Writing Knowledge Transfer

Reference Guides to Rhetoric & CompositionEditors: Charles Bazerman, Anis Bawarshi, & Mary Jo Reiff

WRITING KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER: THEORY, RESEARCH, PEDAGOGY develops a capacious understanding of transfer in writing studies, tracing the distinct ways transfer has been engaged in various disciplinary fields and drawing connections among similar threads of inquiry. Working from a large-scale, collaborative analysis of some of the most salient long-term debates around transfer, this book guides scholars to link long and broad transfer conversations, attend to troublesome transfer problems in their teaching or research, and support both amplitude (more capacious understandings of writing transfer) and specificity (more detailed and relevant treatments of the term) in research on the transfer of writing knowledge. In addition to a detailed synthesis of multiple disciplines' treatment of transfer, the book offers five themes developed during a rigorous transdisciplinary reading of approximately seven hundred books and articles on transfer from disciplines including cognitive psychology and situated learning; sports, medical, and aviation education; second language writing; and school-to-work research, among others. Together the themes capture the interdependent relations among transfer's actors, influences, contexts, and outcomes. They also provide new frames for better understanding learners' varied and even paradoxical motivations for writing. Ultimately, the book offers value and kinship across disciplines to suggest new transfer questions, lines of inquiry, and theoretical and methodological commitments.

Rebecca S. Nowacek is Professor of English at Marquette University, where she co-directs the Norman H. Ott Memorial Writing Center. Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on language diversity, literacy studies, and research methods. Angela Rounsaville is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Central Florida, where her research focuses on transnational literacy, genre studies, and transfer.