and Self-Schema

Several Studies to Justify an Interest in Self-Schema Theory

Practical Application

Works Cited

Introduction to Student Alienation and Self-Schema

I remember my eighth grade English classroom. Specifically, I remember a motivational poster on the wall: Snoopy the Dog sitting at a typewriter on his doghouse, and underneath was the phrase “It’s exciting when you are writing something you know is good.” This poster rang true with me even then, and I found myself nodding in agreement when I first saw it. When writing something “good,” it is not dissimilar to an artistic process. A sense of pride permeates the writer for creating something that conveys, in the best possible way, an idea. The story, essay, report, or what have you becomes something that represents the writer, something that the writer feels a connection to. To use a colloquial but appropriate phrase, the writer “owns” the writing. It is the writer’s brainchild.

Ideally, anyway. Not all writers feel this kind of connection to their writing, perhaps most of all the student that is forced to write for a writing class. For this student, often the writing is a chore, something to be completed, graded, and to move on from. In “Whose Paper is This, Anyway?,” Mark Dubson discusses the disheartening experience of finding a handful of his students’ completed and graded papers discarded in the trash, assuming that all the students “wanted to do more than anything was to get the papers out of their life” (93). He continues to discuss “many factors that come together to alienate students from the work they do,” not the least of which are student attitudes toward writing: they dislike it, fear it, or at the very least, do not understand it (94). Dubson then lays out some of the “cultural ironies” that lead to this mentality.

Dubson seems to be on to something here; anyone teaching a college writing based course knows that the students who embrace their work are, nine times out of ten, the students who have the most successful experiences in these classes. Consequently, it might be argued that mentality/attitude, more than course material, more than time constraints and distractions, perhaps even more than effective teaching, determine whether or not students will “get anything” out of their writing courses. Perhaps then, the direction we should go as teachers is not to debate over voice or discourse, to stress grammatical structures, or to quibble over whether or not three or five paragraph essays are the most appropriate for test taking situations. Instead, it might behoove us to focus more on changing students’ attitudes towards writing so that they embrace writing itself and begin to think of themselves as writers--not just students that have to write.

What I am suggesting at this point probably sounds like touchy-feely nonsense, and the objection might be raised that students don’t learn anything substantive about writing simply because they learn to like writing. Actually, I ground my argument in a theory that was introduced to the field of social psychology in 1977, and that has only just started being applied to education. Coined by Hazel Markus, the concept of self-schema has been applied to health related behavior, but has received less attention in the field of education. Self-schemata are “domain specific” ways of thinking about the self that “make quick and confident judgments to adapt flexibly to different information-processing goals, and to accurately retrieve information relevant to that domain… Schematic individuals are chronically sensitive to schema-relevant stimuli, and they pay close attention to and favor information pertinent to the domain” (Cross and Markus 423).

To simplify, one’s self-schema is one’s identity. It is a label that one might ascribe to oneself, such as athlete, artist, or writer. It is more than simply the label, however. It is also what the individual thinks of as schematic or “domain specific” behavior for that label: an athlete exercises, eats a balanced diet with a focus on protein, may have knowledge about sports, medicine, the human body, etc. An individual with a self-schema of athlete, then, will engage in these behaviors willingly and gladly, as they are behaviors consistent with that identity. Further, there is a mental-behavioral component to self-schema, and individuals schematic for a particular domain (say, athleticism) will generally be more interested in academic matters that pertain to athletics, becoming a better athlete, facts about athletics, etc. The schematic athlete is more receptive to learning about athletics. The same can be said for individuals who think of themselves as writers and their relation to writing.

On the other hand, there also exist aschematic individuals: “Aschematic persons do not recognize their ability in a given domain, and they do not assign their ability critical personal importance. The aschematic individual may be less likely to recognize the relevance of an ability for a given task and may be less adept at anticipating and simulating the necessary strategies for completing a desired task” (Cross and Markus 424). The students that we have in writing classes, as Dubson recognizes, are “writer aschematic.” They do not internalize the writing process due to several cultural ironies, and their identities are set against being conceived of as writers. They do not care to learn about it, they certainly don’t want to engage in behavior characteristic of a writer, and were composition/college writing not a required course, they would likely not be there at all. An important note is that they are not incapable of writing well; they simply don’t care to.

This concept of self schema is not just speculative theory, either. For a portion of this discussion, I would like to address several psychological studies performed in the past twenty years on self-schema in relation to education. While many of these studies are not specific to writing, I believe they can be applied to the composition classroom, perhaps even more effectively than other fields. I will end this paper by discussing some basic ways that we might practically apply this self-schema theory to writing and composition in general.