Meghan Hancock

Introduction

A-range grades:

Assigned for work that is clearly superior and demonstrates extraordinary achievement. Such an essay will make precise and original distinctions between its ideas and between its terms; use words with care and creativity; offer striking and apt examples or evidence; move carefully and eloquently between specifics and generalities; demonstrate depth of reading/observation and the ability to make connections and draw inferences that are remarkably insightful; take the reader on a journey in which all the stages are well connected, but sometimes in surprising ways; and successfully take risks that show initiative and growing independence… [1]

I handed my first-year writing students the above grade description, my first time using “risk-taking” language to define exceptional work. I have since shifted to more assignment-tailored rubrics, but I continue to discuss the merits of writing risks in my classes. I have also had conversations with colleagues who wish more students would take writing risks: try out new modalities or genres, take up atypical research topics, or otherwise stretch their wings a bit more. Fostering intellectual risk-taking becomes even more important as students increasingly use AI to generate their text for them. For those of us who teach required courses in any discipline, hoping students will take risks with a writing assignment can be a tall order. Most students aim to fulfill a degree requirement and be on their way. Though intellectual risk-taking is rare, when students do it—what a moment!

We might agree risk-taking is something we want our student writers to do, but do we really know what we mean by “risk”? Is it trying something new, unconventional or atypical, or is it something else? If this is something we value in our own writing, do we want our students to value it as well? These are questions that are not necessarily new to Writing Studies. As seen in this issue, risk-taking in writing—specifically within the context of its role in failure—is a topic faculty are discussing.

Past work has focused on how creativity as a criterion in writing assignments is conceptualized across disciplines (Lee and Carpenter), as well as writing assignments that ask students to take on writing that might be atypical when compared to past school experiences—writing that “[disrupts] academic convention” (Bastian 6). More recently, work examining risks writers take in academia has become more prevalent (Kelty and Bunten, Thesen and Cooper). But in reviewing claims about intellectual risk-taking, Alexis Teagarden, Carolyn Commer, Ana Cooke and Justin Mando were puzzled, as I was, by the often murky and ambiguous definition of risk-taking in the writing classroom (Intellectual Risk in the Writing Classroom).

To demystify what intellectual risk-taking looks like, many have examined its connection to failure. That is, taking intellectual risks often lies in the act of failing to write toward a goal. Scholars like Allison Carr and Paul Feigenbaum have described failure as generative opportunities for writers. Feigenbaum argues that given the opportunity to fail without the risk of grade consequences, students learn more about and act upon their own “intrinsic motivation” for writing, becoming more autonomous by letting go of entrenched “extrinsic motivations” like A grades or high standardized test scores (404). Carr similarly argues for failure in writing courses as its “own process, but unlike ‘process-based’ pedagogies, it [leads] writers to nowhere in particular,” allowing them to base their learning in the struggle and the experience rather than solely striving for a product (In Support of). Lastly, Teagarden, Mando and Commer acknowledge the importance of teaching about failure in the writing process while also arguing that teaching students about intellectual risk-taking is more effective as “rather than embracing failure, teaching students how to navigate risk can call forth powerful affective states like uncertainty and discomfort while also fostering in students the deliberative skills and disposition of agency to make navigating such choices possible” (60–61).

While the definition of failure and its level of involvement in the act of intellectual risk-taking in each of these studies differs, all seem to agree that intellectual risk-taking is inseparable from the act of failure. Similar to these findings, concepts of failure also emerge in this article’s data (“grit despite potential failure” comes to mind), but defining or reinforcing the connection between failure and risk is not its central undertaking. Rather, this study is concerned with faculty who expect students to take writing risks (perhaps while encountering failure) but are not always articulating those expectations to students (as this study’s results show). If faculty are not making their assessment transparent to students, students cannot know what something like “grit despite potential failure” might mean for a given writing assignment. I later discuss this in more detail among other recommendations for the inclusion of risk-taking in writing assignments in the pedagogical implications section.

In this study, I collected writing instructors’ perceptions of risk-taking (both in general and in their own writing) and analyzed how those perceptions compare and connect to what they expect of students. Based on my findings, I argue that if faculty require risk-taking of their student writers, they must incorporate descriptive language in grading criteria focusing on their concept of risk-taking, provide class discussion and analyses of risk-taking models that demonstrate those goals, and incorporate low-stakes drafting and reflection opportunities for students to think through how and when they take the risks the assignment requires.

The following section will begin by outlining the data gathering and analysis methods of this study, will move into the results, and conclude with a more detailed discussion of results as well as the aforementioned pedagogical recommendations for the instruction of risk-taking in writing.

Methodology

Data Gathering

This study began in June of 2019 at a Northeast liberal-arts college. I renewed the study to continue gathering data after my hire as faculty at a public four-year Southeast university in February of 2021. I received IRB approval at both institutions to send an email survey asking how faculty define risk-taking in their own writing and the writing of their students, and if and how they assess those moves in student writing. Faculty (from any discipline) who have assigned or are currently assigning a graded writing task qualified.

For recruitment, I emailed the survey to the WPA-listserv, two lists of faculty teaching writing-intensive courses (at both institutions) and posted the survey link on a Facebook group for alumni of my PhD program in Writing Studies. From these recruitment efforts, 115 faculty members completed the survey. Survey questions are provided in Appendix A. Of those who answered question 1 regarding academic discipline (79 overall), 48% were from Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies, 19% from English, 15% from multiple disciplines, 9% from social sciences, 4% from hard sciences, 2.5% from creative arts, 1% from history and 1% from art history. [2] Of those who answered question 2 regarding job title (115 overall), 25% were associate professors, 27% were non-tenure-track faculty, 19% were assistant professors, 18% were full professors, 5% were graduate student instructors and 5% were in administration. 36 respondents volunteered to participate in a follow-up interview.

Follow-up interviews were conducted by video or phone and were approximately 30–45 minutes long. Follow-up interviews consisted of clarifying questions based on survey responses I felt warranted more explanation. I also gave participants a chance to expand on any answers they wanted to clarify. For participants who responded that they do not incorporate risk-taking criteria in writing assessment materials, I asked if they would ever want to do so in the future, and if so, how. In addition to clarifying questions, I added a question about what risk-taking in writing looked like in the interviewee’s discipline: “How would you define risk-taking when thinking about the writing of your discipline?” Finally, I asked each participant if they had anything else to say about risk-taking in writing either in general, or in a pedagogical context. Interviews were recorded with permission.

Data Analysis Methods: Survey Responses and Interviews

I coded the survey data using several methods. The first and most prevalent method was descriptive coding where I “assign[ed] labels to data to summarize in a word or short phrase… the basic topic of a passage of qualitative data” (Miles et al. 74). This method, for instance, was used for the code “writer-based novelty,” assigned to responses describing a novel writing technique for the writer(s). In addition to descriptive coding, I occasionally used in vivo coding where I borrowed terms and/or phrases from participants’ actual responses to create a code (Miles et al. 74). This method was used for the code “going against the grain” pulled from a response describing “doing something outside of what are perceived to be usual boundaries; speaking against the grain.” I used these two coding methods for survey responses to question 3, 4, 6 and 8 (see Appendix A for the exact language of these questions).

I assigned these codes to data units that were defining or referring to a concept of risk-taking in writing (see Appendix B for the complete code list). Some survey responses contained several coded units of data, while others included less. For instance, one response to question 3 was as follows: “This phrase, to me, indicates that the writer is willing to try new things in their writing, whether that is changing the voice, organization, flow, etc. They must also be willing to accept that the risk they are not taking may not ultimately work out.” This was coded both as “writer-based novelty” (first bolded phrase) and “grit despite potential failure” (second bolded phrase). References that landed in the “other” category did not fall into any of the more widely occurring codes. One response for question 4, for example, included: “taking a risk for me has been co-authoring with undergraduates.” This reference was placed in the “other” category because it was too specific for one of the broader categories. For the transcribed data of follow-up interviews, I selected quotations for the article that I felt were representative of themes identified when coding the survey data.

Survey Results

The coding results for survey questions 3 and 4 are listed in Table 1. The 5 most frequently occurring codes for each question are in grey.

Q3: When you hear the phrase, “taking risks in writing,” what does that mean to you?”	Number of coded references (out of 262 total)	Q4: In the kinds of writing you do, what would you say it means to “take risks” in your writing?”	Number of coded references and percentage (out of 218 total)
Going against the grain	67 (26%)	Going against the grain	85 (39%)
Writer-based novelty	59 (23%)	Writer-based novelty	31 (14%)
Grit despite potential failure	19 (7%)	Other	22 (10%)
Outside comfort zone	16 (6%)	Personal disclosure	18 (8%)
Personal disclosure	16 (6%)	Broadcasting or sharing writing	12 (6%)
Exploratory agency	16 (6%)
Other	15 (6%)
Low-stakes writing	12 (5%)	Grit despite potential failure	11 (5%)
Digging deeper	10 (4%)	Discipline-based novelty	9 (4%)
Broadcasting or sharing writing	8 (3%)	Exploratory agency	6 (3%)
Writer-based complexity	8 (3%)	Writing for evaluation	6 (3%)
Writing for evaluation	6 (3%)	Writer-based complexity	5 (2%)
All writing	6 (2%)	Outside comfort zone	3 (1%)
Negative response	4 (2%)	Negative response	3 (1%)
		Digging deeper	4 (2%)
		Low-stakes writing	2 (1%)
		All writing	1 (0.5%)

In the following description of survey results, answers to question 3 will be referred to as general concepts of risk-taking in writing, and question 4 answers will be referred to as self-focused concepts (respondents thinking about risk-taking in their own writing practices).

Only 4 respondents stated that they do not take risks in their own writing or think about the term when it comes to their own writing (“negative responses” in the chart), which means that 97% of respondents (111 out of 115) do take risks in their writing. Respondent definitions of self-focused risk-taking and general risk-taking were similar with a few exceptions. For both general and self-focused definitions of risk-taking, “going against the grain” was the most popular. It also had 13% more occurrences for self-focused concepts of risk-taking than it did for general concepts. “Writer-based novelty” was the second-most mentioned for both questions 3 and 4, though it decreased by 8% for self-focused concepts. Personal disclosure landed in fourth place for both concepts. For notable differences of risk-taking concepts between general and self-focused, “grit despite potential failure” made third place in the general category with 3% of responses but did not make the top five for self-focused, dropping by 2%. The “outside comfort zone” concept was 5% higher for general risk-taking than self-focused, “exploratory agency” was 3% higher for general, and “broadcasting or sharing writing” was 3% higher in the self-focused category.

Response	Count (out of 113)	Percentage
Yes	86	76%
No	8	7%
Unsure	19	17%

Moving to a focus on pedagogy, survey questions 5–8 asked respondents to think about risk-taking as it applies to the writing they ask of students. Question 5 (see Table 2) asked respondents if they “have… ever expected students to ‘take risks’ in their work for a particular writing assignment in [their] classes.” Out of 113 total responses, 86 said yes (76%), 8 said no (7%) and 19 said unsure (17%).

Survey question 6 (see Table 3) asked respondents to share examples of writing assignments they considered to be asking students to “take risks” with writing. 86 respondents answered this question. The same coding categories for questions 3 and 4 were used to code the types of writing risks the assignments were asking of students. Out of 125 total references to risk-taking in those assignments, 39 (or 31%) were asking students to try something novel (“writer-based novelty”).

Coded Responses	Count (out of 125)	Percentage
Writer-based novelty	39	31%
Going against the grain	18	14%
Outside comfort zone	13	10%
Personal disclosures	12	10%
Exploratory agency	9	7%
Digging deeper	8	6%
Grit in the face of potential failure	6	5%
Low-stakes writing	5	4%
Broadcasting or sharing writing	4	3%
Other	4	3%
All writing	3	2%
Writing for evaluation	2	2%
Multimodal writing	2	2%

While these are great examples of risk-taking in writing assignments, do faculty build these risk-taking moves into grading criteria? If so, how do faculty assess whether students have taken these risks? Coding results for survey questions 5 and 7 are listed in Table 4.

Question	Yes	No	Unsure	No Response
Q5: Have you ever expected students to “take risks” in their work for a particular writing assignment in your classes? (Out of 113)	86 (76%)	8 (7%)	19 (17%)	0
Q7: If yes to Q5, have you ever included any kind of “risk-taking” as a grading criterion in writing assessment materials you share with students (writing assignment requirements/guidelines, rubrics, etc.)? (Out of 86)	25 (29%	40 (47%	17 (20%)	4 (5%)

Out of those who responded that they do expect students to take risks for a writing assignment, only 29% include “risk-taking” as a type of grading criterion in assessment materials. 47% responded that they do not and 20% responded that they were unsure.

Question 8 (see Table 5) then asked respondents who answered yes to question 7 if they “would… be willing to describe/share that criterion/criteria.” 23 respondents shared their assignment criteria. Of the 23 responses, 35 instances of risk-taking grading criteria were found. The chart below lists the breakdown of how risk-taking was factored into the grading process.

	Count (out of 35)	Percentage
Mentions of a graded criterion in the assignment requirements/guidelines or rubric	12	34%
Mentions of having students explain risk-taking in accompanying reflection	5	14%
Descriptions of giving risk-taking requirements verbally to students in class	4	11%
Mentions of including risk-taking requirements in a formative assignment or draft task	4	11%
Mentions of assessing risk-taking in grading feedback	3	9%
Instances of including risk-taking requirements in assignment prompt	3	9%
Instances of listing risk-taking as a grading criterion in course syllabus	2	6%
Mentions of using risk-taking as a grading “boost”	1	3%
Mentions of labor-based grading that inherently allows for risk-taking	1	3%

For those who responded that they build risk-taking into their assignment rubrics, several mentioned writing where it is clear that the writer took chances, showed courage or used creativity. Others listed criteria in the “A” range of a rubric describing writing that is atypical—for example, it “strike[s] the reader as unexpected and even slightly odd” or “explore[s] a nonobvious line of thinking.” Expectations for risk-taking not included in a rubric ranged from asking students to describe their risk-taking in a reflection, to describing definitions of risk-taking in class, to including risk-taking expectations in another assignment, or describing how risk-taking factored into a student’s grade in written feedback.

Discussion

This section includes a discussion of the survey results, specifically connections between faculty risk-taking concepts and how risk-taking is factored into student writing assignments and assessment criteria. This discussion is interspersed with quotations from interviews.

Faculty Concepts of Risk-Taking in Writing

According to the survey results, faculty think more about writing that goes against the grain, makes personal disclosures, or writing that is broadcasted/shared with others when it comes to their own risk-taking practices versus their general definitions of risk-taking. General definitions focused more on writing demonstrating a writer’s “grit despite potential failure,” “exploratory agency,” and moves that take the writer “outside [their] comfort zone.” These concepts appeared in results for self-focused risk-taking, but less often. Given the types of writing faculty members tend to do—writing that is often public-facing, not only on a classroom or department/college-level, but on a larger scale with publication—these self-focused definitions of risk-taking make sense. 62% (136 references) of respondents’ definitions of self-focused risk-taking were also audience-based, meaning that 62% of the total coded references in that category explicitly mentioned the act of writing for a public audience (this number was 24% lower in the general category).

Comparisons to Expectations of Risk-Taking in Student Writing

How, though, do faculty concepts of risk-taking in writing compare to the risks they expect student writers to take? Risk-taking goals that faculty had for their students were a bit different. The most commonly mentioned risk-taking represented in assignment examples was “writer-based novelty,” implying that it is most important to faculty that students are trying new things (for them)—everything from writing in an unfamiliar genre to exploring new research topics. “Going against the grain,” the most frequently recurring self-focused and general concept among faculty, was still a prevalent goal for student writing assignments. Broadcasting or sharing writing was a far less prevalent goal in assignment examples than it was in faculty descriptions of their own risk-taking. Student risk-taking goals focused more on internal factors that encourage a writer to grow based on their own strengths, interests and experiences. These include trying things outside their comfort zone, having the freedom to explore, and digging deeper to move beyond what is at first obvious (none of these three categories landed in the top five of the faculty-focused risk-taking concepts).

Connections Between Faculty Risk-Taking Concepts and Student Writing Concepts

When first making connections between faculty concepts of risk-taking and the risk-taking goals they have for students, the most notable takeaway is that 76% (84) of 110 respondents who answered question 4 (how they take risks in their writing) also answered yes to whether they expect risk-taking of students. A large majority, then, of respondents are considering risk-taking as they write and are expecting the same of students. In terms of how risk-taking concepts compare between faculty and student writing, 45 out of 86 (52%) respondents to question 6 had alignment between their general risk-taking concept definitions and the risk-taking they were asking of students. [3] 26 out of 86 (30%) respondents to question 6 had alignment between their self-focused concepts of risk-taking and the types they were asking of students. Finally, 25 (29%) out of 86 respondents to question 6 had all three aligned (general concept, self-focused concept and risk-taking they expected of students).

These numbers are not necessarily surprising, and it makes sense that the majority of faculty (71%) would think the risk-taking they do is different from the risks they ask of students. One respondent stated that in their own writing, risk-taking is “bending genre conventions where I think I might get away with it (and sometimes when I’m not sure whether I’ll ‘get away with it’) for the audience I’m writing for” while they ask students to “try new things and reach out beyond what they believe is ‘expected’ of them.” Another stated that risk-taking for them is to “engage with other interlocutors in my field, to stake out new territory, to write in a more public setting or publish things like creative nonfiction or other less traditional academic genres” while they ask students to write “a ‘Buzzfeed quiz’ research assignment” that “was a… new experience for the students” that made students “[feel] nervous about such novelty in their work.” One cannot help but notice that even if these respondents are describing writing tasks that are taking risks in different ways, there are still some commonalities. For instance, while the first respondent described their own risky writing as bending genre conventions, one of their students might define their version of “trying new things” as bending the conventions (for the first time) of a genre they have familiarity with. In the second respondent example, they described “[staking] out new territory” in their field, and while this was not described as a new move for them, it can still be seen as a form of novelty (breaking “new” ground in the field that other scholars have not explored)—a quality they ask of students when composing in a genre new to them (the Buzzfeed quiz). It appears that even among the differences, faculty writers can still connect the risks they take to the risks their students make.

Student Risk-Taking and Grading Criteria

If these are the risk-taking concepts of writing faculty expect of students, how are students’ attempts at these moves being evaluated? Of most concern here is that out of those who responded that they expect students to take risks (75% of total responses), only 29% of them stated that they include “risk-taking” as a grading criterion in assessment materials (e.g., rubrics or assignment guides), while 47% responded that they do not (and 20% responded that they were unsure). Unsure responses (21) ranged from the fact that faculty verbally encourage risk-taking of their students, but don’t necessarily require it in the grading process (4) to the fact that risk-taking is covered in other assessment categories but is not explicitly named risk-taking (7).

When asked in interviews why they responded “no” to including risk-taking as a grading criterion, answers were varied. Many focused on the fact that grading based on risk-taking is too subjective to be precise enough for a requirement. One interviewee stated that she would not “know how [she] would quantify or set forth criteria for what… risk would look like… because it’s very what feels risky to a particular student—what feels like going out on a ledge is very individual. And it’s going to be not just about… what feels personally risky to them, but also their given skill set in relation to a particular assignment… That would be hard to quantify.” Others spoke of time constraints of classes like first-year writing not being able to accommodate risk-taking moves because “getting [students] to a baseline understanding… of what genre is so that they then could take risk in it” would take too much time. Many described a student’s risk-taking as a factor they consider when grading, but only as something external to the basic assignment requirements that might move a student’s grade up. One interviewee described telling students in class that if he “[sees them] attempting to do some of these things,” meaning moves that indicate a risk, “[he is] going to reward that risk” by granting them a higher grade because he “would rather see [them] try and have it not succeed than have [them] just do something that is safe.” Another mentioned providing examples of risk-taking to students in class to encourage them to “push a little further for that highest level of an A.” Another interviewee mentioned that she rewards risk when she sees it in her students’ writing, but only thinks about their level of risk-taking “in [her] head” when she is grading and “[doesn’t] tell [students] that.”

Of those references to the inclusion of risk-taking as a grading criterion, 20 (57% of total) were provided to students as explicit grading criteria. 12 (34%) stated that they included it as an explicit criterion in the assignment/rubric. 5 (14%) assess risk-taking by having students explain their moves in a reflection, like one faculty member who “[asks] students to complete a reflective memo that asks them to describe their process and where they thought they were/were not successful.” 3 (9%) described risk-taking requirements in the assignment prompt. 10 references were of risk-taking requirements given to students separate from the final assignment assessment, like descriptions of risk-taking given verbally in class or included in a smaller assignment.

While there is a range of approaches to factoring risk-taking into the grading process, the fact that 75% of respondents expect students to take risks in their writing while only 29% of that number provide risk-taking explicitly in grading materials is certainly telling. If risk-taking is a factor we are considering when sitting down to grade our students’ work, our students deserve to know what that looks like.

Pedagogical Implications

I argue that students need a combination of pedagogical approaches, all of which are described at varying levels in this study’s data. If we are only considering risk-taking as a “wow factor,” “x factor,” or a “grade boost” that we define only for ourselves, we may be doing students a disservice. These recommended pedagogical approaches are the following:

1. Including explicit grading criteria language in an assignment guide/description and/or rubric. This includes language that is more granular than simply stating writing that takes risks.
2. Lessons and discussions of writing models that take the types of risks the instructor wants students to aim for.
3. Smaller homework tasks, accompanying reflection documents or drafting that asks students to reflect on their risk-taking moves in an assignment.

In the following section, I will more closely define these approaches and will provide relevant examples from this study and my own teaching.

1. Including Explicit Grading Criteria Language

First and foremost, if we are expecting our students to take risks in their writing like 76% of 113 respondents to this study’s survey, it is important that we provide them with explicit grading criteria that describes what risk-taking moves we are evaluating. In such criteria, we should use language that not only names a goal like “successfully [takes] risks that show initiative and growing independence” (the excerpt describing A-range grades from page one of this article), but parses out that concept using more granular descriptors. [4] For instance, as demonstrated by this study’s survey results, “going against the grain” was one of the most frequently mentioned types of risk-taking faculty described (in general, self-focused and student writing concepts). While students may be unfamiliar with going against the grain, we could describe what that means in the context of an assignment, like playing with the boundaries of a genre (interweaving a research paper with elements of creative writing, for example, or reframing an annotated bibliography as a digital research narrative), and include that specific genre-bending goal in our grading criteria.

One example of “going against the grain” was from a creative non-fiction interviewee who assigns a “‘Twisted’ Nonfiction Essay Assignment” in which students engage in “a purposeful experiment with memory, or narrative, or the first-person perspective, or some other fundamental hallmark of the genre.” In the essay’s rubric, a “transgressive purpose or attempt” at the task is “worth a whopping 50% of the grade” and the highest point category is described as a “sophisticated attempt at testing the expectations and/or boundaries of creative nonfiction” with “something clearly ‘at stake,’ in the process—a strong purpose driving the essay’s experiment.” This will not be the first time students will have seen this language, as she described how she scaffolds it in class analyzing and discussing models (see section B below), but students still get more of a precise idea of what type of risk-taking their professor expects.

2. Risk-Taking Writing Models

In addition to including explicit language to describe risk-taking in grading criteria, students also need models representative of the types of risk-taking we expect. Sharing these models should be accompanied by class discussions and/or lessons analyzing specific risk-taking moves.

The creative non-fiction professor from A above prepares students for the “‘Twisted’ Nonfiction Essay” by “[trying] to model it for them as much as [she] can when [they’re] doing in-class work. And… through lots of examples of texts that… experiment formally.” These models and discussion are essential for students writing this project because “it can be a little scary for them to embrace the spirit of experimentation” and it “tends to ease them into a more comfortable relationship” with it.

In another interview, an Art History professor described a Writing Art Criticism assignment that was “‘open,’ as students [could] write about a work or an exhibition of their choice in any way they would like to.” Students’ options are described in more detail below:

They could write a piece of evaluative criticism, an interpretive essay, a polemical tract, a poem or a combination. It’s an opportunity for students to step away from the traditional college art-history essay and play with form and voice. By this time in the semester, students have read a variety of art criticism so they have some models to work with and adapt, if they would like to.

While given this freedom of choice, students were provided with examples of art criticism earlier in the course, giving them a foundation for the genre before asking them to experiment by deviating from the norm.

Another interviewee assigns a multimedia project and describes a lesson teaching students that genres that tend to stand out are examples “that [break the genre] a little,” which is a writing goal she also has for her students. She then provides examples of specific multimedia genres, like the horror film, that do just that. This includes Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 The Shining, one scene of which the professor shows her students. In the film’s last scene, the antagonist, Jack, chases his son through the hedge maze during a blizzard. Typical horror movies would darken the hedge maze to “take you into… deep, dark places.” Kubrick, however, “dumps you in the middle of bright white snow,” a move the professor describes as upending the expectations of the genre in order to create a certain effect—in this case, that horror isn’t limited to the dark.

In my own first-year writing classes, I assign writing requiring students to share personal information. For the first major assignment of the class, students choose a threshold concept from Writing Studies and explore its significance in a reflection, pulling from their past and present experiences to do so. For some students, this feels vulnerable on several levels—both because they (ideally) will be honest about their feelings around writing (often not so positive), and because they have to reveal their personal experiences with strangers (their classmates and me). In addition to sharing models that make similar kinds of moves (literacy narratives, for example), I share my own writing with students. For this assignment, I share pieces where I disclosed personal information. My dissertation, for example, opens with an anecdote about the fear and paralysis I experienced in my first graduate seminar meeting (this felt like an enormous act of vulnerability at the time):

When I showed up at that first seminar meeting, all of [my] confidence disappeared. My experience didn’t matter anymore. The desks were arranged in a big square, so I couldn’t hide if I needed to. I nervously took my seat and tried to force a smile. The syllabus was handed out. My eyes widened at the weekly reading requirements, but especially at the term paper, which was expected to be as long as both of my final papers for my most recent undergraduate courses combined. When the discussion began over an excerpt from a literary text, things got worse. Here… were all of these other students who had similar or possibly… more credentials than I had, and they all sounded smarter than me. Somehow, they all knew when to jump into the conversation without raising their hands. I chose to stay silent, rather than risk sounding like I didn’t belong. What had I gotten myself into? (Hancock 2)

My later discussion and analysis of the seminar paper genre draws upon my opening anecdote as an example of how murky and frustrating new graduate students can find the writing process, acting as a model for how students can draw upon examples from their experiences to discuss their threshold concepts. Sharing examples of when we took risks as writers can be particularly helpful for students in their confidence to take risks themselves. It can be even more helpful if the ways we define risk-taking in our own writing practices aligns with the risk-taking we want students to emulate.

3. Homework Tasks, Reflections and Draft-Stage Work on Risk-Taking

Many study participants allayed their concerns about subjectivity when it came to evaluating student risk-taking by requiring reflections asking students to explain how they took risks in a writing assignment. One respondent includes this criterion in an ENG 102 rubric: “Clear evidence of taking risks or extending oneself beyond one’s current knowledge or practices.” The evidence for this “usually takes the form of students’ reflections on their learning processes where they explain what risks they took, why they were motivated to take them, and the writing, research or thinking gains those risks yielded (or not).” Another respondent “[rewards] it in [their] narrative feedback and [asks] for more of it if [they] don’t see the progression [they’ve] asked for…” and they “try to encourage a sense/awareness of it in [their] students when [they] ask [students] to talk about the risks they’ve taken in the rhetorical analysis they include with each assignment.” Some spoke of writing about risk-taking during the drafting process for a larger assignment. One respondent described a rubric criterion that evaluates “the degree to which ‘ideas overall show creativity, courage and/or critical thinking’” and students work toward this goal by completing a plan for their upcoming essay. This plan asks students to write about “common thinking to get beyond, and why my perspective is different: what is the walk-by thinking/common thinking (that you want to get beyond)? Then explain why/how you see it differently from how other people typically see the place and related issues.”

Not only can these low-stakes assignments help faculty in risk-taking assessment, but this type of metacognitive work also reinforces the risk-taking skills students have gained, increasing the chances of transfer to future writing situations. Teagarden et al. also recommended the reflection approach in their study on intellectual risk-taking, as it “provides students a chance to grapple with potential rhetorical trade-offs involved in risky approaches to argument, convention, and language, and for instructors to access those struggles and potentially intervene if students seem to misunderstand key concepts or practices” (131). By brainstorming how their writing might be taking the risks the professor built into the assignment goals and, on the other end, reflecting on their writing process after-the-fact, students have the time and space to meet the risk-taking goals set out for them (and potentially make similar moves in the future).

Lastly, if faculty feel uncomfortable incorporating risk-taking into their assignment rubrics, risk-taking criteria can instead be incorporated into the drafting stage. During brainstorming, for instance, having students free write about their experiences with what they consider risk-taking might help students consider their own motivations, goals and fears as writers outside of the assignment’s context, and they can then use that writing to draft topic ideas or genre considerations. If this work during the drafting stage is not graded but given process points (similar to Asao B. Inoue’s labor-based grading system in Labor-Based Grading Contracts, an approach also recommended by Fernandes et al. to ensure students have freedom to take risks in their use of plurilingual resources while also getting credit for labor) as well as instructor feedback, students may feel more willing to take whatever risks the instructor describes as an assignment goal.

But… Should We Require Risk-Taking in Our Students’ Writing?

I think it is also important to acknowledge that 7% of respondents answered “no” to question 5 (have you ever expected students to take risks in their work for a particular writing assignment in your classes?). I conducted an interview with one of those respondents. In his survey, Ben (name changed) described risk-taking in writing instruction as a term that “inflates a task’s importance unnecessarily” and that he “[sees] nothing risky in [his] writing, be it for blogs, newspapers, journals or books.” He also stated that he “[refuses] the designation” when it comes to his teaching, “though others might say what [he does] and [has his] students do is risky.” When I asked him why this is, he explained that he thinks the risk-taking writing instructors want their students to take on are not necessarily going to be seen as real risks to students. The risks Ben thought of when considering that term were:

The risks… they are taking even just to come to school. They, especially first-generation college students, don’t know if they’re going to succeed or fail in school. They don’t know anything about college. They come into it as if it’s this huge black space. It’s a risk just to enroll in college and we need to respect those risks—look at our students and forget about flattering ourselves by claiming that we’re doing anything risky.

Ben sees risk-taking as more extreme than the intellectual risks faculty might ask their students to take in writing—how can we say we are asking students to take a risk on something like a research paper when some of them are taking more drastic risks just getting to class in the morning? Other scholars might agree with Ben’s skepticism of faculty concepts of risk-taking in writing, like Sam Hamilton in Risk-Taking is a form of Playing it Safe. Hamilton argues that the risks faculty are asking students to take aren’t really risks because students are still expected to operate under the constraints and boundaries put in place by academia in order to succeed (Risk-Taking). Hamilton might agree with Ben, then, that requiring students to take risks in writing assignments is unrealistic and perhaps a bit unfair. While I understand these limitations in incorporating risk-taking into a writing assignment (especially when required), I believe that the use of risk-taking in the drafting stage gives students more freedom to think about their intrinsic motivations for completing a writing assignment (as Feigenbaum discusses) and how experimenting and trying (and failing) are valuable learning opportunities.

Conclusion

This study reinforces how wide-ranging, subjective and murky the concept of risk-taking in writing can be—everything from the act of sharing writing with others to moves that take us out of our writerly comfort zones. These concepts can also vary depending on discipline and what our own motivations are. What it also reveals is that risk-taking is a concept we are thinking about in our own writing practices and how it plays out in our students’ work. If we are expecting our students to take risks, it is vital that we are communicating what those expectations entail in grading criteria, discussion and analysis of models, asking students to think through what risk-taking might look like during drafting and, after the fact, how they think they were successful with that process.

Appendices

Appendix A: Email Survey Questions

1. What is your primary academic discipline? If your primary discipline is inter- or multi-disciplinary or you work primarily in more than one discipline, please note that, naming no more than 3 disciplines total.

2. What is your instructor position/title?

• Full Professor
• Associate Professor
• Assistant Professor
• Non-Tenure-Track Faculty
• Graduate Student Instructor
• Lab instructor
• Postdoc
• Other

3. When you hear the phrase, “taking risks in writing,” what does that mean to you?

4. In the kinds of writing you do, what would you say it means to “take risks” in your writing?

5. Have you ever expected students to “take risks” in their work for a particular writing assignment in your classes?

• Yes
• No
• Unsure (please elaborate)

6. If you can, please briefly describe a writing assignment or assignments and how “risk-taking” factored into what you expected from students’ writing.

7. Have you ever included any kind of “risk-taking” as a grading criterion in writing assessment materials you share with students (writing assignment requirements/guidelines, rubrics, etc.)?

• Yes
• No
• Unsure (please elaborate)

8. Would you be willing to describe/share that criterion/criteria? If yes, please do so below. If not, you may skip to the next question.

9. Would you be willing to participate in a 30–45 minute follow-up virtual interview via phone or video chat?

• Yes
• No

If Yes: Please provide an email address where you can be reached to arrange an interview for a date between ____ and _____.

Appendix B: Coding Schema

List of 15 codes based on participants’ concepts that define or describe risk-taking in writing, each followed by a brief description.

1. Broadcasting or sharing writing: any act of disseminating writing to others
2. Digging deeper: moving writing beyond the obvious, simple or commonplace (this code was taken from a survey response “pushing yourself to dig deeper in your thinking”)
3. Going against the grain: unorthodox, non-traditional writing moves that go against dominant conventions, norms, or ways of thinking
4. Grit despite potential failure: persisting with the writing process despite the potential to fail
5. Low stakes writing: writing produced during the “low stakes” stages, i.e., during the drafting process
6. Outside comfort zone: writing that pushes the writer beyond comfort
7. Personal disclosure: disclosure of information that the writer considers personal
8. Exploratory agency: taking control of the writing process while embracing the freedom of exploration
9. Writer-based complexity: writing that the writer considers difficult or complex
10. Writer-based novelty: writing that is new in some way to the writer
11. Discipline-based novelty: writing that is new to the writer’s discipline
12. Writing for evaluation: writing produced for evaluation, i.e., a promotion and tenure portfolio
13. Negative response: participant does not take risks in writing or disagrees with the concept of risk-taking in writing
14. All writing: respondent considers all acts of writing to be risks
15. Other: responses that do not fall into the above 14 codes

Notes

[1] I must credit this description of “A-range grades” to Dr. Stephen Sutherland, my mentor teacher and the Director of Composition while I was an MA English student at UMass Boston from 2009–2011. Dr. Sutherland let us graduate student instructors adapt his materials for teaching English 101, including a document of descriptions of essay grade ranges (that this excerpt is from). We handed these out to our students at the beginning of the semester.

[2] Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of survey respondents were from my home discipline of Rhetoric and Composition most likely due to the fact that Rhet./Comp. faculty are more likely to see the value of this type of research and tend to be more willing to take a writing instruction-focused survey like this one. Though this was intended to be a multidisciplinary study, I did receive more qualitative responses from participants who primarily teach first-year writing, which would account for the large number of first-year writing-specific teaching examples described by participants in the article.

[3] This meant that a given respondent’s definition of general risk-taking had at least one coding category in common with a risk-taking type they described in the risk-taking containing assignment example they provided for question 6.

[4] My focus on these principles stems from Pamela Flash’s excellent work in creating the Writing Enriched Curriculum model, wherein faculty in a given department collaboratively generate a set of writing abilities and criteria to assess those abilities for their majors by the time of graduation. One of WEC’s major philosophies is that “systemic, curricular incorporation of writing into ‘content instruction’ can be most meaningfully achieved when those who teach are provided multiple opportunities to articulate, interrogate, and communicate their assumptions and expectations” about student writing in the major (Flash 20).