Exploring Learned Resourcefulness as a Mitigator for Situational Writing Apprehension: A Post-Intentional Phenomenological Journey

Writing apprehension is a phenomenon that manifests as fear and avoidance of evaluated writing that can affect students’ college and career choices. Writing apprehension has been shown to negatively correlate with self-efficacy, which is one of four forms of learned resourcefulness that have been shown to help an individual maintain emotional control in stressful situations in order to achieve a goal or outcome. The other three forms of learned resourcefulness are delayed gratification, cognitive positive reinforcement, and problem solving. Using post-intentional phenomenology, I explored the ways graduate students in online programs experienced writing apprehension and the ways learned resourcefulness manifested in these experiences. My findings reveal that my participants appeared to be experiencing situational writing apprehension and that they did mitigate it by using learned resourcefulness. By framing participants’ experiences within the post-intentional phenomenological concept of through-ness, I discovered that feedback was a significant contributor or mitigator to my participants' writing apprehension, that online learning did influence their writing apprehension, and that learned resourcefulness did manifest in their experiences with writing apprehension.