The Things They Carried: Research on Transfer and Its Implications for the Curriculum in Composition
Rebekah Shultz Colby

Kathleen Blake Yancey not only has her finger on the pulse of composition today in a way that no other compositionists do, but she is also amazingly dynamic in pursuing the future goals of composition as a field. She has published extensively on a number of key issues, including assessment, especially the role of electronic portfolios in assessment; the role of the fifth rhetorical canon, delivery, within the writing classroom; collaboration; and transfer. Her edited collection, Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon, received the 2006-2007 Best Book Award from the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

On the afternoon of Friday, October 31, Kathleen Blake Yancey delivered her keynote address, The Things They Carried: Research on Transfer and Its Implications for the Curriculum in Composition to a room full of faculty and students from across DUs campus and all along the Front Range. Yancey opened her talk by defining writing since it is impossible to ascertain if writing knowledge transfers in different contexts until we define specifically what writing means. Earlier that morning, she had heard a student define writing as expressing ideas for another audience, which she thought was a good start. However, writing also includes the visual pictures, charts, and graphs. Most importantly though, writing is disciplinary and, as a result, directly connected to the making of knowledge. Furthermore, a great deal of student writing doesnt take place on campus but is self-sponsored writing that students do in their free time and increasingly online. However, there is little research on students' self-sponsored writing and how it may or may not improve their writing in other contexts. For example, how does text-messaging help international students improve their writing in English? There is also little research on the writing that students do on the job after they graduate.

Yancey continued to explain that to understand transfer fully, we need to begin by examining students developmental learning frameworks. For instance, William Perry famously defined three stages of conceptual learning: dualistic, relativistic, and reflective judgment. Unfortunately, by the time they graduate from college, most students never reach the reflective judgment stage a stage defined by the ability to flexibly create conceptual models. Instead, they usually only progress to the relativistic stage, seeing knowledge creation as all relative, or remain in the dualistic stage, seeing knowledge as a series of right or wrong facts. Fostered by an educational system that relies on textbooks that present knowledge as a series of concrete facts and a testing system that presents knowledge as categorically right or wrong, most first-year writers are still in the dualistic stage. Yancey also discussed the work of Carol Gilligan, who studies how gender affects learning and who theorized that women create knowledge collaboratively and relationally. Finally, she discussed Baxter Magolda who examines in learning the self-as learner, validity of experience, and learning as co-constructed.

Based on the work of these three theorists, Yancey discussed what we now know about how students learn. Most people learn by comparing new knowledge with what they already know. If knowledge is so new, as it can be when students are writing in completely different genres or using a completely different disciplinary framework in which to think and write, students may not be able to successfully make comparisons with old knowledge and may then simply revert to inappropriately using older knowledge -- for instance, using a five-paragraph essay to write about ethnographic research. In writing, the difference between novices and experts is that experts have conceptual frameworks and processes with which to think about writing. They have larger mental maps for writing. These mental maps allow them to successfully switch genres. In contrast, first-year writers are usually novices who do not posses these larger conceptual mental maps. Instead, they rely on a set of micro-strategies or arbitrary writing rules that may not necessarily be appropriate within different writing contexts. Yancey referred to this as learning to drive in a new city by using a TomTom GPS system without reference to a larger, more traditional physical map, which can still get drivers lost and disoriented. Consequently, first-year writers need practice in contextual writing and need to be introduced to a critical vocabulary that they can use to think about writing in these larger conceptual ways. Writing students also need explicit explanation in how each writing assignment and strategy should contribute to their larger conceptual writing map. Finally, students should be given a chance to reflect on their writing so that they can better articulate what they have learned about it and begin to build their larger metacognitive maps of writing.

In specifically learning how to write, students first learn the product or form of writing. For example, they learn the form of the five-paragraph essay. While learning a form of writing is helpful when students are first beginning to learn to write essays, in college it gets them in trouble. They tend to see each assignment as a unique recipe in a writing cookbook that they will get right if they just follow the steps, without seeing how these writing assignments connect within a larger conceptual framework. After seeing writing as a distinct form, more advanced writers learn the processes or practices that inform writing. However, writing processes still change for each discipline. Furthermore, students do not see writing as larger processes but see writing as a series of micro-processes or micro-strategies. Expert writers, in contrast, see writing as a series of systems, ecologies, or frameworks that they can flexibly adapt to meet the changing demands of writing within different disciplines. To better teach writing, we need to explicitly teach students how genres are connected within these disciplinary frameworks.

Because of a limited conceptual understanding of writing, students dont have a robust vocabulary to describe writing nor a broad conceptual understanding of writing; they dont create a map of writing that helps them move from novice to expert. Consequently, what students take away from their first-year writing courses is usually a sense of genre but not the vocabulary supporting its use. Not surprisingly, students have a dearth of epistemological understanding. Unfortunately, most students come to college thinking they know everything they need to know about writing, which makes them more unwilling to be novices and actually learn.

To better help students transfer the knowledge they learn about writing in their first-year writing courses, teachers needs to give students a robust vocabulary to describe writing. They need to use this vocabulary to explicitly describe the frameworks that connect texts within different disciplines. This includes teaching an explicit rhetorical awareness of writing in different contexts. Teachers need to explicitly articulate and model expert practices and processes within the different disciplines. They need to facilitate formal connected apprenticeships of writing in the classroom and more informal, social apprenticeships. Teachers need to allow opportunities for students to reflect on what exactly they have learned about writing so that they increase their metacognitive awareness of writing. Finally, teachers need to keep working on increasing student confidence with writing; writing confidence does transfer. It helps students take on risks so that they try new things instead of simply resorting to familiar forms they have learned before. Therefore, confidence enables students to learn more about their writing.

To teach for transfer, teachers need to first tap prior knowledge and concurrent knowledge and bridge it to new knowledge. In fact, where possible, teachers should ask students to create their own frameworks, using prior knowledge in a re-iterative way. Teachers need to create contextualized writing assignments as part of cognitive apprenticeships. They need to build in as much self-reflection of both verbal and visual writing practices as possible so that it builds meta-cognition. This is also accomplished by allowing students to self-assess their own writing as much as possible. Teachers need to model general and discipline-specific writing practices through annotation. Finally, teachers need to expect students to take as many steps backward in their writing as they do forward as students struggle with brand new ways of thinking about writing.

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