Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing

3. Teaching for Transfer (TFT) and the Role of Content in Composition

DoI: 10.7330/9780874219388.c003 3 t e ac h i n g f o r t r a n s f e r ( t f t ) a n d t h e r o l e o f c o n t e n t i n c o m P o s i t i o n Initially, the amateur writer doesn’t consider everything that goes into composing a paper. They do not concisely acknowledge that you need to first figure out what audience you are conveying your message to and what genre you are going to put your composition under. As time goes on, the author begins to acquire more experience, and their skills progress so that they can formally seek out the audience and genre. — Renee As explained in the last chapter, while several teacher-scholars have created new curricula designed to support students’ transfer of knowledge and practice in writing, we have yet to fully explore if or how the content in a first-year composition class influences the writing knowledge and practice students develop in such a setting, and thus the knowledge and practice they can use in other sites of writing. Intuitively, it makes sense that the content of a writing class—as indicated by readings and assignments, for example—would at least influence students’ experience. Alternatively, the content might be viewed as more than minimally influential; it might be seen as required, as the window or fulcrum through which students learn about writing and how to write. In this case, selecting content would be less peripheral and more fundamental to the design of a first-year composition class. Anne Beaufort’s model suggests that content or subject matter knowledge is one of the five critical domains of writing; if this is so for writing in other disciplines, it must be so for writing in first-year composition, since the salient issue isn’t disciplinarity per se, but rather the content that is inherent in any given writing task. Indeed, given that first-year composition functions as a gateway to writing in college, selecting the content—and it’s fair to note that in very few disciplines can the content be “selected” in the sense in which we are using the term here1 — would be a first-order concern. Teaching for Transfer (TFT) and the Role of Content in Composition 61 Given this context, we begin this chapter by detailing the particulars of our research into the “content” question, including the local institutional context hosting our study, after which we detail our research investigating the role that content in FYC plays in transfer. As suggested in chapters 1 and 2, we pursue this question by comparing the content taught in three different sections of first-year composition and exploring the efficacy of each in supporting students’ transfer of writing knowledge and practice. More specifically, we report on students’ experiences in three FYC courses differentiated by content: first, an Expressivist course; second, a course with content from cultural studies and media; and third, the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) course. We also pay close attention to the role of the teacher in these courses, finding that the differences across the courses are not a function of differentiated proficiency in teaching, but rather a function of curriculum. And as we suggested in chapter 1, one of the major findings we report is the role of language in helping students transfer writing knowledge and practice; as is conventional practice, each course included a language locating both writing and theme, but it was the language of the TFT course that provided students with the passport to writing across multiple sites. To forecast our findings, then, the content in first-year composition does matter, contributing in very specific ways to students’ intentional transfer of knowledge and practice in writing. INSTITUTIONA L CON TEXT Our research took place at Florida State University (FSU), a large, flagship , Research–1 institution in the Southeast US, had IRB approval and spanned two semesters totaling thirty-five weeks, over the fall of 2009 and the spring of 2010. We began in the fall with the second course of the two-course composition curricular sequence; then in the spring we followed students as they continued to write in their general education classes—what we call liberal studies classes—which included a wide range of offerings, from chemistry and biology to religious studies, history, and humanities. FSU’s first-year composition program—constituted by two...