The Content of Composition, Reflective Practice, and the Transfer of Knowledge and Practice in Composition

Once you understand that writing is all about context you understand how to shape it to whatever the need is. And once you understand that different genres are meant to do different things for different audiences you know more about writing that works for whatever context you're writing in.

— Clay

Since the formation of the field of composition studies in the latter half of the twentieth century, writing faculty have worked to develop writing courses that will help students succeed; indeed, in Joe Harris's (1996) invocation of the 1966 Dartmouth Conference mantra, composition is, famously, a teaching subject. Thus, in the 1950s, during a period of productivity in linguistics, we tapped insights from linguistics — style or coherence, for example — to enrich our classrooms. In the 1960s and 1970s, researching what became known as the composing process, we began putting at the center of our writing classes process pedagogies that have since transformed the curricular and pedagogical landscape. And in the 1980s and 1990s, we had a new sense of the writing called for in school — what we began calling academic argumentative writing — that was on its way to being fully ensconced in the classroom, notwithstanding the Elbow/Bartholomae debates about the relative merits of personal and academic writing.

If we fast-forward to 2013, however, we find that the landscape in composition has changed yet again. The academic argumentative writing that so influenced the teaching of composition is now regarded as only one variety of writing, if that (see, for example, Wardle's 2009 "Mutt Genres," among others). Likewise, scholars in the field have raised questions about our motives for teaching (Hawk 2007) and about the efficacy of what are now familiar approaches (Fulkerson 2005). Just as important, the classroom research that distinguished the field in the 1970s and 1980s is again flourishing, especially research projects explicitly designed to investigate what has become known as the "transfer question." Put briefly, this question asks how we can support students' transfer of knowledge and practice in writing; that is, how we can help students develop writing knowledge and practices that they can draw upon, use, and repurpose for new writing tasks in new settings. In this moment in composition, teachers and scholars are especially questioning two earlier assumptions about writing: (1) that there is a generalized genre called academic writing and (2) that we are teaching as effectively as we might. Moreover, we have a sense of how to move forward: regarding genre, for instance, the singular writing practice described as academic writing is being replaced by a pluralized sense of both genres and practices that themselves participate in larger systems or ecologies of writing. Likewise regarding the teaching of such a pluralized set of practices and genres: curricula designed explicitly to support transfer are being created and researched. And as we will report here, various research projects (e.g., Wardle 2007) seek to document the effect of these new curricular designs as well as the rationale accounting for their impact.

As Writing across Contexts demonstrates, we too are participating in this new field of inquiry, and our interest in how we can support students' transfer of writing knowledge and practice has been specifically motivated by three sources: (1) our experiences with portfolios; (2) our interest in the role of content in the teaching of composition; and (3) our understanding — and that of higher education's more generally — of the importance of helping students understand the logic and theory underlying practice if we want students to practice well.

A first source motivating our interest in transfer is our experience with portfolios of writing. Linking portfolios to writing curricula, especially when portfolios include texts outside the writing classroom (Yancey 1998, 2013), has been useful pedagogically, of course, but it has also helped put a very specific face on the transfer question. Through what we see within the frame of the portfolio — the set of portfolio texts and the student narration — we have been able to ask new questions about how students write in different settings and about how they understand writing. Looking at the multiple texts inside one portfolio, for instance, we can be prompted to observe — indeed, learn from the student — how he or she has made a successful transition from high school to college, while looking at another makes us wonder what else we might have done to support such a transition. Similarly, when exhibits in a portfolio include writing from other college classes, we ask other questions, chief among them why some students are able to make use of what they seemed to have learned in first-year composition to complete writing tasks elsewhere, while other students are not. Through the portfolio reflective text, what Yancey has called a reflection-in-presentation (Yancey 1998), students tell us in their own words what they have learned about writing, how they understand writing, and how they write now. In this context, we often ask other questions. How is it that students, drawing on previous writing knowledge, are able to recontextualize it for new situations? When students cannot do so, can we see why not, and given what we see, are there adjustments we should make to the curriculum?

A second source we have drawn upon in our thinking about the transfer of knowledge and practice in writing is the recent discussion in composition studies about what might be the best content for a composition curriculum. Forwarded by CCCC in 2006, this discussion about the relationship of content and composition has sparked vigorous debates. Such content, some say, can be anything as long as the focus on writing is maintained. Michael Donnelly (2006) argues: "There is no 'must' content; the only thing(s) that really matters is what students are _doing_ — i.e., reading, thinking, responding, writing, receiving (feedback), and re-writing. When these things are primary, and whatever other content remains secondary, we have a writing course." Given this view, it's perhaps not surprising that many institutions — including many elite institutions like those in the Ivy League, as well as public institutions like Florida State University — provide additional evidence of this approach in the...