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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until May 08, 2028

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Naming What They Know: Instructor Perspectives on Students’ Prior Knowledge Transfer in First-Year Writing

Hambrick, Keira M
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0038-6225
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1680191306995234

Abstract Details

2023, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
As a common touchstone for millions of college students annually, First-Year Writing (FYW) is an important site of research activity that seeks to determine high-impact teaching practices that serve this increasingly diverse student population. Many teacher-scholars have turned to principles of Learning Transfer as a solution for promoting student learning in the writing classroom. Learning transfer, the repurposing or generalization of knowledge between contexts, is an incredibly complex process. Discussions of transfer often lack critical attention to what prior knowledges, skills, dispositions, or literacies we expect students might bring into writing courses, as well as what we hope they will take with them. Writing studies scholarship needs a model that defines prior knowledges and transfer in ways that explicitly attend to sociocultural and linguistic diversity to establish practices for cultural accountability in teaching for writing transfer. To address this need, I designed a mixed-method study that was guided by four research questions: 1. What prior knowledges, if any, do First-Year Writing instructors expect students to possess? 2. To what degree do those expectations account for sociocultural and linguistic knowledges from home, school, and other contexts? 3. How are students’ prior knowledges valued or mobilized by instructors? 4. What patterns, if any, exist across instructors’ beliefs about teaching and learning, assumptions about student prior knowledges, and instructional practices? Through a framework of writing studies transfer scholarship and asset-based, multicultural education pedagogies, my mixed-methods analysis of participating instructors’ survey, interview, and teaching document data offers two contributions to writing studies and transfer scholarship. The first is a systematic Typology of Prior Knowledges, makes it possible to account for the various expectations instructors have about students’ prior knowledges. When used as a research tool, the typology enables us to gauge the knowledge types instructors consider and value. When used as a pedagogical tool, the typology invites discussions of prior knowledge types and origins and reflections on how we measure, cue, and integrate these knowledges into writing instruction. The second contribution is the identification of seven distinct profiles of instructors, curricula, and programs. These profiles are the result of constellating individual and programmatic data from my study, including those gleaned through my typology, and principles from key scholarship in writing studies and related fields. The profiles therefore describe assignments, syllabi, teachers, and whole programs and curricula, and thus can be used to provide a snapshot of a particular cohort of teachers or programs at a moment in time as well as their development or changes over time.
Kay Halasek (Advisor)
Scott L. DeWitt (Committee Member)
Beverly J. Moss (Committee Member)
Timothy San Pedro (Committee Member)
268 p.
Curriculum Development; Education; Literacy; Rhetoric; Teacher Education
writing transfer, asset-based pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy, mixed methods, accountability, social justice, first-year writing, FYW, writing program administration, prior knowledge

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hambrick, K. M. (2023). Naming What They Know: Instructor Perspectives on Students’ Prior Knowledge Transfer in First-Year Writing [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1680191306995234

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hambrick, Keira. Naming What They Know: Instructor Perspectives on Students’ Prior Knowledge Transfer in First-Year Writing. 2023. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1680191306995234.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hambrick, Keira. "Naming What They Know: Instructor Perspectives on Students’ Prior Knowledge Transfer in First-Year Writing." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2023. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1680191306995234

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1680191306995234
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.