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Articles Conference Reviews |
D.34 Teaching for TransferD.34 Teaching for Transfer: Strengthening the Relationship between First-Year Composition and Writing in Multidisciplinary Contexts This panel included four speakers who both taught and researched teaching for transfer in the first-year composition classroom. Liane Robertson and Kara Taczak had presented their preliminary findings at last year’s CCCC where Heather Camp was in their audience. Camp enlisted the collaboration of Sarah Johnson, and together they constructed a research project for their university’s first-year composition classroom. This year’s session included these four speakers and the findings of these two projects. According to the panelists, a common complaint among teachers of first-year composition is that students can improve their writing, but students do not transfer these writing skills to other courses. Our expectation is that student writing in the first-year composition classroom will apply to other contexts on four levels: 1) between assignments within FYC, 2) from FYC to general education courses, 3) from FYC to writing in major disciplines, and 4) from FYC to workplace writing. This simply does not happen; in fact, their writing is unrelated to these contexts. This presentation, representing two carefully constructed research projects, highlights these primary issues. With no teaching of the theoretical foundations of writing, students do not see connections. In these situations, students “default to high school” writing. Theme-based FYCs do not facilitate transfer. In theme-based FYCs, students perceive research as means of production. They did not develop a framework for writing in new contexts. We need to teach students how to learn to write with the emphasis on “how to learn to.” Scaffolding must occur between assignments within FYC, from each assignment to broader course content, from FYC to general education and throughout the student’s trajectory of writing. One important finding is that connected assignments in first year composition allow students to understand and practice the application of writing concepts to new contexts The terms audience, genre, reflection, rhetorical situation, exigence, context, critical analysis, circulation, discourse community, composing, and knowledge are introduced to students in this order. While working on assignments, the students’ responses to these questions enable them to identify and select the appropriate genre. Composing is a process wherein students use rhetorical strategies to determine genre. The same terms above give students a vocabulary for developing their theory of writing. In developing this theory, important questions for students to ask themselves are: Why am I writing? Who am I writing to? What is the rhetorical situation (context)? Often reflection in the first-year composition course takes the form of self-assessment, arguing for a good grade, and thinking of the writing process. The reflection, however, in teaching for transfer asks students to reflect in order to compose a theory of their writing, using their semester’s writing for evidence. According to the presenters, this is “metacognitive self-monitoring.” For students to “come around” to a theory of writing, reflection is vital as part of the writing process. Reflection represents a set of practices that help establish students’ identities as writers. Learning a set of practices that follows patterns of belief, understanding, reflection, and action enables students to develop as writers, to develop a theory of writing, to transfer writing to other contexts. In their research, these speakers find that the content of the FYC course is not writing or the process of writing or even producing academic writing, but it is learning how to learn to write. These presenters’ findings refute the argument that transfer cannot be taught. We can teach for transfer. The research found that students in the TFT courses outperform those in other FYC courses not requiring students to develop a theory of writing. In addition, one speaker researched the effects of teaching critical reading. She scaffolds group activities, rhetorical analysis, and carefully constructs the course. The production of student texts is guided by rhetorical concepts. When the students practice critical reading skills, they are able to identify genre connections and evaluate the claim, evidence, and reasoning in a text. Students learn to use rhetorical terms to frame the task and pay more attention to content. In terms of critical reading, rhetorical knowledge is important, perhaps more so than rhetorical awareness. These speakers pointed their audience to future research that focuses not on whether or not transfer occurs, but on how much we know and understand students’ processes of learning how to transfer. This is similar to the medical field where, in some medical schools, contextualized practice is utilized: Novices behave like experts. This links to a theory of writing. Students can, indeed, develop a theory of writing. They do not have to wait until graduate school to reflect upon how they learn. Mention was made on a few occasions about students “defaulting” to high school methods of writing when they did not know how to frame the rhetorical situation for a writing task. Unwittingly perhaps, a few of the presenters tended to dismiss the value of what students bring with them to the classroom. These ways of teaching for transfer seem to be privileged above what students bring from their former classrooms, rather than made part of the scaffolding enterprise. Students do not leave behind what they learned the past several years of their lives. However well or ill-prepared students are for writing in first-year composition, their former learning is also part of their knowledge of how they learn how to write. The challenge is how to incorporate this into the reflection as part of the students’ knowledge of their theories of writing. |