Transfer student writers, who comprise more than one-third of all college students, are simultaneously experienced writers and first-year students at their new institutions. Despite their complicated positions, these students have received very little attention from composition specialists. This article responds to the paucity of attention to transfer student writers by reporting on a multiyear study that alternated between investigations of the experiences of these students and programmatic changes designed to address their expressed needs and concerns. The guiding principle of this work, and of the advice offered to colleagues interested in supporting transfer student writers on their own campuses, is a combination of institutional and student changes or mutual adjustments.

Examination of the perspectives and experiences of faculty, graduate student instructors, and undergraduates participating in a WAC/WID program shows how discipline-focused WAC/WID principles are often resisted, interrogated, and subverted by all three groups of stakeholders. New disciplinarity, especially its concepts of borderlands and elasticity, offers a promising focus for WAC/WID.