Transferable Skills vs. Student Interest

Anne Beaufort’s piece specifies important concepts concerning teaching “College Writing and Beyond.” She denotes the importance of turning specific problems into “abstract concepts in different social contexts” to ensure students are capable of transferring their new skills to real-life situations (181).

To accomplish this she suggests focusing on genre awareness and discourse communities in order to “facilitate positive transfer of learning” and emphasize writing as a social practice (182). She concludes the piece by emphasizing that “The urge to communicate, to solve meaningful writing problems, as Bazerman (1997) says, is the most powerful motivator for learning to write better. The best curricular approaches, then, give students meaningful intellectual challenges and provide the scaffolding (Applebee and Langer 1983) for them to achieve success in the lifelong path of learning” (206).

In her amendment to this piece, “College Writing and Beyond: Five Years Later”, she continues to emphasize the importance of “aiding [the] positive transfer of learning to other contexts of writing” (2). In order to improve her technique in doing so she recommends these amendments to her pedagogical style.

1. The importance of making learning goals clear to students.
2. Focusing on the theme of your course.
3. Focusing on the genre in order to avoid negative transference.

Beaufort clarifies her rhetorical pedagogical style as opposed to an expressivist approach in order to demonstrate her strong emphasis on the transference of knowledge. Although I believe her amended approach is more effective in an ideal world, I believe she’s lost sight of her concluding statement from her initial declaration.

In order to maximize education, focusing on student desire should be the number one priority. By increasing the rigidity of her style and denouncing the utilization of narrative, she may be more effective at teaching more transferable writing skills, but she may also lose the excitement and interest of her students.

This is especially true in a day in age when a robot can help students with formatting and genre. The true uphill battle is getting students wanting to write in the first place. In order to help them “achieve success in the lifelong path of learning”, you must keep them on the path (206).