"Transfer"

 

When I first learned that the topic of this course was going to revolve around the concept of transfer, I wasn't sure if there would be enough information to cover the duration of the semester. Boy, was I wrong!  The concept of “transfer” is a complex, yet fascinating topic.Like many other educators, I believed that as long as students mastered the content and skills in their English class, then they would be successful in future reading and writing tasks.  I've learned that this is not necessarily the case.  We have failed to take into consideration the various activity systems and the multiple genres that students will be exposed to in their futures, many of which are not correlated with the current English curriculum.  Therefore, we are left with the following question: What can we do differently to help students transfer the knowledge they come to learn in our classroom to other classrooms and varied rhetorical situations? Two concepts that we focused on in thsi class that have especially affected my thinking as an educator are "genre awareness" and "metacognitive awareness."  Our study of these two topics has been intriguing, especially when considering how they affect successful transfer of knowledge from one context to another. There is value in incorporating these into my pedagogical practice in order to better support student learning, not only for the context of my classroom, but for future collegiate and workplace contexts.

 

Amy Devit’s article, “Teaching Critical Genre Awareness” (see link below for full article), struck a note with me.  It especially hit home when she pointedly stated: “The first and most important genre pedagogy, then, is the teacher’s genre awareness: the teacher being conscious of the genre decisions he or she makes and what those decisions will teach students” (339).   Initially, genre pedagogy seemed overwhelming and impossible.  I definitely saw the value of teaching students multiple genres, especially those that they would most likely meet in future contexts, but I worried about how to tackle such a huge endeavor.  I not only felt limited by the time I am allotted with students in one school year, but I felt especially limited by my own knowledge of genre usage in the various discourse communities that exist.  I was therefore grateful for Devit’s acknowledgment that “writing teachers cannot possibly possess insider knowledge of all the genres students want or need to learn, so their instruction in particular genres will always be incomplete, no matter how much they want to help students gain access to important genres” (340).  This thought put me at ease.  Rather than trying to find an impossible perfect solution, I began focusing on what I could logically and reasonably do in my classroom that would at least help bridge the gap and give students a better foundation to build their genre knowledge upon.   I specifically appreciated Devit’s pedagogical approach:  “Although we cannot teach students a specific genre fully, the genres that we do teach and use in the classroom can serve as scaffolding for later genre acquisition, as these partially learned genres act as antecedents for other genres” (346).   Devit further explains that she does this by giving students “writing experiences that can transfer to the writing they do in their major classes or in their workplace.”  When she assigns “public genres like pamphlets, brochures and organization websites, [she] aims to add public audiences and purposes to their generic repertoire so that they have more non-academic rhetorical antecedents to draw from in their political lives” (347).  With this method, students can eventually develop critical genre awareness, in which they can “learn to critique the genres they know and encounter, with an end possibility of changing the genres that need to change to better serve their needs” (347).  Although I acknowledge that this will be a learning process for both me and my students, it is a pedagogical approach that I plan to implement into my practice.  Doing so will better prepare students to write in multiple genres across multiple activity systems, and it may even empower them to change structures and dynamics as needed.

 

As I continue to work through implementing genre awareness into my curriculum, I also realize that I must regularly employ metacognitive strategies.  This coincides with Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick’s study of the “Habits of Mind”(see link below for full article), in which they emphasize that intellectual problem solvers develop metacognitive practices.  For the teaching profession, this would include “developing a teaching strategy for a lesson, keeping that strategy in mind throughout the instruction, then reflecting back upon the strategy to evaluate its effectiveness in producing the desired student outcomes."  I recognize that this will not only require mental effort, but it will also require time to reflect.  Even though time is always in short supply, I have come to understand that metacognitive awareness is just as important to analyze as is the pedagogical approach.  Evaluating my teaching strategies will empower me as an educator, and reflecting on the effectiveness of the instruction will have a direct influence on the final outcomes.  Of course, it will also be of benefit to give students time to employ metacognitive strategies as they work through new concepts.   In relation to genre awareness, students will need to “facilitate temporal and comparative judgments, assess the readiness for more or different activities, and monitor [their] interpretations, perceptions, decisions and behaviors” (Costa& Kallick).  This means that students will need to form “internal questions as [they] search for information and meaning, develop mental maps or plans of actions,  mentally rehearsing prior to performance, monitoring those plans as they are employed--being conscious of the need for midcourse correction if the plan is not meeting expectations, reflecting on the plan upon completion of the implementation for the purpose of self-evaluation, and editing mental pictures for improved performance" (Costa& Kallick).   I can monitor students’ metacognitive strategies by employing more reflective writing and discussion throughout the course of instruction.   This will better assist me in knowing how students are taking in, utilizing and transferring knowledge, and I can thereafter make the necessary adjustments before it is too late.

 

 Ultimately,  “in order for transfer to occur, learners need to (1) recognize similarity between two contexts— a monumental task; (2) identify what knowledge or skills have worked in the past that may be applied to a new opportunistic context; (3) exercise judgment on the applicability of said context using metacognitive awareness; and (4) adapt and apply the concept to the new context as necessary” (Walwema& Driscoll 22).   By employing genre awareness and metacognitive strategies into my teaching practice, I can help ensure that students will be more successful in transferring their knowledge to future discourse communities. 

 

 

Here are some of my favorite articles that we read in this course: