Abstract
This case study, an example of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research, explores student motivations to collaborate with both peer teams and community partners in a service-learning course. Written by one instructor and three undergraduates, the article draws on personal narratives, student reflections, and a postcourse student survey. Our experiences and findings suggest that in courses like these positive extrinsic factors motivate students to collaborate in ways that the extrinsic motivators in typical assignments do not, helping to foster trust and shared goals. We also share our work as an example of how to include student voices in SoTL work.
The writing and editing process became more concrete, real. Rhetorically, we crafted our grant more precisely and tried to use rhetorical strategies more effectivelybecause we cared more.
Throughout my academic career, I focused intently on my grades and always strived for the “A,” but I don’t think I have ever been as motivated to do well for something other than a grade as I was in this particular course. At the beginning of this process, we all wanted to do well and get our organizations money, but we were still very focused on understanding the proposal elements in order to ensure a good grade.
Motivating students to complete writing assignments for a purpose other than a grade is a persistently troubling problem. A quick search ofBusiness Communication Quarterly, for example, returned almost 500 hits for the termsstudent engagementandstudent motivation. From case-study assignments to problem-based learning to client-based and service-learning projects, there is no magic pedagogy to increase students’ engagement and intrinsic motivation. But courses and projects that create authentic contexts for collaboration and writing have been shown to not only address these issues but also to improve student learning and teamwork skills.
Including student voices work in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) offers a lens for examining student motivation, in turn enriching disciplinary discussions about how to design courses for maximum engagement. The SoTL movement supports student participation in the research of teaching and learning to create a fuller picture of the process that we can adapt accordingly (Cohn, 2012;Werder & Otis, 2009). Students benefit from a deeper understanding of the work that faculty put into teaching and research, whereas faculty benefit from the student voices when planning courses and executing learning-based research (Cohn, 2012;Werder & Otis, 2009). These benefits are especially true when considering student motivations for learning.
The authors of this piece include a faculty member, Rebecca Pope-Ruark (known to students as RPR), and three students who participated in a Fall 2012 Special Topics in Professional Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) course titled “Grant Writing for Non-Profits.” Junior Paige Ransbury, senior Mia Brady, and sophomore Rachel Fishman, all English majors concentrating in PWR, were invited to collaborate on SoTL research in the Spring of 2013. Together we conducted a follow-up survey of students in the course and explored our own experiences through lengthy discussions and regular freewriting. Our preliminary discussions led us to believe that different motivations had a great impact on students’ collaborative engagement with both peers and community partners.
In this article, we will each address different aspects of our experiences from our unique yet related perspectives in order to specifically explore how positive extrinsic motivations affected, and in many cases improved, student collaboration. RPR will begin by situating our case study within the context of literature on student motivation and service learning, as well as explaining the specifics of the course and SoTL methodology used to collect our data. Next, Paige will explore different aspects of motivation experienced in the course, Mia how those motivations affected students’ collaborative activities with peers, and Rachel how motivations affected collaboration with community partners. Finally, we will offer insights into how exploring our service-learning course experience as an SoTL research project provided valuable insight about positive extrinsic motivations to collaborate effectively, as well as how student voices work like this article provide value to the discipline.
Student Motivation and Service-Learning Experiences
“What motivates students to perform well in academic courses?” is an age-old question. Motivation is a complex and tricky subject, well covered in the educational psychology literature.Ryan and Deci (2000)provided an excellent overview of existing research defining the central ideas of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations related to student learning. Students who are motivated solely by a grade or external validations areextrinsicallymotivated. These are the students most concerned with getting the “right answer” or most interested in “what you [the instructor] are looking for” (Brumberger, 2004, p. 349). These students often have whatCarol Dweck (1999)referred to as a performance orientation.
On the other hand, students who exhibit whatDweck (1999)called a mastery orientation areintrinsicallymotivated and act for personal enjoyment, curiosity, or the challenge of the activity (Ryan & Deci, 2000). These students view the undertaken activities as satisfying “innate needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness” (p. 57).Catherine King (2007)noted that, while a mastery orientation might be ideal, an extrinsic performance orientation is not always bad when it leads students to push themselves to succeed for others. In both cases, students begin to self-regulate their learning through careful planning, monitoring their activities, exercising control over their environments, and reacting to and reflecting about learning (Pintrich, 2000).
ButRyan and Deci (2000)astutely noted that many educational assignments are designed to achieve curricular goals within the credentializing university system rather than to intrinsically motivate students to learn, or to work together. They asked, “How [can we] motivate students to value and self-regulate such activities, and without external pressure, to carry them out on their own?” (p. 61). Building on this question, how then can instructors of professional communication, whose disciplinary roots reach back to the intrinsic and positive extrinsic motivations of Greek citizens participating in civic activities, help students engage more deeply in their learning?Melinda Knight (2012)noted that we must assume “the more engaged students are, the more likely they are to learn what we believe we are teaching them” (p. 123).Burke and James (2008)argued that motivation may hinge on student curiosity, andMcCarthy and McCarthy (2003)summarized a variety of studies that collectively reported that students are most motivated when they see a direct connection between a course or project outcome and their personal goals. So, is performative extrinsic motivation always negative?Li-shih Huang (2003)reminded us that the root of the word “motivation” lies in the Latinmovere, one of Cicero’s primary purposes of rhetoric. She recommended that we “foster an open, supportive, and positive learning environment” (p. 90), “set clear expectations and help learners set learning goals (p. 91), “provide opportunities to accumulate success” (p. 92), and “provide opportunities for self-assessment” (p. 93).
Service learning is one means, albeit an imperfect one with its own set of challenges, to create the opportunities Huang articulated.The National and Community Service Act of 1990defines service learning as a pedagogy in which students engage in “thoughtfully organized [and fully integrated] service that is conducted in and meets the needs of a community” and through which students develop a reflective sense of civic engagement. In his foundational article about service learning in our field,James Dubinsky (2002)argued that professional communication is inherently practical in the positive Aristotelian sense and that the pedagogy serves “as a bridge between practical, ‘market-driven’ focus and a humanistic, service-oriented one” (pp. 61, 62). Within this frame,J. Blake Scott (2004,2008) argued that service learning allows students the opportunity to both “develop, reflect about, and enact civic responsibility” (2004, p. 289) and to adapt “emergent knowledge to specific workplace or community-based contexts” (2008, p. 382) in whatJeff Grabill (2006)called “structured, meaningful, and potentially long-term ways in order to solve problems” (pp. 152-153). Yet much of the published work on service learning in professional communication courses seems to have focused more on the transitional role of these projects, helping students practice workplace genres, develop flexibility and project management skills, and begin the transition from school to workplace, as well as decrying the increased time and effort for instructors to create good service-learning experiences (cf.,Blakeslee, 2001;Kastman Breuch, 2001;Mara, 2006;Matthews & Zimmerman, 1999;Smith Taylor, 2006).
Missing from this literature seems to be an important voice—students. Instead of focusing on the instructors’ views and observations of students in these courses, what happens to student motivations in these experiences when students participate in studying their own learning? In the following sections, we take turns presenting aspects of a case study of one grant writing service-learning course, specifically in terms of student motivations for collaborative activities, in order to show some of the benefits of cultivating positive extrinsic motivations in the classroom as well as to illustrate the value of student voices in our understanding of teaching and learning.
RPR’s Turn: Creating a Transactional Collaborative Learning Experience
Over the last 5 years, I have used comprehensive service-learning projects to address what I see as the challenges of student motivation related to collaboration.Schullery and Gibson (2001)noted a distinct gap between the value of the team project in the business communication classroom and actual instruction in collaborative practices, articulating the need for explicit instruction to “foster more successful experiences” (p. 12). As I have written elsewhere, my own early unsuccessful experiences collaborating in industry have led me to find ways to break through some of the walls students construct against group experiences and to actively teach effective strategies for both collaboration and project management (Pope-Ruark, 2012;Pope-Ruark, Eichel, Talbott, & Thornton, 2011). Years of experiences with social loafers, drama kings and queens, and controlling dictators have heightened students’ protective instincts regarding their own individual grades and dramatically reduced their ability to trust one another (Fredrick, 2008;Pope-Ruark et al., 2011). Collaboration is expected of them, although they do not necessarily believe they have strategies that will help them succeed in collaborative activities. But when they use the only strategies they know, typically divide-and-conquer, we as faculty are often frustrated by the results.
For these reasons I strive to create experiences that (a) teach students strategies for collaboration, (b) provide authentic project experiences that allow students to practice collaboration and rhetorical strategies, and (c) encourage students to develop team strategies for trust and empowerment. I define an authentic experience as one for an outside audience with real needs and complexities, that lasts longer than 2 to 3 weeks, and that is too large for one student to complete individually.
My Fall 2012 Special Topics in Professional Writing and Rhetoric course, themed “Grant Writing for Non-Profits,” was designed to meet my three criteria for authentic experiences. First, students were partnered with representatives from five local organizations ranging from a domestic violence agency to an exotic animal rescue. Each organization had very different needs and its own funding challenges, while each representative had a unique way of interacting with the student teams ranging from actively line editing drafts to overly lavishing praise and thanks without much critical feedback. Students competed for a share of funding that they would personally hand to their partners, making the situation more than a simulation. The partner grant project lasted 7 weeks, and then students spent 1 week acting as the funding committee making disbursement decisions based on the final grant proposals. Students had to deal with issues of group dynamics and partner relationships that can often be avoided in shorter projects. Finally, in crafting the project, I made certain the grant application required multiple lines of research, invention, and argument to discourage one student from taking over.
As I was interested in how successful this experience was for students, this study provides an example of using mixed methods to conduct SoTL research and involving students in aspects of that work (seeD’Andrea, 2006;Hubball & Clarke, 2010;Hutchings, 2002). As part of an ongoing and IRB-approved SoTL agenda studying my students’ collaboration and project experiences, I first collected observations and students’ weekly reflections throughout the course during the fall semester. Fifteen students consented to include their reflection data in my initial SoTL study. A preliminary review of the data after the course was completed illustrated for me that many students began to reflect on their projects differently as the semester went on, talking less about class material or ideas they thought I wanted to hear about and more about how their activities would affect their partners. As the quotes from Mia and Paige above show, it seemed that students began to “care” more and, therefore, were more engaged in their collaborative activities with both their peer groups and their community partners, both intrinsically and extrinsically.
To explore this idea, I invited Rachel, Mia, and Paige to share their experiences and develop a small study of their peers to further investigate. In addition to my observation data, our data come from two primary sources beyond our personal experiences: the student reflections I collected during the fall and a postcourse survey we jointly developed and distributed in the spring after the course. Eleven of the 18 students who took the course completed the IRB-approved survey in its entirety, including the three student coinquirers. The survey was designed to collect information about students’ experiences with service learning, collaboration, and motivations related to group work. We used a combination of multiple-choice, Likert-type scale, and open-ended questions. (See theappendixfor a copy of the survey instrument used in the study.)
As noted above, while all four of us analyzed the survey data, I provided a summary analysis of the student reflections; the student researchers did not have direct access to their peers’ reflections in order to maintain participant confidentiality. Once we identified elements related to motivations and collaboration strategies to code data for, I did the first- and second-level coding in the reflections, combined and blinded the findings, and then discussed the results with the student researchers. We used the same codes to sort the responses to three open-ended survey questions. The student researchers drew on the compiled and excerpted reflection data below in addition to our survey results and analyses.
In the sections that follow, each of the student authors, drawing on our collective data, discusses one aspect of our findings regarding student motivation broadly, motivation to collaborate with peers, and motivation to collaborate with community partners. First, Paige will explore the broader concepts of students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to perform well in a service-learning writing course, drawing on both her own experiences and our study results.
Paige’s Turn: Understanding Students’ Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations
Last semester in one of my courses, I took a quiz. In my opinion I answered a 2-point question correctly, but my professor disagreed and gave me half credit. In 10-point quizzes, every point matters—and I wasn’t willing to give up thatone pointeasily. This experience highlights a universal student motivation: the grade. In academic environments, grade motivation is nearly impossible to escape, but it’s not the only motivation fueling student success. For example, one of my main motivations to complete work is meeting (or exceeding) people’s expectations. In this section, I will first discuss my personal motivations for learning and collaborating, then connect them to our data. Ultimately, I found that course structures impact motivation, motivation impacts collaboration, and motivations are subject (and likely) to change over time.
Reflecting on My Own Motivations
In service-learning-designated classes, my motivation to complete work is somewhat different than in a typical class. While assignments based on hypothetical situations can be helpful, I sometimes question what they will teach me (i.e., “When am I ever going to need to know/do this?”). Service-learning classes take students from the hypothetical to the real (or mostly real). This shift, for me, correlates with a shift in my motivation from extrinsic to intrinsic. Instead of performing for outside approval (quantified in a grade or qualified in relationships with peers), I consider how I am building a professional identity. The focus is on who I am becoming, not what I am doing. That’s one reason I registered for Grant Writing; I knew enough about my “team player” identity to know that it needed work. The structure of Grant Writing would challenge me to grow as a leader and a writer. These goals were fueled, and in my mind, made more doable, by the fact that the work completed in this course would have “real world” consequences.
My team worked with a nonprofit exotic wildlife rescue. Visiting our community partner marked a turning point in our project, as we were able to experience first-hand the staff’s passion and dedication to their work. Observing their passion helped us adopt it as our own. I recognized, at the time, that this adopted passion would be short-lived. I didn’t expect to care about the rescue in a way that motivated action after the course, but it didn’t stop me from caring about whether or not we earned them grant money. The writing and editing process became more concrete as the realization that we would be turning in a final draft of something on behalf of a nonprofit became more real. There was real money and real competition; nothing was guaranteed. We responded to this uncertainty by working to make things more certain, consistently going back to the directions, revising the grant, and asking clarifying questions. Socially, we created relationships with each other that went beyond “do the work and meet the deadlines.” Rhetorically, we crafted our grant more precisely and tried to use rhetorical devices more effectively in our persuasive narrative and budget justifications, for example, because we justcaredmore.
As my intrinsic motivation to grow as a leader and my extrinsic motivation to do well for our partner grew, effective collaboration with my peers became more important. We were a unit acting on behalf of a nonprofit. Communication suffered when one group member did not seem to be as invested as the rest of us, and the apparent lack of motivation translated into a lack of effort. Our frustrations partly stemmed from the feeling that we were losing a valuable resource, someone who could catch a typo, think of a creative hook, or help format the document. The other group members and I had to work harder to ensure that tasks were completed on time and up to standards. Dealing with group dynamics was a learning experience, but learning experiences don’t fund proposals. At that point, I felt like I had already established myself as a leader, and the extrinsic motivation to get our proposal funded became my main motivation.
Collaboration with our community partner was more hands-off than other groups, perhaps because the rescue had worked with RPR before and knew what to expect from her students. This became a problem when it would take weeks for them to provide information we needed in order to proceed with writing the proposal. Our work was often suspended until we received necessary information. However, visiting and adopting their passion as our own meant aligning with them and empathizing with their schedules and priorities. Several times throughout the semester, I heard comments from my team members demonstrating such understanding. Someone said at one point, “They’re saving animals’ lives . . . they can take as long as they want to get back to us.” While the lack of timely communication was an issue, it also served as a platform from which my team could extol the partner’s virtues and, therefore, increase our positive external motivations to work on their behalf.
Near the end of the course, I felt as though I had reached my personal goals of growing as a leader and collaborator. When my group members mentioned their hopes and fears related to their final grades, I didn’t really consider the future of my own grade. I framed the course as an opportunity to grow as a leader, and RPR framed the course as an opportunity to work with and for a community partner. These frameworks motivated me to engage with my peers and community partner in a meaningful way, as our data also supported.
Exploring My Peers’ Motivations
Based on our data, every student had different experiences within their team and partner relationships that affected motivations throughout the course. Motivations can be determined partly by identifying whom students perceived as the primary audience. Many were excited at the beginning of the class to know our work would be for a real community partner because, as more than half the class noted in their reflections, writing for a “real” audience helped them feel as if they could make an impact on the community or reader. One student nicely summarized the collective feeling of many of our peers: Most times when I am writing for a class outside of my professional writing classes, I am writing to display my knowledge of the material we learn . . . when the audience is primarily the professor, the good grade is the end goal. Where[as] with a real audience, the goal can range from informing to persuading . . . and the word choice, layout design, and information highlighted will reflect this purpose.
For the most part, our peers recognized the difference between writing for a grade and writing to impact a community partner. In Grant Writing, 36% of students somewhat agreed or agreed that RPR was the primary audience, rather than the community partner, which may suggest that a lower number of students had high grade motivations or did not buy into the course framework. However, this highly contrasts with the 82% of students who agreed or agreed somewhat that the instructor is the primary audience in typical group projects. This is a significant increase, which suggests that the students who select service-learning courses may belessgrade driven than others.
A common theme in my classmates’ motivations was working on behalf of someone else, especially at the beginning of the project. Based on the survey, 73% of students believed earning funding for their partner was very important. Every student said they felt motivated to perform well for the partner in early reflections, with one noting, Our group’s ultimate goal, of course, is to fulfill [partner’s] need . . . by writing a grant that is good enough to secure funding for them. . . . It would be a shame if we can’t get well-deserved funding because the grant we wrote for them wasn’t good enough.
Another student reflected, “There is actually an opportunity for us to make a difference. . . . We get to use class time and have homework assignments that actually matter. There is nothing in this class that feels like busy work.” Extrinsic motivation to do well, or the performance orientation, sprung from working for a worthy cause. This is supported by the survey data as well: 73% of those surveyed felt highly motivated to collaborate successfully, and 91% felt motivated or highly motivated to go beyond expectations.
As with my group, meeting with the partner onsite rather than in the classroom had a huge impact on motivation. One student reflected, “This trip honestly changed my viewpoints. . . . I didn’t really feel the urgency [of partner’s mission] until I visited. . . . This trip sparked my inspiration and motivation in ways I did not expect.” Another reflected, “I can now say that I am definitely more passionate and interested in the project. I want to make sure we can help.” These reflections emphasize how partnerships extending beyond university walls can affect students’ extrinsic motivations positively.
Did students show any higher level of intrinsic motivations in the course? According to our analysis, yes. Several students reflected throughout the class about how the work they were doing in Grant Writing connected to their lives, showing growth and some intrinsic motivation. Eight students referenced how the skills they were learning by working with the partners and applying lessons from class would directly apply to their future plans. Four of these students spent more time reflecting on class lessons in their journals, but did so in ways that showed they were processing the information, connecting it to their personal and professional experiences to date, and then practicing the skills directly in their partner projects.
Motivations are determined by a variety of factors: course format, past experiences, personal dispositions, interactions with peers and partners, and general communication with others. The intrinsic motivation to become better—as a student, leader, writer, communicator, collaborator, and so on—drives many of us, whereas extrinsic grade motivation is probably the most prevalent and the most difficult to keep in check. But the motivation to do well for others—peers, professors, or partners—is another, more positive extrinsic motivation. Maybe it is telling that the two most commonly used words in the survey to describe the service-learning experience were “rewarding” and “challenging.” In the following sections, Mia and Rachel will dig deeper into what motivated us and our peers to do well for both our peer groups and community partners.
Mia’s Turn: Analyzing Collaborative Relationships with Peers
As Paige discussed above, both intrinsic and extrinsic factors motivate students to work with peers and community partners in different ways. In this section, I go into more detail about student collaboration with peers and discuss the ways in which motivations led to different styles of collaboration. While some students had stronger collaborative experiences than others, collectively we all learned more about the collaboration process and how to collaborate successfully through participating in this service-learning experience.
My Personal Motivations for Collaboration
As a PWR senior, I highly value collaboration and have had various experiences that remind me of the essential components of successful group work. I now find myself thinking about the “real world” and consider strong collaboration to be one of my greatest strengths. I came into RPR’s Grant Writing course with this mindset; I knew how important it was for me to gain further practice working with group members. I did not think too intently about the fact that this was a service-learning course. Initially, I was more interested in the fact that it fulfilled a major requirement than the fact that we would work with a nonprofit, but I was personally motivated to explore how working with a nonprofit would create new group dynamics.
I was part of a team of just three people. One was a student I knew from previous classes and with whom I was also working in another PWR course, and the other was a student I had never met before. We had all indicated that we were interested in working with a local nonprofit organization that provides services for women and children in domestic violence situations. My group members and I learned that we would be working with the organization to write a grant for a puppet show program for local elementary schools that educates students on domestic violence, bullying, and similar issues. The organization needed a new puppet stage, as the one they were currently transporting from school to school around the county was falling apart.
As our group was smaller than others, I was somewhat fearful that more work might fall on me, as I consider myself to be a “go-getter” in group projects. But from the very beginning of our group work experience, it was clear that my group members and I worked well together. I was not the only go-getter by any means. My group members and I were eager to do well for our partner, but we all shared a clear understanding that we would do the best for them if we worked together and communicated openly with each other about expectations and any issues that we encountered (although to be honest, we didn’t quite encounter any). We were motivated extrinsically by two different audiences—our community partner and each other. We wanted to provide our community partner with a thorough grant application as well as prove ourselves to be professional and dedicated. When thinking about each other as an audience, we held ourselves to a very high standard, ensuring that we kept each other accountable with the timeliness and quality of our work. We also clearly communicated what we expected of each other. Being able to differentiate between these audiences, and collaborating well for both our group members and our community partner, was essential to our success.
I did not expect that working with our community partner would influence my group’s dynamic the way that it did. Collectively, my group members and I thought deeply about our partner audience. We were extrinsically motivated by the organization in a profound way, as we wanted to ensure that the work we provided them was not only thorough and well written, but also that the grant application would yield positive results. It felt important to be writing for an organization that was passionate about ending domestic violence, and at some level, that we were contributing to their mission of educating the community. Those feelings motivated us to do well for this community partner.
Peer Motivations for Collaboration
Did my peers in the course have a similar experience? In our survey, students were questioned about collaboration in typical classes compared with this service-learning class. For example, 45.5% of students agreed that group projects in classes (in general) help them to learn to deal with collaboration successfully; in contrast, 91% of students agreed regarding Grant Writing. In terms of communicating in group projects in other classes, only 27% of students agreed that they usually feel listened to and heard/taken seriously by team members, whereas 91% of students agreed in Grant Writing. As these results show, students felt that they learned more in terms of successful collaboration in this service-learning course than in regular courses.
Because students were working so closely together and felt that they were listened to, 80% of students in Grant Writing reported being motivated to use the strengths of their team members, and 64% felt comfortable taking a leadership role in the project at one time or another. Reflection data showed that students were always thinking about the community partner and were more likely to listen to each other because of the community partner. One student noted, Having an actual organization behind the assignment makes this project real. . . . I find our group discussing what will be the best opportunity for the organization and asking ourselves questions to find out what the best solution is to the problem.
Another student reflected that the group was highly motivated by “constantly reminding ourselves that we are writing this grant so a worthy organization can acquire desperately needed resources.” Working for the benefit of the community partners not only extrinsically motivated students but also heightened their collaborative experience. Students wanted to work successfully with each other because of the community partner and the valuable work that could be done.
RPR found in the reflections that members of the strongest groups seemed to trust each other more because they believed they had the same motives for the project—to do the best job possible for the worthy partner they were all passionate about. But on the other hand, members of less successful collaborative groups did not share this understanding of each other’s motivations. Students who most resisted collaboration and seemed most motivated by individual grades did not have good experiences, either taking over the project or withdrawing completely. For example, one student discussed a series of bad collaborative experiences in an early journal and expressed concern that this would be another bad experience. RPR noted that this team never gelled, perhaps because the student was not able to trust peers or deal with group frustrations. Another student’s grade motivation and focus on RPR’s feedback led to group problems because the student became more concerned with what RPR thought was “right or wrong” rather than discussions with the team about what was best for the partner in the grant. This student did not trust peers, commenting in a journal entry after the entire class provided detailed written feedback on each team’s presentation that “most people grade harshly on ‘small things.’ I feel like our class is full of harsh graders.” For these students, trust of peers became an issue that made successful collaboration almost impossible.
There is no question that working with a team is a challenging experience. In fact, when asked to list three words to describe collaborating with a group in this service-learning project, students used words like “challenging” and sometimes “frustrating.” Yet words such as “eye-opening,” “enjoyable,” “beneficial,” “effective,” and “enlightening” were common as well. Pushing through challenges allowed students to appreciate working with their peers for the benefit of their community partners.
Working with our peers is certainly more common in the average college classroom than working with community partners. Community partners allow students to get a feel for what it’s like to communicate with people on a professional level, while still directly incorporating coursework and skills that they develop in the classroom, and, of course, while working with other students. Although students had different experiences collaborating with group members, we were all motivated by our community partners in a palpable way. In Rachel’s section below, she discusses student collaboration with partners, and the ways in which practical strategies learned in the classroom and through handling communication challenges carry over when working with community partners.
Rachel’s Turn: Examining Collaborative Relationships With Partners
As Mia discussed above, collaborating with peers poses challenges. Students in Grant Writing also faced these challenges in external environments, as communicating with community partners required employing effective rhetorical strategies to ensure that the products met the partners’ goals. Working with a partner carries a new source of motivation; however, as Paige reported above, working with a partner also poses some challenges of its own, while ideally allowing students to improve their professional communication skills. In this section, I discuss the motivations that sparked collaborative relationships with partners and the manner by which these motivations evolved and changed the collaboration process.
Developing Personal Motivation to Collaborate
My group partnered with an organization that serves previously incarcerated males by helping them become stronger fathers and role models in the community. For me, the fact that we were working with a community partner meant that it was not just essential to effectively communicate with group members in order to create a strong product, as Mia discussed; I believed we had to be intentional about sustaining open communication with our partner representative in order to ensure both the effectiveness and accuracy of our grant proposal. Going into the Grant Writing experience, I was not quite sure what to expect with regard to the exact role of our partner. Because of my extensive service activities beyond this class, I recognized the complexity of the multiple roles that most staff members are forced to embody. Therefore, I prepared myself for a communication struggle—not because I doubted the commitment of our partner to assist us, but rather because I feared our work would be a low priority. Interestingly, throughout the process, I realized that this fear affected my work. Part of me wanted to not send emails with small questions to our partner, for fear of being an annoyance or having the emails overlooked. However, we found that, even though the responses were not always thorough, we did always receive prompt feedback if we asked the right questions.
The beginning of our collaboration with our partner was charged by a passion and an excitement to work together. The initial collaboration was also fueled by the demand of asking and answering many background questions. But sometimes, this two-sided relationship was more difficult to maintain. My group and I found ourselves waiting on integral information for days, and when we would send drafts or questions, the responses were often useful but minimal. This was a new experience for me to get used to, having feedback be straightforward and not necessarily intended to encourage, which is normal when receiving feedback from a professor. When we sent drafts, sometimes we would get a simple response of “this is fine,” and that would be it. Although both our group and our partner were fulfilling the roles required to make this process work, it was difficult to not feel detached at times. The seeming lack of effective communication affected our morale because we could not always count on receiving the depth of information we were hoping to get within our time constraints.
About half way through the semester, we began to change the tone and the structure of the emails. RPR suggested we consider that our partner had no real obligation to respond to our emails; it was up to us to write the emails in a way that encouraged responses. From that point on, my group wrote direct sentences at the beginning of emails providing context for our questions. Rather than burying the questions, we more clearly posed them through direct bulleted sentences, which finally allowed us to get the responses we had been hoping to receive. Through reconsidering our audience and the context within which we were operating, we collaborated with our partner much more effectively. The impetus for this change in style and technique was a result of our realization that we had to change the way we were writing in order to get the responses we wanted. We stopped accepting minimal amounts of feedback as inevitable and recognized the rhetorical power of our emails. As more of the details of the proposal became the focus, we also began to increase the frequency of our emails. For me personally, and for my group, communicating with our partner posed collaboration challenges that we were not used to, but the situation and our genuine passion for the organization’s mission motivated us to make changes and succeed.
Understanding Peers’ Motivations to Collaborate With Partner
Collaboration with a community partner was a new experience for most people in the class, representing a different type of writing and a new source of motivation that one student summarized in a reflection: “I see writing outside of a classroom and writing for a grade as different because [the former] requires a genuine interest.” Most group members shared in this sentiment, and 91% of students felt motivated to do their best as a result of their investment in the partner. In a broader sense, the students, as a whole, saw the benefits of working with a community partner to write a grant, and 91% of students believed that this was a valuable part of the course. One student asserted that “the opportunity to take something that is schoolwork and make it actually relate to the real world is a great experience and what most classes should be like.” As Paige and Mia have noted, it was the partner aspect of writing that drove students to succeed and was the foundation for collaboration.
RPR found that the more successful groups showed a passion for the partner throughout the semester, not just at the beginning of the project. For example, like Paige noted above, eight students reported in the reflections that the initial meeting with their community partner was an impetus for the passion that was frequently sustained throughout the process. This passion sometimes caused team conflicts, as one student noted, “Just because we are so passionate and committed to this project”; this team had some difficulty getting their messages across to each other sensitively. Many of the student reflections centered on the idea that, as one student put it, “There is actually an opportunity for us to make a difference,” showing the impact of the positive extrinsic motivation of a community partner in this course.
The collaborative process with partners was directly connected to the motivation source of the groups. When students thought they had a reciprocal relationship with partners, the collaboration was much more effective. Students defined reciprocity in terms of being told by the partners that they shared excitement for the project, evidenced by being provided with responses to questions and information about the organization quickly and having access to the partner in person or via email on a regular basis. On the other hand, students in less successful groups did not feel a commitment from the partner, despite the students claiming to understand that our projects were not a high priority for the partners. One student summed it up this way: We fully understand that [partner] is busy and has more pressing needs to attend to at the organization. [Partner] has many responsibilities at [organization] and needs to devote full attention to these tasks. However, this is a partnership, and without feedback and permission, we [are] at a deadlock.
Building solid partner relationships was a high priority for students because they became motivated to get the funding for the partner, which helped students stay engaged in the grant writing process. However, when students did not see a similar sense of commitment from a partner, their own motivations to succeed slipped as well.
Taking this a step further, three students in the most successful groups actually reported being motivated by fear at the end of the partner grant project—not fear of a poor grade, but fear they would not do enough to earn the funding that they strongly felt their partners deserved, showing strong positive extrinsic motivations. For example, one student that Paige cited above reflected about midway through the project that our group’s ultimate goal, of course, is to fulfill [partner’s] need . . . by writing a grant that is good enough to secure funding for them . . . It would be a shame if we can’t get well-deserved funding because the grant we wrote for them wasn’t good enough.
But this fear became more pronounced near the end of the project when the same student said, This week, I thought a lot probably too much—about failure. . . . I would feel like we were letting [partner] down if we don’t get them everything they are asking for. . . . They deserve someone to come through for them, and I’d be lying if I said I won’t feel a little bit sick if our grant doesn’t [come through].
Many students may have been fearful of getting a low grade, but this fear of not doing well for the partner seemed to be more positively motivating than grades for some.
Motivation is at the foundation of the collaborative process and is inextricable from the manner by which the groups collaborated internally and externally. The source of motivation caused students to approach their relationships with their partners differently, and various communication strategies and processes ensued. Due to the nature of this class, we experienced completely different sources of motivation than in the typical group project. The role of the partner altered our motivation and changed the manner by which we collaborated with our peers. As the outcome became more partner focused and less grade focused, we developed more motivation to change our communicative practices, both with our partners and our peers.
In our final section, my coauthors and I draw some conclusions about student motivations to collaborate in our Grant Writing course and consider how adding student voices is valuable for teaching and learning.
Our Turn: Considering Collaboration and Motivation Anew
Many students who took Grant Writing for Non-Profits had intrinsic motivations coming into a service-learning course, especially since they self-selected into the experience. Though not revolutionary, we found that most students seemed to be more motivated to excel and succeed in their projects in order to do well for their community partners rather than to only earn a high grade. But we were impressed how that change in motivation affected students’ desire to use rhetorical strategies to write and collaborate effectively with peers and to overcome early trust issues. For example, Paige and her team responded to their concerns about not earning funding for a worthy partner by working together to compare their work to the grant guidelines, frequently developing clarifying questions to ask the partner and each other, and collaboratively editing their work along the way. Mia overcame initial concerns about doing all the work after realizing her team members shared her interest in the partner organization and were willing to develop solid team processes for success. Rachel and her team were open to an important lesson about how to organize requests in correspondence after realizing they needed to change styles to better communicate with the partner. These are just three examples of how students responded to positive extrinsic motivations.
Along with our group members, we, the student coauthors, experienced growth on personal and professional levels and learned to communicate professionally with partners to establish an effective collaborative relationship. Motivated by this partner relationship, we mostly held ourselves accountable for our work because we wanted to do well for our partners and build trusting relationships with our peers and partners. We felt empowered to complete the various grant sections on time because we realized that thorough work on one section would aid the efficiency of composing the subsequent sections and, therefore, strengthen our proposal for our partners. Our knowledge of rhetorical strategies increased as a result of the learning environment and the variety of genres that were seamlessly included through the process of creating our grant applications with our group members. Because we were motivated to work for more than a grade, we were motivated to learn more about the process of writing and collaborating and to sustain our commitments to the project.
As the faculty coauthor and instructor for this course, I was impressed by how the combination of working with a valued community partner and the availability of actual funding motivated many students to collaborate on multiple levels. Equally impressive was how the more successful teams sidestepped trust issues with their peers by recognizing a shared commitment to making a difference for their partners and working to develop group practices to encourage sustaining engagement with the project. I understand the challenges and extra time commitments necessary to succeed with service learning or other client-based pedagogies can be impediments, but the results in learning and students’ personal growth can be worth the investment.
By introducing our SoTL research into our Grant Writing for Non-Profits course, we invite instructors to consider how implementing projects might allow students to experience some of the motivational benefits evident in Grant Writing for Non-Profits. In our course, trust and relationship building became crucially important when students realized a shared passion to do well for community partners, thereby overcoming for some students extrinsic grade motivations and encouraging movement past certain biases about collaboration. We noted, based on our postcourse survey, that while intrinsic motivations are important for student success, not all extrinsic motivators are “bad.” Maximizing student engagement in a project can result in new motivations for strong student collaboration and, as a result of those motivations, can create beneficial shifts in how students communicate with, trust, and engage peers and partners to achieve shared goals. Of course, our class was not perfect and not all students were able to achieve the benefits we saw ourselves. Ultimately though, attending to student motivations extends service learning and professional communication discussions about the value of these projects with real audiences as high-impact practices that deepen student engagement.
We hope this article showcases the value of including students directly in the research on teaching and learning. While SoTL is becoming an established avenue of research, sometimes the student learning side can get lost in translation. How can faculty improve teaching without better understanding what drives student learning and motivations? By exploring this particular experience together, I as the faculty mentor learned more about how my students approach the service-learning experiences I create for them and what motivates them to succeed in these environments so that I can better prepare learning situations in the future. And, as student researchers exploring our own learning in addition to that of our peers, we learned that knowing we were working collaboratively for the betterment of our community partners not only gave us reason to dedicate ourselves personally to the work we were doing, but furthermore gave us reason to dedicate ourselves to effective collaboration. We learned the importance of thinking about our motivations when we collaborate so we can build trust and better group practices in the future. Bringing student voices into the study of teaching and learning in our courses enhances our understanding of student learning and motivations to learn, which in turn enriches the effectiveness of the symbiotic relationship that connects us in the endeavors of higher education.
Footnotes
Appendix
Authors’ Note
This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Elon University. Student comments are reproduced by permission.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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