Volume 3, Issue 1 (2020)

Welcome to WRIT Issue 3.1!

The six articles in this issue—our fifth—represent work that students have completed in a recent course by the University Writing Program (UWP) of BGSU—and then continued to work on for this journal. Each author featured within this issue committed the time and energy necessary to make their work as strong as it could be, including working to address reviewers’ feedback between resubmissions. In submitting these pieces, these six students performed three habits of mind that the University Writing Program values and promotes in its curricula: openness to new perspectives, curiosity about ideas and ways of writing, and creativity in writing.

Within this issue, readers will find quite a bit to be curious about, though writers who persisted through the publication process wrote pieces in two broad areas: education and popular culture, so this issue is unofficially split into those two themes.

In “Icebreakers and Anxiety,” Sara Jurkiewicz shares original research extending conversations about social anxiety with specific regard to the use of classroom icebreakers. Rebecca Stetler continues the discussion about classroom concerns with “Teacher Passion: A Student Perspective,” with a discussion of how students perceive teacher passion and how that passion affects the teacher-student relationship. Finally, Carollynn M. Judge’s “Student Motivation and College Assignments: A Study of the Relationship between Academic Confidence and How Projects are Assigned” features the author’s survey research to determine how the structure of an academic assignment affects student motivation, including their motivation to assure quality in their work.

In “Dynamic Difficulty: A Player Perspective,” Maggie Hergenrather explores what players want from video games in terms of difficulty. Katelyn Niehaus’s “Seeing into the City of Glass: An Analysis of the Postmodern Worldview as Displayed by Postmodern Detective Fiction” critiques the genre of postmodern detective fiction to reveal philosophical implications about reality and the existence of multiple truths. And last but not least, Elizabeth J. Farren—who is also one of three award-winning presenters for the 2020 Writing Showcase—takes a critical look at a popular book character in “Nancy Drew: A Feminist Icon or a Problematic Figure of the Patriarchy and White Privilege.”

Take a look through the articles we proudly present in this issue and see what our student writers are capable of. This journal is a celebration of undergraduate writers’ effort, achievements, and courage in sending their voices—with all that that entails—out into the world. We applaud these writers, and we hope you do, too.

Thank you to every writer who submitted something to this journal. We could not accept every piece, but we hope you will all continue to enjoy the journey of writing and find ways to write your world. Thanks also to the volunteers who thoughtfully reviewed submissions and provided feedback to the writers toward making this issue the best it could be. Finally, thank you, dear readers, for supporting our student writers with your time and attention, for honoring these writers through your reading.

We hope you enjoy this fifth issue of WRIT and look forward to continuing to share student voices in future issues.

Brian Urias
Editor

A recent curricular revision in the University Writing Program, the host and sponsor of this journal, has led to a higher occurrence of primary research within students’ writing projects and therefore also in submissions to this journal. A few of the pieces within this issue contain the authors’ primary research with human subjects. The UWP and this journal were at a crossroads: Do we hold fast to our commitment to showcasing and supporting student excellence in writing? Or do we automatically reject submissions that have not been reviewed by BGSU's Institutional Review Board?"

We are currently working with the Office of Research Compliance on a solution; however for this issue, we developed what we hope is a good-faith compromise for this issue of the journal. We reached out to each author whose work had passed the first stage of reviews and whose work featured research with human subjects. We asked these authors to tell us what measures they took toward protecting participant confidentiality or anonymity, and we asked them to tell us how they ensured that subjects were informed participants who were aware of their right to refuse or terminate participation. The responses from these authors assured us that their participants had been appropriately protected—and that our program faculty had done well in guiding these young scholars in ethical research.

We recognize that this compromise must be temporary and that the UWP will need to determine a more encompassing solution in order to support student writers as well as their subjects. In the meantime, please enjoy the six pieces featured in WRIT Vol 3.1.

Sincerely,
Brian Urias, Editor
Neil Baird, University Writing Program Director