Yesterday, I attended the first session of the ISSOTL 2013 online pre-conference in the strand Studying and Designing for Transfer. The first week introduces transfer theories. The expert chat with Rebecca Nowacek, associate professor at Marquette University and Director of the Norman H. Ott Memorial Writing Center, introduced a rhetorical perspective on transfer. She used the term ‘bricolage’ to illuminate the concept of transfer, which she described as as a collage fabricated when individuals take little bits and pieces from different domains and learning experiences. Her work on transfer is based on rhetorical genre theory. How can we learn from genre theory for orchestrating transfer learning in educational settings? Rebecca pointed me to an interesting article that disusses how students repurpose familiar genres to new contexts:
Reiff, M. J., & Bawarshi, A. (2011). Tracing discursive resources: How students use prior genre knowledge to negotiate new writing contexts in first-year composition. Written Communication, 28(3), 312-337.
How do students experience our efforts to help them transfer and integrate? Rebecca said that we do not have (enough) research on how to facilitate students’ experience of the integrated curriculum, we simply know how to ‘make it look integrated’ or ‘feel integrated to faculty’. In her recent book ‘Agents of Integration‘ she describes the struggles and challenges that come with an integrated curriculum.
Can genre theory provide a productive framework for faculty to think about transfer as part of the course design? Can it help integrating transfer into curriculum and assessment? As one participant commented during the chat, “there has been so much research of late on swirl, and students attending multiple institutions … the rhetorical approach to transfer of learning strikes me as a really valuable throughline that could tie together the often fragmented experience that can derail our students“.
