Since the formation of the field of composition studies in the latter half of the twentieth century, writing faculty have worked to develop writing courses that will help students succeed; indeed, in Joe Harris’s (1996) invocation of the 1966 Dartmouth Conference mantra, composition is, famously, a teaching subject. Thus, in the 1950s, during a period of productivity in linguistics, we tapped insights from linguistics—style or coherence, for example—to enrich our classrooms. In the 1960s and 1970s, researching what became known as the composing process, we began putting at the center of our writing classes process pedagogies that have...

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...

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 asmorethan...

As the previous chapter suggests, one significant factor influencing students is their prior experience. Marta and Emma, for instance, who brought to college very positive writing experiences from high school, continue to draw on that prior knowledge almost mechanically, while Rick and Clay develop new knowledge as a function of their TFT class. Put more generally, a significant factor in all the case studies that we didn’t appreciate until we began examining the data was the influence of prior knowledge on several dimensions of students’ writing experiences: their attitudes toward writing; the strategies they drew upon; the knowledge about writing...

We opened this book, in part, by looking at McCarthy’s (1987) Dave and thinking about how we might help students like Dave make sense of the multiple sites of writing in postsecondary education. Toward that end, we began by reviewing and cross-referencing multiple definitions of transfer, noting the different vocabularies employed in each, as well as synthesizing empirical evidence demonstrating that students have transferred—that they have carried forward and used what they have learned in FYC appropriately in new situations—what we have taught them. We included in that review a consideration of writing process, of students’ need for...