Reading Response 4

What transfers from the learning context to the target context?

Review our discussion questions from today:

1. What are the characteristics of the resources that facilitate dynamic transfer?
2. What transfers from the learning context to be coordinated with those resources?

Then consider the pedagogical approaches suggested by Teaching for Transfer, Writing About Writing, and Transfer as Recontextualization.

How do these approaches deal with the obstacles facing the transfer of writing knowledge?  

The chapters we read in Writing Across Contexts (Chapters 2-3) gave excellent examples of the types of FYC (first year composition) courses that exist in universities. The first course they explored focused on teaching students to write creatively, with the use of lots of imagery to tell a story. The second course's content focused exclusively on the media and the way it is used in society. Lastly, the Teaching for Transfer course focused on teaching students about the discipline of writing studies, not only covering the key vocabulary, but also employing reflective assignments to help students develop their own personal theory of writing. 

From the reading, the writers discussed that the Teaching for Transfer class had the highest amount of students using key concepts and vocabulary to talk about writing. Giving students the language needed to discuss their own writing helps them think about their writing more critically. This approach gives students the appropriate tools to abstract their own writing knowledge and then helps them apply these abstract concepts to concrete tasks. This approach (Teaching for Transfer) seems to be one of the glass-half-full types where it assumes that transfer can occur, and subsequently employs explicit instruction to teach students about writing. This approach shows that students do think and talk about writing differently than they did when they first came into college. 

Of course obstacles to transfer will always exist, and we may even witness our students go through frustrated transfer. However, if the Teaching for Transfer method is used, maybe we can help most of our students grasp the abstract concepts early on and help them move through their content classes more successfully.