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Articles Conference Reviews |
2007M12WingardSession M. 12: “Pedagogical Memory and the Transferability of Knowledge: An Interview-Based Study of Juniors and Seniors at a Research University”
This session, attended by about 40 people, involved a collaborative study done by the four panelists: three faculty from the University of California-Irvine and one, formerly of UCI, from the University of South Carolina. As the first speaker (and session chair) described it, their study took a rhetorical approach to research, seeking to learn what carries over in students’ writing experience from course to course; what knowledge transfers from early to later writing courses; and what students remember about their early writing courses. She cited Thaiss and Zawacki’s taxonomy of writing development as that which the collaborators used to frame their findings: generic academic writing (one size fits all, if it’s academic writing); radical relativism (students write what they believe the assigning teacher wants); and coherence within diversity (wherein disciplinary expectations require appropriate rhetorical choices). She described three modes of knowledge transfer: active, unreflective, and denial or resistance. The study involved interviews of juniors and seniors who had completed their required three academic quarters of writing courses. Speaker 2 reported that 68 percent of students said they remembered their history of writing instruction, which raised the question of the underlying conditions that made for this successful degree of pedagogical memory. Parsing students’ affirmative responses further, she said that a significant number of students counted “grammar” instruction as that which transferred from course to course and another group of students cited “research” as the genre that transferred. The third speaker discussed some of the statements students gave in the interviews as to why they thought transfer occurred. The typical answer “I don’t know how I know how to write in successive writing courses; I just do!” indicated students had developed some tacit knowledge about writing in their first course: students cannot trace their histories as writers but they are able to perform differently according to the rhetorical situation in other courses. The speaker wondered if this were truly knowledge transfer or just generalized learning. She distinguished between “high-road” and “low-road” transfer, the former involving the deliberate application of skills and strategies learned in one situation to another and the latter the application of tacit knowledge. The first involved metacognition on students’ parts; the second did not. She also said that students who could be described as engaging in unreflective practice could be grouped thematically in terms of those whose learning happened as if by osmosis, those whose learning was development by accumulation of experience, and those who believed that writing was a static skill. The fourth speaker discussed the group’s interpretation of some of the mixed responses student interviewees gave. Some responses she categorized as “unacknowledged learning.” In such cases, students said they experienced no transfer from the first writing course to later ones, yet say they have made use of first-course instruction in later courses. Other students gave “statements of non-transfer” in which they see unbridgeable differences among writing courses. Yet sometimes, over the duration of an interview, students would modify or revise these initial negative statements. This evidence, as well as the evidence of transfer that did occur, suggests the value of various “affordances” of opportunities for reflection. The interviews themselves, in some cases, constituted such an opportunity, but so did occasions where students could write about what they had learned previously. It seems that almost any occasion in which students are given the chance to verbalize about their history as writers helps reinforce what they have learned and helps them recognize that learning has indeed taken place. She closed with the recommendation that instructors of advanced writing courses begin with a short writing assignment that specifically asks students about what they have learned in their first writing course. Comments? |