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Nelms-September 2003

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In September 2003, in response to a question about the content of composition courses (more specifically, whether literature should be “the” content of a second semester course (or of either course), Jerry Nelms turned the conversation to the issue of “transfer”: (what Ed White calls “the central issue for FYC [WPA-L September 18, 2003]). What follows are substantial portions of Nelm’s two messages discussing transfer, what students [do?, should?, could?] carry forward from their composition courses.

(I’ve edited these messages very lightly, mostly adding paragraph breaks to make them more web-friendly and deleting references to other participants in this email thread. If you wish to see the entire exchange, follow this link to the WPA-L archives.)

Here’s Nelms:

Thursday, September 18, 2003

Since I’ve gotten involved in studying knowledge transfer, my reservations about “content-based” (whether literature or other) composition—that is, content beyond the study of rhetorical and composition knowledge—have become stronger.

Even when students take a composition course that does not revolve around a “theme” or some other disciplinary or pop culture content, research suggests that they don’t transfer composition knowledge learned in that course to other non-comp course writing situations.

I strongly suspect that a theme for a comp course only creates a denser filter through which students must transfer the rhetorical and composition knowledge applicable to all writing situations. I’m thinking here of what the late Edward P.J. Corbett called “the rhetorical norms” (purpose, audience, ethos, and subject matter), to which we might add process and forum (or collapse these into the other norms).

Subject matter as a rhetorical norm, I think, needs to be translated generally—that is, as a category of decisions about any subject matter the writer faces, decisions about how much the writer knows and feels she doesn’t know, what kind of knowledge she needs to gain and how she believes and intends to gain it (her methodology).

Focusing a writing course on a theme, literary or otherwise, to my mind, only localizes transfer even more than it already is. That is, the student leaves the comp course able to accomplish “low-road transfer,” the application of knowledge in similar situations, but is less able to generalize that knowledge to accomplish “high-road transfer,” the application of knowledge in non-similar situations.

A comp course that focuses on literature, say, may facilitate a student’s writing in another course where the student is called upon to write about literature, but I suspect that it may actually hinder application of composition knowledge in other writing situations that call for the student to write about other subject matter. The student will tend to associate comp knowledge with writing about literature.

We’d all like to think that writing situations are similar enough that all transfer of comp knowledge is “low-road,” but it just doesn’t appear to be the case. In sum, I believe fighting for a comp course unencumbered with literary baggage is worth it.

24 Sep 2003 16:49:26

[W]hat comp curriculum might best support the “high road transfer” of comp knowledge-that is, the more general application of knowledge acquired from the composition course to situations dissimilar from the composition course[?]

The problem is that there’s not a lot of research out there-on knowledge transfer generally and less on the transfer of composition knowledge. Some of my research is packed in one of my boxes here, so forgive me, if I fail to cite someone.

There are, however, some important scholarly works on transfer of comp knowledge. I’m thinking here especially of

The other works that have influenced my thinking about transfer are

My interpretation of the literature-and I admit, that interpretation is very much still in process-is this: We-that is, all academics, all teachers, administrators, parents, students, everyone-have been going to school and then to college and to workshops and to conferences, etc., etc., all under the assumption that if students are engaged in the material and the material is presented in a coherent way that the material would be learned and then, all learned material would be available for application. But that’s not exactly true.

We humans tend to categorize, classify, pack everything into boxes. In my file cabinet, I have devoted a separate drawer to files on the history and theory of rhetoric. In doing so, I am thinking of rhetorical history and theory as somehow separate from the other rhetoric and composition subject matter of my other file drawers. And when I begin looking for information to apply to problems and projects that come up, I distinguish between my rhetoric files and my other files.

All of this is to say, we work from “low road transfer” first-that is, when we face a situation where we need more information, we usually first do internal research-we seek to access what we already have learned and can apply. We typically search knowledge acquired in situations similar to the one we now face. We make this search by looking for contextual cues, things that cue us to similarities in situations. Foertsch quotes Hintzman (1986):

Foertsch concludes-not just based upon Hintzman, of course, but generally from the literature-that “successful transfer can be achieved even with relatively low levels of past experience [and expertise] as long as novices are forced to process the problems in ways that direct their attention toward structural commonalities (decontextualized abstractions) rather than surface-level differences” (372). That is, low road transfer is “local” and particular, requiring less generalization than high road transfer, which Perkins and Salomon say “has a very different character.” “By definition,” they write, “high road transfer depends on deliberate, mindful abstraction of skill and knowledge from one context for application in another” (25).

As we can see, context is the environment in which learning takes place and creates an obstacle to transfer. Context is, of course, itself an abstraction. Context is simply the flow of existence. We “create” context by perceiving delineations within experience. I move from bedroom to bathroom to hallway to stairs to downstairs to kitchen to outdoors to garage to car to parking lot to walkway to building to hallway to office to hallway to departmental office to hallway again to office to classroom, back to office, etc. All of these are contexts in which things happen to me. And in my office, I go online and experience a different context, one which I can also access from home-but is it different because I’m at home?

Context is a box that helps us store experiences, and we’re really just beginning to understand how powerful it is in helping us shape our perceptions. Moving, then, items from one contextual box to another contextual box can be difficult. And of course, the analogy doesn’t hold up, because we aren’t moving items-we’re copying them and then, revising-reshaping-them to fit into the new box. That reshaping requires “deliberate, mindful abstraction.”

How does this apply to composition transfer?

As we all know now, writing contexts differ, often dramatically. When they don’t, writers tend to rely on low road transfer. If I’ve worked in an office for the same company for a number of years, I’m no doubt comfortable in my membership in that office’s discourse community. I don’t have to do much conscious thinking about the voice I take in my memos to others in my office. I’ve done it so often, it’s automatic. I rely on automaticity in much of my writing. But suddenly, when I’m called upon to present information on my company’s product to new group of people outside of my experience in my work with the company, I suddenly become highly metacognitive. I may question my self-efficacy. I think very consciously about who the audience is and how I should sound and what I should wear and can I take off a few pounds before the day of the presentation, etc. I rely on metacognition in preparing for and accomplishing this presentation.

Now, I may have had a similar experience in college. Yeah, I had to make a presentation to the class, and the speech instructor and the textbook talked about techniques for preparing for such a presentation and how to speak to such groups. But do I recall that experience? I will not have lost the memory; it’s still there somewhere. But is there a something that will cue me to recall what I learned-or at least, that I learned it and go rummaging around in my attic for the old textbook and my notes?

In fact, there might just be such cues. One can be context itself. It turns out my speech instructor drummed context as an abstraction into us over and over. With every speech we gave, she had us prepare by analyzing context. She even gave us a handout, a heuristic with questions meant to cue us to how to approach the new context and prepare for speaking in it. In fact, by golly, she emphasized context so much that I even began analyzing the contexts every time I went to speak somewhere after that. I analyzed the purpose and audience of each situation. I considered the subject matter-how much I knew and where I’d need to go to learn more and how I would need to shape that matter for my audience and my purpose. I thought, too, about my ethos, how I should sound to and look to and be experienced by that audience and still fulfill my purpose.

Now, the above is all fictional. I wish I had had such a teacher. The point is this: the transfer of comp knowledge requires developing contextual cues, perceptions that will activate a student writer’s memory of what she learned in the comp course and will reveal similarities between contexts (the comp course and the new writing situation). That kind of transfer appears not to occur for many students. They go from the comp course to writing in non-comp course situations and simply do not apply what they learned in the comp course.

My current belief is that we need to teach in ways that generalize aspects of context such that students are made cognitively (metacognitively) aware of them and they cue students to recall knowledge acquired in the comp course. For me, the most obvious aspects of context are the rhetorical norms (purpose, audience, ethos, and subject matter). Teaching context as problem to be solved seems to me to be the way to go. For me, then, problem-based learning and teaching students how to analyze context explicitly seem important aspects of good composition pedagogy.

In addition to more research on knowledge transfer and especially the transfer of composition knowledge, we need research into the nature of context and into cause-and-effect relationships between aspects of context and specific composition techniques. For example, when is brainstorming a more efficient and productive invention technique than, say, freewriting or, say, the use of the topics (classical topoi)? What should cue the writer to develop a rough outline-that is, work deliberately on organization?

Thinking this way makes me less and less interested in focusing any comp course I teach on a particular subject matter for several reasons. First, I don’t want to confuse the emphasis of the course. And sure, I know that comp courses focusing on literature can still be comp courses. But is that true in the student’s mind? David’s belief that students come to college associating writing more or less completely with literary criticism may be somewhat of an overstatement but probably not by much.

Second, I think that focusing the comp course on literature limits the contexts for the writing done in that course, and I’d prefer to expand the variety of contexts. Of course, students must have subject matter to write about, but my sense is that writing about literature is a relatively narrow subject matter with little overlap with other academic subject matter that students will be called on to write about in their academic and professional careers. In addition, I think that the composition course ought to give students experience reading and understanding different kinds of texts.

To my way of thinking, writing issues from experiencing a dissonance between the way I think things ought to be and the way I’m experiencing them as they are-often experienced through reading texts (see Young, Becker, and Pike, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (1970). Reading can be a storehouse of contextual cues for writing. If I’m assigned to read Jane Austen, that cues me to recall any training I’ve had in literary interpretation and writing about literature when I’m asked to write about Jane Austen.

But how often are our students called on to write about fiction, poetry, and drama? Should we not be teaching our students how to critically read and respond to civic deliberations, technical reports, empirical research reports, etc.? That is, shouldn’t we be teaching students how to become members of a discourse community-not a particular discourse community but what it means to be a member of a discourse community and how to acquire such membership, how to read the contexts and generalize from that reading, how to, then, become participants in the ongoing conversations going on within those contexts and the greater community?

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t want our students-want everyone-to appreciate and know how to respond to literary works. But isn’t that more of an argument for a required first-year literature course, not the inclusion of literature in the teaching of composition? [snip chunk about lit as fy course]

Finally, I don’t want to reduce the amount of time I spend emphasizing context and writing. Writing about literature requires reading the literature and discussing its meaning and that takes time.

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