Ecological Awareness: Enacting An Ecological Composition Curriculum To Encourage Student Knowledge Transfer

In 2012, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Karen Taczak and Liane Robertson published a book entitled Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition and Sites of Writing, in which they advocate for explicit instruction to help students transfer the writing expertise they gain in college composition courses to other writing contexts. That same year, the online journal Composition Forum put out a special issue dedicated to knowledge transfer. Since then, the call to investigate, and indeed teach for, knowledge transfer in the field of writing studies has been echoing around the discipline. In responding to this call, this dissertation project applies an ecological model of writing to a First Year Composition curriculum and pedagogy to promote writing knowledge transfer. This study examines how the framework of an ecological model of writing, or “writing ecologies pedagogy” can support students’ transfer of prior knowledge into the FYC classroom, as they encounter threshold concepts identified in composition studies (Adler-Kassner and Wardle, 2015). In addition, this project examines how a writing ecologies pedagogy can support the transfer of threshold concepts beyond FYC. While initial steps have been taken to theorize prior knowledge and teach explicitly for transfer (Yancey, Robertson and Taczak; Reiff and Bawarshi), the focus to this point has been on genre awareness transferred from prior writing experiences and practices that happen before entering college—contexts solely dependent on students’ experience in school. This project attempts to expand the focus from experiences prior to FYC, to experiences after as well. It also expands beyond the context of school to include home and personal discourse communities to complete the picture of where students write, and for what purposes. This dissertation triangulates between survey data collected from students at the beginning and end of their FYC courses, and longitudinal interviews with seven students to follow their trajectories of within and beyond the composition course. The surveys reveal that students are, for the most part, able to appropriately negotiate useful prior knowledge with the threshold concepts presented within the writing ecologies courses. The interviews reveal that students are able to transfer the threshold concepts of “Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Act” and “Writing is Linked to Identity,” very strongly. The focus of explicit instruction within the writing ecologies courses promotes the transfer of these two threshold concepts, though not all of the threshold concepts that were initially outlined in the curriculum. Ultimately, therefore, findings from this project suggest that further research on the effects of a writing ecologies curriculum and pedagogy on the transfer of writing knowledge can help pedagogical theorists, instructors and composition researchers develop a deeper understanding of how an ecological model of writing development can support knowledge transfer for students throughout their college careers, and beyond

The (Missing) Human Part: Listening for Students’ Perceptions of the Value of Peer Mentors

In this paper, we describe an IRB-approved (exempt) study designed to help us understand the impact that engaging with a peer mentor has on student learning in the online, intermediate composition classroom. Our study aimed to both identify the quantity of student interactions with peer mentors in online intermediate composition courses and to understand specifically how these interactions impacted students’ learning. The study focused on this question: “How do students describe the impact of peer mentors on their learning in the writing course?” Using a combination of qualitative methods (student survey, student interview, peer mentor reflection, and local institutional data on students’ use of campus resources), we developed four analytical themes focused on modes of engagement, expectations for online interaction, expectations for grades versus reported engagement with peer mentors, and students’ use of campus resources. Through this analysis, we argue that structuring contact points with peer mentors is not enough to engage students with this invaluable learning resource; without attention to the social quality of those contacts, we will not see increased engagement between students and peer mentors in our learning community, nor will we see students’ valuing of peer mentoring as improved

The Effects of Student-Fashioning and Teacher-Pleasing in the Assessment of First-Year Writing Reflective Essays

The use of reflective essays has become a key artifact of outcome-based writing assessment in the field of writing studies (White, 2005). However, scoring reflective essays may be influenced by textual features irrelevant to most outcomes and assessment rubrics.  Two problematic features are teacher-pleasing, which Yancey (1996) called the “schmooze factor,” and student-fashioning, which Miura (2018) related to identity formation. In this article, we present two mixed methods studies to examine the effects of these particular textual features on the direct assessment of first-year writing (FYW) reflective essays. In the first pilot study, we identified four textual features relevant to teacher-pleasing and student-fashioning. In the second quasi-experimental study, we created a sample of FYW essays with and without these features. Two assessment teams then scored the essays in order to determine whether these features had statistically significant effects on assessment scores. The empirical results of these linked studies indicate these features did not have significant effects in a direct assessment of FYW reflective essays. However, in the discussion and conclusion, we argue our mixed methods approach offers a feasible and efficient set of research methods to examine specific textual features in the direct assessments of student writing. Keywords: writing assessment, first year writing (FYW), reflection, reflective essays, mixed method