Talk: Engaging Students in Learning for Transfer through Visual Mapping and Reflection
Date: Monday, January 29, 2024
Time: 3:30 - 5:00
Location: 1215-16 McClung Tower

This talk introduces pedagogical principles for transfer-focused writing instruction and response to student work, beginning with an overview of writing transfer research and curricular models designed to foster students’ development and transfer of writing knowledge and practice across contexts. While research on curricula like Writing about Writing (WAW) and Teaching for Transfer (TFT) has found these approaches efficacious, I argue for a conceptual shift from teaching for transfer to learning for transfer and share some pedagogical innovations keyed to engaging students as agents of their own learning in writing and writing-intensive classes. Because prior knowledge and writing experiences shape both what and how we learn, I share two methods designed to elicit students’ tacit and developing writing knowledge, using student examples to illustrate the affordances of visual mapping and reflective writing for making conceptual knowledge visible and available for conscious reflection and revision. 

Workshop: Exploring and Mapping Personal Conceptions of Writing
Date: Monday, January 29, 2024
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Location: McClung 402

Although our personal conceptions of writing are consequential for our work as writers, teachers, and researchers, we are not always aware of the knowledge, values, and beliefs shaping and guiding not only what and how we write, but the rhetorical possibilities and composing choices we perceive as available to us. In this workshop, participants will reflect on, articulate, and visually map their conceptions of writing, then share and collectively analyze these maps to surface disciplinary, cultural, and popular discourses tacitly (re)shaping our personal conceptions of writing.

Bio: Erin Workman (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, & Discourse at DePaul University, where she serves as the Director of First-Year Writing. Her research focuses on methods and methodologies for studying writing development through the lifespan and has appeared in The WAC Journal, College Composition and Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research.