In College Writing and Beyond: Five Years Later by Anne Beaufort, she reflects on the issues she previously presented on curriculum from her own book. Beaufort criticizes her earlier ideas and suggests improvements, emphasizing the idea of transferring knowledge. One of the claims she made from her previous work was that the types of assignments, introduced in her previous work, were not ideal for reinforcing transferable skills. She also said that it did not adequately teach the framework concepts for writing expertise. To combat these issues Beaufort suggests that transferable learning should be a core goal and assignment should be more impactful.
I pointed out a few of Beaufort`s revisions that stood out to me specifically. I do want to say that I like the idea of going and making changes to work, thoughts and concepts that you once worked so hard to create in the first place. I think that shows a lot of growth evolutionary thinking, which is what we need more of in the academic world. Typically, we see someone make claims and address concerns and then leave them stagnant , though there may need to be changes done down the line. I do think a lot of these corrections could be used in younger grade levels as well. For example, more useful assignments. It would benefit the students to have work that they can see as actually meaningful, whether they see it now or years down the road. Even though this is a difficult task, especially for younger students, because they are not established in the real world yet. But this is extremely beneficial. However, at young ages there is still a need for self discovery and developing identity, so when Beaufort suggests focusing more on rhetorical analysis and literature reviews, I do have to disagree with that for the little ones. Only because they need that identity development writing. As for higher level writing students, absolutely.
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