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Student apathy—a lack of motivation or mental presence in the classroom—is common in many academic institutions and courses of study. In Public Speaking courses, speech anxiety can be a factor that contributes to student apathy. To solve this problem, I suggest implementing an unconventional approach—in-class unguided longhand freewriting— that requires students to write nonstop about anything that comes to mind, without censoring or editing, during the first five minutes of each class session. I base this recommendation on my own observations of the students’ body language during the freewriting period, as well as my qualitative analysis of 95 students’ written feedback regarding the effect of freewriting on them. I found that this practice helps reduce student apathy through increased self-reflexivity, decreased anxiety, and improved presence. Public Speaking (PS) is one course I have taught for the past two decades. One of the problems I have encountered repeatedly in this course is student apathy. According to Marshall (2012), “apathy in learning is an expression of indifference, lethargy, and/or disengagement in the classroom environment” (p. 275). Apathetic students are bored, checked-out, and show neutrality toward higher education (Hassel & Lourey, 2005). Student apathy, which has been blamed on factors such as ineffective teaching and student failure to study, has posed stark challenges for classroom instruction (Becker, 2010; O’Brien, 2010; Turner, 2016). While apathy may occur for several reasons and can be present in any course of study (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004), this essay focuses on apathy in the PS course as a unique context—a core course that nearly all college students, including mine, are required to take during their first year. However, many students take the course unwillingly: they want to avoid the stress that is almost synonymous with PS. They are not alone as Dwyer and Davidson (2012) noted that 65 Journal of Communication Pedagogy 1(1) “people fear public speaking more than death” (p. 99). This great fear--or speech anxiety--often is experienced through physical sensations (e.g., upset stomach) before and during a speech; psychological responses (e.g., loss of memory) during a speech; and emotional responses (e.g., loss of control), before, during, and after a speech (Fujishin, 2015). Based on my experience, on speech days, some students are too anxious to sit still, while other students skip class altogether because they “got sick.” During their speeches, many students display behaviors that signal anxiety, such as drawing a blank, coughing nervously, trembling, or using verbal fillers (e.g., “like,” “you know”). During classroom discussion, apathy is apparent in that students generally appear disengaged, indifferent, fatigued, and emotionally absent as their minds are too preoccupied with speech anxiety, if not other distractions, to be fully present during class. Because anxiety is linked positively to apathy (Sashittal, Jassawalla, & Markulis, 2012), it is possible that student apathy in PS classes is a cover for anxiety. The pedagogy challenge in this course, then, is to use an approach that can help students release their anxiety and unpack their preoccupied minds. Solution: Unguided Longhand Freewriting Scholars have offered numerous teaching techniques to remedy student apathy, or to motivate and engage students (Barkley, 2009). One such technique is the use of freewriting, defined as writing minus “the normal constraints involved in writing” (Belanoff, Elbow, & Fontaine, 1991, p. xiii). Freewriting, which can be guided or unguided, is a kind of writing where students “never stop to look back, to cross something out, to wonder how to spell something, to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what [they] are doing” (Elbow, 1998, p. 3). Students who engage in freewriting are able to cleanse their minds (Keshishian, 2009), improve their academic writing skills (Somerville & Crème, 2005), and overcome writing anxiety, especially among English language learners (Scullin & Baron, 2013). Freewriting is commonly used in composition courses as well as sometimes in courses such as performance, archeology, and engineering to help generate ideas (Somerville & Crème, 2005). Defining freewriting as “unformed exploratory talk and writing,” Palmerton (1992) suggested using freewriting in PS classes as a tool to “facilitate the process of formulating thought” (p. 338). My Own Experience with Freewriting I discovered the power of freewriting years ago, when I was having difficulty finishing my doctoral dissertation. A friend suggested that I read Cameron’s (1992/2002) The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. The book helped me realize that I was unable to write because my mind was preoccupied with so many other things (e.g., school work, finances, homesickness). To release this preoccupation, Cameron urged, “Get it on the page” (p. 11). Every morning, I wrote about these things for 20 minutes and noticed its positive impact on me almost immediately. It helped me overcome my writer’s block, as well as helped me become more present, focused, decisive, and productive as well as less afraid to write. Despite my conviction about the power of freewriting, however, I hesitated to use it in my teaching, believing that writing would be unpopular among students, especially Millennial students, a generation that grew up surrounded by high-speed Internet, touch media, Wi-Fi, iPads, iPods, and MacBook’s in an educational environment that has embraced information 66 Journal of Communication Pedagogy 1(1) communication technology (ICT). Imposing an archaic process such as longhand freewriting on them, therefore, did not seem to be a good idea. I was aware, however, that students who write their notes have a different type of cognitive processing and outperform those students who take notes on a computer (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014). This awareness suggested freewriting might still be useful. Moreover, freewriting has been identified as a technique that helps students form a concrete self-concept, which Fontaine (1991) defined as “a sense of who [students] are, what they value, and the bases on which they determine these values” (p. 13). This insight again made it seem that freewriting was worth investigating. I also presumed, based on my experience as a student, that my students’ minds were preoccupied with their own issues and that their state of mind itself was contributing to their apathy, because it is difficult for students to concentrate when preoccupied and that they, too, might be stressed, albeit for different reasons (Pierceall & Keim, 2007). In fact, one of the biggest stressors students face is speech anxiety connected to their PS course (Dwyer & Davidson, 2012). Thus, freewriting’s potential [e.g., its therapeutic value and its capacity to free the mind (Cameron, 1992/2002; Pennebaker, 1997)] made it seem the assignment was a good match for the unique context of the PS course. As such, I decided to implement in-class unguided longhand freewriting as a solution to student apathy in my PS courses during the Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 semester. In my course syllabi, I explained to students that (a) they would need a notebook and a pen so that they could handwrite nonstop about anything that came to mind, without editing or censoring, during the first five minutes of each class session; (b) the freewrite assignment would be worth 5% of their total grade in the course, though class participation would not be mandatory if they were willing to forego five points; and (c) I would not read their freewriting but would keep a record instead of their participation during class. My reason for including freewriting in the course, I told them, was that not only had I personally benefited from it and wanted the same for them, but also that I was curious to learn in what ways, if any, the assignment would affect them. The project was approved by the University Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Using Freewriting in Public Speaking Courses to Remedy Student Apathy: An Unconventional Solution to a Common Problem