2.2: Does Knowledge Transfer?

I used to be of the opinion that English 101 and 102 was a waste
of time to students in the engineering discipline.

—Godwin Erekaife

 

Godwin Erekaife, a chemical engineering student who graduated in May 2010, is not alone in his early beliefs about FYC. His opinion about the requirement stemmed from his uncertainty about its practical application and his desire to reserve credit hours for his chosen field: engineering. Godwin’s uncertainty is understandable. He wanted broad preparation for chemical engineering and to know how FYC would help him later on. His questions about FYC applicability speak to something called knowledge transfer: the degree to which we can use newly learned skills and abilities and apply them in other contexts. In short, Godwin didn’t believe that what he learned in FYC would positively impact his engineering coursework.

Godwin’s initial thoughts resonate with others. In her recent study—“Understanding Transfer From FYC: Preliminary Results from a Longitudinal Study”—Elizabeth Wardle discovered that after fulfilling their FYC requirements, her students didn’t immediately see connections between FYC and other courses. Wardle also found that while they saw some value in what they learned—“new textual features (new ways of organizing material), how to manage large research projects (including use of peer review and planning, how to read and analyze research articles; and how to conduct serious, in-depth academic research” (72)—her students employed few of these new abilities in their first two years of college. In a similar study, “Disciplinarity and Transfer: Students’ Perceptions of Learning to Write,” Linda Bergmann and Janet Zepernick found that students at their schools saw FYC as a “distraction from the important work of professional socialization that occurs in the ‘content area’ courses” (138). In essence, their students, like Godwin (and maybe even like you), were eager to enter their fields of study and learn the discourses (ways of thinking, speaking, writing, interpreting, and generally making knowledge in a community) of those fields and would have preferred entering those discourse communities earlier rather than take FYC.

However, both studies also suggest that FYC can be a powerful tool in helping us all learn new discourses. Wardle found that people developed a “meta-awareness about writing, language, and rhetorical strategies” (82) when they took FYC. It helped them “think about writing in the university” (82), how it works, why it works differently in different contexts, and how to use it. Similarly, Bergmann and Zepernick’s findings suggest that FYC is a requirement that can teach you “how to learn to write” (142). Bergmann and Zepernick provide a really useful metaphor to help you think through both the idea of meta-awareness and learning how to learn to write. They ask you to consider,

[The] specific skills athletes learn in one sport (such as how
to dribble a basketball) may not be directly transferable to
another sport (such as soccer), but what athletes are able to
transfer from one sport to another is what they know about
how to learn a new sport. Everything about getting one’s
head into the game is transferable, as are training habits, onfield
attitudes, and a generally competitive outlook on the
whole procedure. 142

If you think about the FYC requirement in terms of the above sports metaphor, then each discreet writing assignment does not transfer to other courses (just as dribbling a basketball down the court will not help us learn how to dribble a soccer ball downfield). You may write a personal narrative in a FYC course, but you will probably never write
another one in any other course. Because of this reality, you might be tempted to think that the FYC requirement is, a waste of time. However, if you think about the course as a whole or the totality of our FYC writing experiences, you can begin to see how FYC is designed to help writers develop critical tools that they can apply to any writing situation (just like learning one sport can help us understand how to learn other sports).