The Unexplored Assumption:
Knowledge Transfer and Teaching Composition

Christiane Donahue, University of Maine, Farmington
Elizabeth Wardle, University of Dayton

How do we know whether what students learn in our writing classes is useful in future writing situations, in other courses and after they graduate? What do or can they transfer from high school? If all learning is basically context-specific, as some researchers suggest, why provide instruction in writing? What writing instruction is most effective: process, strategies, rhetorical analysis, "skills"? Traditionally, these are not questions our field has taken up directly, rather writing teachers tend to assume as a given the “transfer” of writing ability, despite the fact that there is little evidence that such transfer commonly occurs. Given our field’s attention to proven pedagogy and the national climate on accountability, examining our unexamined assumptions about transfer seems central to our success as composition teachers.

What is transfer?
The answer depends on your perspective. Traditionally, transfer has meant that an individual uses knowledge, strategies, skills or abilities developed in one context in another context. More recently, theorists in psychology and education have suggested that individuals and situations interact to produce transfer. Transfer is now often seen as situated, socio-cultural, and activity-based, which means that understanding how transfer works means taking into account how individuals interact in with situations and how individuals construct associations among various contexts, such as different college classes or disciplines.

What do we actually know about transfer?
Not a lot. It is difficult to document, especially in school settings, partly because so much depends on how individuals recognize similarities between two situations and transform or expand knowledge across them (Perkins & Salomon; Tuomi-Gröhn & Engeström; Beach; Guile & Young). We do know something about what hampers or encourages transfer in particular cases. These general constraints and affordances to transfer provides a necessary background for understanding writing-related transfer.

Transfer is hampered when:

• Individuals learn procedures without learning underlying concepts, or learning is overly-contextualized, i.e., when the classroom does not connect with everyday practices (Bransford) or details of the learned material are elaborated in one context and become attached to that context (Eich);
  
• Material is taught in only one setting or context rather than in multiple contexts (Bjork & Richardson-Klavhen);
  
• Home and school practices conflict.

Transfer is more likely to occur when:

• First and following tasks are similar (Bransford), similarities between the situations are made explicit, and “affordances” for transfer are present in the next situation (Tuomi-Gröhn & Engeström);
  
• Initial learning is not rushed (Bransford);
  
• Learners can explicitly abstract principles from a situation (Gick & Holyoak);
  
• Material is taught through analogy or contrast (Bransford);
  
• Learners engage in self-reflection and mindfulness (Belmont et al; Bransford; Langer; Bereiter);
  
• The learning of new material is scaffolded (Dias et al.);
  
• Teachers provide work that is appropriately challenging to students’ current ability levels, drawing on students’ zones of proximal development (Alsup and Bernard-Donals; Jaxon);
  
• Learners are “supported to participate in an activity system that encourages collaboration, discussion, and some form of ‘risk taking’” (Guile &Young);
  
• Learners “have opportunities to share and be inspired by a common motive for undertaking a specific learning task” (Guile & Young).

What about writing-related transfer?
Composition researchers rarely address transfer, and usually only implicitly. Nearly all thorough research studies of writing-related transfer have detailed transfer from professional writing courses to other school writing and/or workplace writing (Beaufort; Dias et al; Dias & Pare; Ford; Freedman & Adam). Dias et al suggest transfer is hampered when students inappropriately bring school learning patterns and an individualist ethos (i.e., a focus on their own learning rather than task accomplishment) to highly collaborative, outcome-driven workplace contexts.

We have also learned, as Rogers’ 2006 review of twelve key longitudinal studies in colleges from the past twenty years suggests, that:

• Writing is not perceived by students as a generalizable skill;
  
• Students’ pre-existing conceptions of writing from other contexts can prevent transfer;
  
• Students who transfer writing ability successfully begin “seeing texts as accomplishing social actions” and develop a “complex of activities” rather than a set of generalizable skills[EAW1];
  
• Students whose teachers help them deconstruct the genres of their field transfer writing knowledge/ability more effectively;
  
• The kinds of scaffolding required to support transfer differs from student to student.

Where do we go from here?
These findings help illustrate why some socio-cultural and activity theorists reject the term “transfer” and instead argue for broadening our understanding of what happens as people use skills, strategies, knowledge, and experiences across situations. Tuomi-Grohn and Engeström discuss “transfer” as “expansive learning,” in which questioning existing practices plays a key role. Beach offers the term “generalization,” which includes the classical conception of transfer—carrying and applying knowledge across tasks—but also examines individuals, their social organizations, and the ways individuals construct associations among social organizations. We hope that “transfer” or “expansion” or “generalization” of writing abilities from high school to college and from first-year composition (FYC) to other university settings will be studied in the next few years, using this understanding, in order to better inform our teaching in these contexts. In the meantime, we as teachers can generalize from what has been learned in other fields and, to a lesser degree, in our own, to inform our pedagogies.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:

Do the findings about transfer conflict with any common composition pedagogies?

Do we have enough information about transfer to begin shaping practice?

If so, what specific teaching practices might we reconsider, add, or abandon?

The Unexplored Assumption: Knowledge Transfer and Teaching Composition