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DoI: 10.7330/9780874219388.c002 2 t h e r o l e o f c U r r i c U l a r d e s i g n i n f o s t e r i n g t r a n s f e r o f K n o W l e d g e a n d P r ac t i c e i n c o m P o s i t i o n A Synthetic Review My theory of writing that has evolved in this class can help me in all of my future classes, not just English. That will probably be the most helpful thing that I take out of this class. — Rick As we saw in chapter 1, we do know something about students’ transfer of knowledge and practice in writing. We know, for instance, that when students come to college directly from high school, they bring with them some school-supported writing practices and understandings : an ability to create a text with beginnings, middles, and endings; and a nascent sense of genre, but one that is uninformed about the role of genre in shaping discourse. We also know that students bring with them writing experiences—and experiences they repurpose for writing —developed in other areas of their lives, as we saw in Davis’s (2012) Natascha, Roozen’s (2009) Angelica, and Navarre Cleary’s (2013) Doppel. Moreover, some of this experience isn’t in the immediate past, but rather in a past spanning several years and several sites of writing. Once in college, students transfer writing process and appreciation of process; their writing experiences seem more successful if they identify themselves as novices, particularly as they enter college and again as they enter their major. We know that college students develop a language for writing but that, even at the close of their college careers, this language isn’t sufficient for the purpose of describing their own practice and theorizing their own knowledge. Notably, most of what we know about transfer does not derive from curricula designed specifically to foster transfer. Recently, however, scholars 38 KAT Hleen BlAKe YAnCeY, lIAne RoBeRTSon, AnD KARA TACzAK have focused on how curricular design could support the transfer of writing knowledge and practice, and in this chapter we outline a range of such curricular models. On one end of what we might call a continuum of such models is the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of a model, as described by David Smit (2004); at the other end is a generalized, non-specific curricular model of general rhetorical education as put forth by Doug Brent (2012). And in the middle are four models, each with a distinctive contribution : (1) the Downs and Wardle (2007) Writing about Writing (WAW) model focusing on enhancing rhetorical awareness; (2) the Debra Dew (2003) WAW model focusing on language and rhetoric as content; (3) the Rebecca Nowacek (2011) “agents of integration” model focusing on genre as a portal to transfer; and (4) our Teaching For Transfer (TFT) model focusing on key terms, theoretical readings, writing in multiple genres, and reflective practices, including students’ theories of writing. Given our interest in fostering writing expertise and in the ways that transfer can support such development, however, we begin our chapter with an explanation of the National Research Council’s How People Learn (Bransford, Pellegrino, and Donovan 2000) compilation of what we know about the differences between novice and expert. WHAT WE KNOW ABOU T EXPERTI SE Published in 2000, the National Research Council-sponsored How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School expands on the idea of how we might teach for transfer by focusing, as the title suggests, on how people learn, in this case evidencing the potential for the teaching of transfer by drawing from literature on learning across multiple sites and ages, from elementary school through graduate school. As the authors note, the promise of transfer is located, in part, in the difference between training and education: It is especially important to understand the kinds of learning experiences that lead to transfer, defined as the ability to extend what has been learned in one context to new contexts (e.g., Byrnes 1996, 74). Educators hope that students will transfer learning from one problem to another within a course, from one year in school to another, between school and home, and from school to workplace. Assumptions about transfer accompany the belief that it is better...

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