WP3 Tyler's Transfer

Inroduction

Transfer

          The real-world application of key concepts taught in modern academic settings must become a top-priority for teachers hoping to enable their students to succeed in the classroom and life. As a society, it is critical that we foster a sense of creative crossover between contexts and encourage students to use the skills that they learn in school over a broad range of situations. As Elizabeth Wardle argues in her scholarly piece What Is Transfer, “When students learn something, they can learn it rigidly and for the present moment only, or they can learn the concepts underlying it and recognize the potential value of this learning for another setting and task”. Teachers must strive to enable their students to recognize this concept and learn to apply their skills in multiple settings, effectively transferring from one context to the next. While this applies to a variety of critical thinking skills developed over the course of a student’s academic career, it becomes most crucial during the transfer of rhetorical skills across disciplines.

          Wardle expresses the interaction of students and their writing atmospheres succinctly – “Individuals and contexts never exist independently of one another”. By using a key set of strategies including rhetorical awareness, metaphors, and self-monitoring, writing program administrators should be able to assist students in the process of developing concepts and skills rather than memorizing rigid rules. Application of sound rhetorical practices throughout disciplines is a necessary skill to employ in any writing piece, whatever the academic context.

 Transformation 1: The Wardle Web

Transformation 2: Mr. Ettner's Excellent Example Journal

     

A Real GEM – WP3 Moves Self Reflection

            A picture is most definitely worth a thousand words! For my genre transformation project I utilized a variety of pictures and graphics in order to display the concepts from the article What is Transfer by Elizabeth Wardle. This piece is meant to urge writing teachers to promote the idea of skills transfer and foster an understanding of this issue within their students work across a variety of contexts. The idea of skills transfer lies in the fact that learning basic writing skills can assist in creating rhetoric in any type of medium or genre, and requires practitioners to craft a better understanding of fundamental “concepts and heuristics rather than rigid rules” (Wardle 151). This principle carries great implications for practical application, as the modern economy also requires professionals to transfer their basic skills between a broad range of situations. For this reason, my genre transformations involve a creative business skills mind-map termed The Wardle Web, and a writing professor’s instructional journal for high-school writing students.

            As I pass by the gigantic team whiteboard at the Goleta Entrepreneurial Magnet (GEM), a local startup incubator where I act as an intern of sorts, inspiration struck and a beautiful idea spawned the missing piece to completing my WP3 in style! Going forward with my Wardle Web, I began drafting it up on the board and soon after, groups of entrepreneurs, innovators, and small business owners took interest in the project. Through a series of discussions and informal interviews I got a ton of great content and really solidified my thoughts on the project. I took copious notes and discovered many key ideas that I learned which I deemed worthy to manifest themselves in my finished product. Seeing that the identification of audience is an important step in the writing process, I decided to target my mind-map towards a diverse group of budding entrepreneurs who seek to learn about the basic skills necessary for success, and how to apply them to different contexts within the modern business atmosphere.

            The very first startup team member that I talked to explained that one of the most crucial skills for an entrepreneur involves self-awareness and the ability to frame your ideas and goals into different contexts. This tied in so well with the course readings that I was taken aback, and clearly saw that the lessons we’ve learned from authors such as McCloud, Wardle, Losh, and Alexander really do transfer into real life situations. The example demonstrated to me involved a company developing train-cars and raised the question, ‘are you really just in the train-car industry, or is it the transportation economy as a whole?’ My colleague argued that this key framing distinction makes all the difference in the way that you work to provide value to your customer by focusing beyond the narrow scope of a specialized type of production and instead taking the entire travelling experience into account. I decided that this would be a major key in my work, and sought to frame my skill transfer web to provide value to entrepreneurs of all occupations and industries, rather than focusing on just one specific idea.

During the construction of my piece, it took a high degree of planning and drafting in order to put my ideas together in a coherent way. In order to achieve this, I looked back to the ideas presented in the course reader for some much needed support. In his piece Writing with Pictures, McCloud claims that the choice of frame “shows readers what they need to see” by “directing reader focus” (McCloud 37), which is meant to be a result of the structure of the Wardle Web. Key skills and attributes are located in the center as most essential and first priority, branching out and transferring to the four main bodies of a business model. In addition to the structural components, the actual skills that the mind-map brings to the attention of readers were also rhetorical skills in disguise. These included everything from ‘evidence expert’ to ‘audience appeaser’, and even ‘structure sensei’, meant to prove that these rhetorical and real world skills have a high degree of transferability across contexts and situations.

In stark contrast to the conventions of the entrepreneur’s mind-map, my second genre transformation for students took on a much different style. Just as Losh and Alexander express in Writing Identities, “When you [try to] specifically reach a younger audience, you [create] a completely different rhetorical effect” (Losh and Alexander 130). By changing the writing tone to be more casual and informative, I created a sense of ethos and crafted a new identity as an author in order to relate to a younger audience of high-school writing students. This transformation of Wardle’s piece took the form of a model instructional journal, which a writing teacher would like their students to emulate throughout the course in order to keep track of the concepts they would learn. ‘Mr. Ettner’s Excellent Example Journal’ includes various drawings and colors, and avoids following a rigid structure, in an attempt to gain the attention of a younger audience. Some of the text is even written upside-down, a move meant to force students to pause and become mindful of what they are reading. Just as Wardle urges writers to “learn concepts and heuristics rather than rigid rules” (Wardle 151), this piece encourages students to focus in on key concepts and express their thoughts in a creative manner in order to foster better comprehension.

The inclusion of bright colors and high-lites throughout the journal piece was a move meant to draw the reader’s attention to critical concepts or advanced topics that students are encouraged to follow up with if they aren’t familiar. Rhetorical skills or ideas such as genre, context, concrete evidence, and structure can be found throughout the piece, with accompanying quotes and sketches in an attempt to further improve cognition through the use of image and moment. By establishing a solid identity and following up with these creative moves as well as small tips and tricks marked with asterisks, ‘Mr. Ettner’s Excellent Example Journal’ is meant to convey Wardle’s teachings with clarity and show the real-world applications of her claims to even the most unexperienced of writing students.

The third and final writing project of this class really encouraged the development of a deeper understanding of the concepts of genre, taking key moves such as the identification of audience, establishment of identity, and use of visual components in order to transform an ordinary article into something much more. Transforming Wardle’s piece What is Transfer into instructional texts for two drastically different audiences forced me to identify the genre conventions that really matter when writing to these audiences, and ensure that my pieces took the audience’s skills, motivations, and natures into account. This proved to be an incredibly valuable writing experience, and helped to solidify many of the rhetorical skills which I aspired to improve over the course of this class.

Works Cited

Losh, Elizabeth M., and Johnathan Alexander. “Writing Identities.” Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing. 114-139. Print.

McCloud, Scott. “Writing with Pictures.” Making Comics. New York: Harper, 2006. 8-55. Print.

Pajares, Frank, and Gio Valiante. Chapter 11: Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Motivation in Writing Development. 158-170. [On Gauchospace]. Web. 3 Mar. 2016.