by Jessie L. Moore

If writing-intensive courses are a high-impact practice, as George Kuh and others have suggested, what can universities do to help students transition from these high-impact experiences into other contexts and apply what they’ve learned about writing? What bridging strategies (as Perkins and Salomon call them) can faculty employ in their classes to facilitate mindful abstraction? How might course designs foster what King Beach calls critical transitions? And how can colleges prepare students to be boundary crossers when it comes to their writing? From 2011 to 2013, the Center for Engaged Learning sponsored a two-year, multi-institutional research seminar to explore these and other questions about writing transfer, and we’re featuring some of the resulting research this week in Critical Transitions Online.

Here are some of the highlights:

In first-year writing courses, content matters. Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer participants have investigated both “Writing about Writing” and “Teaching for Transfer” curricula in multi-institutional studies. Because these types of curricular approaches forefront the rhetorical knowledge, terms, and concepts that students will need to apply in future contexts, they equip students with tools and strategies for successful “boundary crossing.” As Kara Taczak notes in her video interview for Critical Transitions Online (with Liane Robertson, below), these content approaches allow  writers to “reframe” and analyze new writing situations in ways that enable  them to understand and write responsively for those new contexts – whether they are general education courses, courses in disciplinary  majors, or workplace settings.

Students need reiterative opportunities for reflection throughout their education. Both Writing about Writing and Teaching for Transfer curricula typically build in these opportunities, but courses university-wide can include reflection activities about both generalizable and discipline-specific writing strategies. A sophisticated reflective practice allows students to identify the writing strategies they already know and mindfully abstract them for use in new writing situations. (For strategies for fostering “reflective habits of mind,” see Kathleen Blake Yancey’s Reflection in the Writing Classroom, which has informed several of the Critical Transitions seminar studies on reflective practices and their impact on transfer.)

When considering students’ ability to transfer or adapt writing strategies, personal identities matter. Transfer successes and challenges cannot be understood outside of the learners’ social-cultural spaces. Dana Driscoll, Gwen Gorzelsky, and Ed Jones explore some of the ways that learners’ interests, goals, and prior experiences inform their transfer practices, drawing attention to the need to adapt curricula (specifically, Writing about Writing approaches) for the institutional context and local learners’ needs. Studies on student dispositions further emphasize the role of the individual in writing transfer.

Across the university, expectations for student writing often are misaligned. Prior studies have examined students’ and faculty members’ perceptions of the transferability – or rather, the lack of transferability – of first-year writing material to subsequent courses (also see Dana Driscoll’s work). Critical Transitions participant Carmen Werder notes that academic writing expectations remain tacit across universities, leading to misalignments in what students, faculty, and administrators expect student writers to “know, do, and believe.” To bridge high-impact, writing-intensive courses with other writing experiences across the curriculum and to enable (and recognize) transfer, then, universities need to facilitate institution-wide discussions about writing practices and instruction.

This post only scratches the surface of what Critical Transitions research seminar participants are learning about writing transfer.  Nonetheless, these highlights already offer insight into how university curricula can better prepare student writers for critical transitions by consciously using enabling practices and by facilitating university-wide discussions to improve recognition of students’ attempts at boundary crossing.

Watch for additional research findings – and an extended discussion of their implications for universities – in Part 2 (in two weeks).

Jessie L. Moore (@jessielmoore) is the Associate Director of the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University and associate professor of Professional Writing & Rhetoric in the Department of English.

by Jessie L. Moore

This week the Center for Engaged Learning launches Critical Transitions Online, a free online seminar focusing on the common curricular assumption that students will take writing knowledge and strategies gained in one context (for instance, a first-year writing course) and apply them (or “transfer” them) to other contexts (for instance, a course in a major, or a future workplace). This three-week online event leads into the Critical Transitions Conference at Elon University, June 24-26, which is the culmination of a two-year, multi-institutional Elon Research Seminar (ERS) on writing transfer.

At the mid-point of the research seminar, in June 2012, ERS participants developed the graphic below to illustrate the recurring process inherent in writing transfer research. Briefly, the descriptive model assumes circularity among the three layers: conceptions, definitions, and theories inform practices and evidence, and practices and evidence inform each other and shape the working principles. In addition, ERS participants noted that the descriptive model can apply to four distinct views of learning and transfer experiences: the student perspective; the faculty or classroom view; the program or institutional view; and the domain, workplace, discipline, or community of practice view.

Given the complexity of these multiple views, writing transfer theories must be both robust enough to explain the overlaps among these multiple perspectives and flexible enough to zoom in on a specific context or zoom out to examine the bigger picture of a student’s learning journey. The following broad learning and transfer theories – part of the “Theories of Transfer, Learning, and Writing” layer in the model above – have helped ERS participants work towards this theory-building goal (more on their progress next week):

• Communities of Practice – Etienne Wenger and others remind us that when communities form around shared goals and interests, those communities include both novices and experts. Part of the dialogic process of moving from novice to expert involves learning how to learn within communities. As we think about learning transfer, then, we should look for the enabling practices that help students develop those learning-how-to-learn strategies that apply across contexts or communities.
• Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) – As the Center for Research on Activity, Development, and Learning explains, cultural-historical activity theory builds from the concept that “A human individual never reacts directly (or merely with inborn reflects) to environment. The relationship between human agent and objects of environment is mediated by cultural means, tools and signs.” Students routinely move among activity systems (including curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular contexts), and language functions as one of their mediating tools, but they must learn how to adapt their use of the tool to each activity system.
• Threshold Concepts: Jan (Erik) Meyer and Ray Land, building on David Perkins’ notion of troublesome knowledge, challenge educators to identify “transformed way[s] of understanding” that function as a “portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something.” Once educators identify threshold concepts that are central to meaning making in their fields, they can prioritize teaching these concepts, in turn increasing the likelihood that students will carry an understanding of these core concepts into future coursework and contexts. (Glynis Cousin offers another helpful introduction to Threshold Concepts.)

As writing transfer scholars (including ERS participants) explain in the video below, this small sampling barely scratches the surface of the theoretical frameworks informing transfer studies – and the next challenge for these scholars is developing a common vocabulary to help us move among these interlaid theories.

Join week one of CEL’s Critical Transitions Online to learn how ERS participants have adapted these three theories and other borrowed legends for understanding transfer (broadly) in their own research on writing transfer (specifically).

Jessie L. Moore (@jessielmoore) is the Associate Director of the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University and associate professor of Professional Writing & Rhetoric in the Department of English.