In this article we consider the ways in which college writers make use of prior knowledge as they take up new writing tasks. Drawing on two studies of transfer, both connected to a Teaching for Transfer composition curriculum for first-year students, we  articulate a theory of prior knowledge and document how the use of prior knowledge can detract from or contribute to efficacy in student writing.

Within composition studies, transfer and rhetorical genre studies have found an especially productive partnership for exploring together whether and in what ways students transfer writing-related knowledge from one context to another. This article continues this synthesis by turning to Anne Freadman’s notion of uptake to suggest a more robust understanding of transfer for writing . As I will show, uptake foregrounds the role that heterogeneity, selection, and problem-solving play in how literate learners encounter and make sense of new writing tasks at the convergence of prior genre knowledge and current, local genred events. This micro discursive space of uptake is an important site for thinking about transfer in that it is partially through this process that prior genres meet, are transformed, rejected, or imported whole cloth into new rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this article argues that, through uptake, high road transfer is reconceived as a dynamic, problem-solving endeavor where writers can be encouraged to proactively sort through and make selections in and amongst prior genre knowledge.

The following article maps the questions, methods, contexts, and theories presented in published scholarship on writing-related transfer. While not exhaustive, this review attempts to capture representative samples with a focus on recent publications. The article then highlights a multi-institutional research initiative that aims to flesh out the field’s “map” and suggests additional areas for exploration.

This video captures the reactions of selected writing researchers at the Elon Research Seminar as they are asked to consider the problem of transfer and how it relates to the teaching of writing. As a research area and pedagogical concept, transfer is poised to create a lasting impact in the way writing is studied and taught. In this video, scholars who focus on how writing knowledge is transferred share their questions, insights, and goals as they move forward their research efforts on transfer.

In this introduction to the special “transfer” issue of Composition Forum, I offer some preliminary thinking about ways to expand our consideration of this phenomenon, which I will describe from here on out as creative repurposing for expansive learning, or “repurposing” in brief (Prior and Shipka; Roozen). I argue for understanding repurposing as the result of particular dispositions that are embodied not only by individuals but also by what Pierre Bourdieu calls “fields,” and the interactions between the two. In doing so, I focus primarily (but not exclusively) on the dispositions of educational systems. In sketching out my initial thoughts on dispositions, I draw on Bourdieu’s discussions of “habitus” and “doxa.” I suggest that to move forward in our consideration of repurposing and expansive learning, we might look beyond one task, one setting, or one individual to consider the habitus of the educational systems that encourage particular dispositions in individuals. I will suggest that creative repurposing is one consequence of what I will call “problem-exploring dispositions,” while “answer-getting dispositions” discourage such repurposing. I end by suggesting that the steady movement toward standardized testing and tight control of educational activities by legislators is producing and reproducing answer-getting dispositions in educational systems and individuals, and that this movement is more than a dislike for the messiness of deep learning; rather, it can be understood as an attempt to limit the kind of thinking that students and citizens have the tools to do. In this view, conducting and enacting research on repurposing (“transfer”), including the scholarship in this special issue, is a high-stakes enterprise.

The challenges of redesigning and reviving Longwood University’s Rhetoric and Professional Writing program involved skills in collaboration, negotiation, and advertisement. While unexpected obstacles arose, taking an honest look at the existing program design and working to maintain the focus on rhetoric helped to circumvent failure. Finally, student involvement, student feedback, and the use of online resources became key elements in bringing a weak program to life.

This profile articulates the authors’ response to a statewide mandate to eliminate “remedial” writing instruction at four-year public universities, including their own. The profile describes the difficulties the authors faced in responding to this initiative, given the context of their regional comprehensive university and its specific challenges with retention and student success, and discusses their revision of the university’s writing program. The changes the authors made—eliminating a non-credit basic writing course and creating a credit-bearing basic writing course; instituting guided self-placement; and developing a flexible, WPA-outcomes based writing curriculum—have led to improved satisfaction, success, and retention rates among basic writers at their institution.

Since 2003, the International Writing Centers Association has held a Summer Institute for Writing Center Directors and Professionals. Encouragement of scholarship, writing, and publication are important aspects of the institute. We have compiled a bibliography of scholarly works emerging from the first seven institutes. These works include web publications, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference presentations, dissertations, and one book. The entry for each work is followed by a narrative by the author or authors describing the influence of the Summer Institute, how they conceived and developed the work, and how they met their collaborators. Through these narratives we see that the IWCA Summer Institute offers a model for seeding an active community of practice that brings people together from diverse institutions, giving them new perspectives on their work through mentoring, collaboration, and the development of professional friendships. For many, this also results in development of a professional and scholarly identity more deeply connected to writing centers and their attendant fields. We also speculate on the meaning of identified publication patterns and make suggestions for future endeavors.

Writing centers are like organisms, performing in and living in an educational environment: evolving, altering, adapting. Given this organic quality, a key way to understand how writing centers handle the teaching of writing is to examine them through the lens of ecocomposition. Focusing on the organic nature of writing, ecocompositionists borrow the concept of ecology as a central metaphor, seeing writers and their environments as dynamically intertwined. Student writers, then, are part of a web of connections. Woven into the theory of ecocomposition are perceptions and ideas that explain the work of writing centers today. This paper applies to centers each of ecocompostion’s pivotal concepts—interrelationship, place, and voice—in order to provide new insight into the nature of centers as they help students and to show that centers are not colonialists, they are not outsiders, and they are very capable of adding to Composition Studies.

This article narrates the experience of rhetoric and composition faculty developing a graduate program at a growing state university in south Texas. The narrative emphasizes the contextual constraints that required “institutional critique” and rhetorical negotiations. The second part of the article argues for a critical stance on how we talk about program development more generally. I use critical theory to engage the contradictions inherent in institutional work and in our own discourses, in order to argue that while we navigate institutional constraints, we must remain "dialectically ambivalent" about the larger implications of the work we do.

In this interview, Malea Powell discusses the importance of keeping the discipline of composition and rhetoric growing, vibrant, engaging, and contestatory. While arguing for the value of interdisciplinarity through the example of her own theoretical work that considers making as rhetorical scholarship, she extends this concept to the larger webbed relation of our field and addresses many of the issues surrounding the 2011 CCCC theme she established.

E-book devices (and devices that support e-books) are increasingly being integrated into the working lives of students and teachers. We discuss our pedagogical and institutional experiences with the Sony Reader in composition courses at both the graduate and undergraduate level, reporting on dynamics and challenges associated with three key literacy tasks: accessing texts, operating texts, and marking texts. We conclude with a heuristic that can help teachers and administrators adopt and design an e-book initiative.

Faculty involved in implementing a grant to incorporate technology into post-secondary ESL teaching and learning describe the coaching model they used to do this. The authors explain how they drew from principles of literacy coaching to develop and implement their model; describe their experiences in working with coachees; discuss technology plans, including instructional software and lessons; and reflect on the successes and challenges experienced by the faculty and students. The profile includes applications for faculty professional development in higher education, with implications that are especially meaningful for programs predominantly staffed by part-time and adjunct faculty.

The first-year composition requirement at Murray State University was revised in 2008 from a 6-credit-hour, two-semester sequence to a 4-credit-hour, one-semester course. The revision overtly emphasizes critical reading, writing, and inquiry, while addressing the realities of the institution’s resources for teaching first-year composition. This profile describes the reasons behind the revision and the process of its implementation, contextualizing the change within the background of the university and burgeoning writing program. The methods and results of an assessment of the revised course in comparison to the previous course sequence are outlined in depth, along with how the assessment guides the instruction, administration, and future assessment of writing at the university.

This article examines the disjunction between, on the one hand, critical theory’s critique of the privileging of authorial intent in protocols of textual interpretation, and, on the other hand, continued obeisance to authorial intent in composition textbooks and pedagogy. By unpacking the implications of this disjunction, I show the limitations that the reification of authorial intent creates for composition pedagogy and student writing. I conclude by suggesting how bracketing authorial intent in the composition classroom might enhance composition pedagogy and student writing, while also challenging fundamental epistemologies of the field.

I see a parallel between the illiteracy I witnessed while working in the court system and the challenges facing first-year writers at the university. In both cases, problems arise due to unfamiliarity with the discourse community into which one enters. In response, because much of the language governing composition and rhetoric is rife with place and journey metaphors (note the metaphor I just used of entering into a community, suggesting it is a place), I posit that ecocomposition theory may provide a fresh lens through which to view classical rhetoric. After providing a read of Aristotle’s Rhetoric focusing on issues of place and ecology, I offer how such theory, which I playfully term “EcoStotle,” might be applicable to a first-year composition course. The benefit to this approach to classical rhetoric and ecocomposition is that it is grounded in argumentation, thereby promoting literacy for our students, whatever discourse community they enter.

Composition scholars have contributed many theoretical analyses that WPAs and teachers might apply to first-year composition textbooks in order to make informed decisions about book adoption and implementation. As they offer critiques of the ideological effects of FYC books, many of these studies call composition textbooks “tools” without exploring the implications of textbook qua tool. The following essay addresses this unexamined area by developing a theory of valuation , a linguistic and rhetorical process of assigning worth to students and textbook instructional apparatuses as student-readers might engage with the texts. An analysis of valuation by WPAs and teachers has the potential to foster the empowerment of students, the instruction of critical thinking and writing, the autonomy of new teachers, and the coherence of local writing programs.

In this interview, Jonathan Alexander provides snapshots into his history and positionality as a Composition scholar. He contextualizes his published, professional work within behind-the-scenes details, influences, and personal scholastic commitments that have shaped his relationship with composition, how he defines writing, and how he theorizes and designs pedagogies.

This review essay examines recent texts by Nancy Welch and Tony Scott, both of which use embodied activism as a starting point for their inquiries. Taken together, these works point to a distinct shift in composition studies’ turn toward the social, one that calls on workers both within and outside the academy to actively engage in grassroots political struggle.

The Major in Writing Studies (with emphases in Professional Writing and in Journalism) at the University of Minnesota Duluth marks a curricular innovation. This profile traces the intellectual arguments that created space for a Department and Major in Writing Studies at UMD. Those arguments included a differentiation from the contested spaces of other disciplines (literary studies and communication studies) as well as from the prior disciplinary identity of the Department (composition studies). These arguments also included a positive identification of Writing Studies as one of the disciplines defined by its object (akin to American Studies, Women’s Studies, etc.). The object of Writing Studies at UMD is writing, defined as a practice, a tool for cognition and social action, and a force for sociocultural change. These arguments are manifest in the core curriculum of the major (16 credits of courses across all four years of the students’ coursework).

This essay seeks to explain the history that led to the establishment of First-Year Writing at Binghamton University, a program which offers a set of electives that complement discipline-specific and writing-across-the-curriculum courses while providing first-year students a common experience in and comprehensive introduction to college writing.

This article examines ways in which the fundamentals of both writing studies and sustainability studies overlap and complement each other, ultimately moving toward a theory of writing that not only is sustainable, but that also sustains writing practice across a variety of areas. For example, in order to be sustainable, both writing and geographical communities must consider several elements in any decision or employed strategy. Both writing (the act and the teaching of it) and sustainability studies are localized, regionally specific. Key to the argument’s theoretical positioning is the role of technology and technological innovation in both a community and a classroom in terms of inhibiting and facilitating sustainability and communication.

This article looks closely at some of the lingering stereotypes that Composition Studies holds toward Web surfing and queries the resulting literacy hierarchy against our students’ reading and writing practices that take place online. This article claims that while good progress has been made in the way of revising twenty-first century definitions of (digital) composing, the academy has yet to fully revisit its boundaries of legitimacy surrounding (digital) reading. Additionally, this article contests the academy’s use of technology vis-à-vis email, Blackboard, or blogging as a placating attempt to integrate technology into the classroom without genuinely validating our students’ dominant literacies or their digital lives. This article leans on the theories of feminist composition pedagogy as it calls for the field to decenter its authority and revise curricula to incorporate critical digital literacies.

In this interview, Cindy Selfe talks about the intersections of technological literacy, digital scholarship, poststructuralist theory, and university politics. In doing so, she provides a lens for scholars trying to understand the milieu of the university by viewing its potential in juxtaposition to its past; explains how technology redefines the boundary between theory and experiential reality; and recommends a set of simple questions digital scholars can ask themselves when attempting to create localized, sustainable tactics demonstrating their work has the reach and scope of their immediate non-digital peers.

In this critical program profile, the authors provide an analysis of the historical, political, theoretical, and practical circumstances that influenced the development of Oakland University’s undergraduate major in writing and rhetoric. Through an analysis of the developmental process and the major itself, this article explores many separate, yet interconnected issues. These include the development and naming of a department of writing and rhetoric, the impact the major has had on the first-year writing program, the theoretical and practical structure of the three-track major, as well as the institutional impact the program has had.

With a particular focus on the preparation of teaching assistants, this profile details the recent transition to a standardized English 101 curriculum at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). More specifically, the profile details theoretical and practical incentives for the move, as well as political and logistical challenges encountered by Writing Studies staff in conceiving and implementing the new curriculum. The profile ends with a discussion of the perceived benefits of standardizing English 101 at SIUC and, presumably, by extension, in the context of similar institutional contexts.

This article presents the case for using a critical literacy approach to enhance the freshman composition experience for second language writers. As our classrooms become more multilingual and multicultural with each passing semester, we need to move away from thinking of our ESL students as “outliers” and consider them as key participants with specialized linguistic and cultural needs and strengths. Using both published examples and her own experiences, the author illustrates how a critical approach can be advantageous to second- language writers and offers ways such an approach might be implemented in actual practice.

I created my Exploratory Survey on the Status of the Research Paper Assignment in First-year Writing/Composition Courses to learn whether the traditional research paper remained as common an assignment in 2009 as it had been in the past. My survey updates results from two previous surveys on the status of this assignment. Ambrose N. Manning’s survey, conducted in 1961, found that 83% of colleges and universities in the United States included the traditional research paper assignment in first-year writing/composition curricula. James E. Ford and Dennis R. Perry’s 1982 survey concluded that 78.11% of the colleges and universities that required first-year writing/composition courses included the assignment, a decline of 5%. My survey results indicate that in 2009, at survey respondents’ schools, only 6% of research assignments in first-year writing/composition courses are traditional research paper assignments, a decline of 72% since 1982, while 94% are alternative ones. This shift appears to reflect trends in scholarship as well as changes in assessment practices, structure of first-year writing/composition programs, and technologies for writing, researching, and teaching.

In this interview Susan Jarratt reviews the trajectory of her scholarship and revisits some of the lessons learned from a variety of her projects while simultaneously drawing out historical and narrative continuities of seemingly disparate time periods and contexts. In doing so, she elucidates the value of scholarship as a political and instructive tool that can be usefully applied to both teaching and administration.

Writing faculty, tutors, and librarians at West Virginia University took a team-approach to teaching research, reading, and writing as intertwined processes. This collaborative project encouraged each member of the team to re-examine professional and disciplinary boundaries, and resulted in new assignments and activities that successfully engage students in researched writing.

This essay examines the disappearance of the study of style from rhetoric’s disciplinary research agenda and from contemporary writing classrooms, linking the decline of disciplinary interest in style to contemporary writing handbooks, which tend to treat style in reductive ways. Also pointing out the disappearance of “sentence-based” style rhetorics, the essay argues for a disciplinary re-commitment to the study and teaching of style, one of the original canons of classical rhetoric. The essay ends with several pedagogical examples of how to re-introduce style to writing classroom, as well as an invitation to other scholars to share their approaches to teaching writing style.

Studying the communicative role models of my freshman composition students at a historically black school, I learned which rhetorical approaches my students already appreciate and possibly bring with them to college. My analysis of their essays on their role models illuminates a distinction between what they have learned and what they are expected to practice as college writers, suggesting that their communicative role models are significant indicators for how comfortably they will adjust to writing in college. I discovered that those students who admire personas who project with a forceful, “true,” inner confidence, frequently learned from hip-hop culture, could be deflated in an academic setting if they are not taught the necessity of adjusting oneself to the rhetorical situation.

This essay challenges writing teachers to consider anew the assigning of politicized or controversial topics in the composition classroom. The author describes his use of writing assignments related to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars/Occupations from 2003 to 2006. Although some writing teachers embraced war-related topics in their classrooms during this time period, others seemed to avoid them out of fear of reading cliché-ridden “blinding binaries” arguments or of facing a hostile student environment. The author argues that the time was right to engage students in critical inquiry into the many war-related topics so as to pursue the truth-seeking mission of higher education. Necessarily, as the questions and issues related to the wars evolved, so too did assessment strategies. The assignments and student writing during this time period also show the value of this writing as a form of social action for students in their communities.