When All That Is Old Becomes New: Transferring Writing Knowledge and Practice Across Print, Screen, and Network Spaces

• Other Authors: Zawilski, Bret (authoraut)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Subjects: Education
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-9532

This dissertation develops a model of material composing knowledge, which considers the role that surfaces, environments, and tools play in the composing processes of student writers as they shift their writing practices across multiple contexts. The research questions ask if and how knowledge of materiality aids students in transferring their writing knowledge and practice across dissimilar composing tasks, such as the remediation of a Print Newsletter into a networked text. To address these questions, it builds upon a model of composing developed by Anne Beaufort that looks at five domains—discourse community knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, writing process knowledge, genre knowledge, and subject matter knowledge—that comprise a model of writing aimed at fostering transfer, and this study considers the addition of a sixth domain: material composing knowledge. This exploration of material composing knowledge extends upon research already conducted within the field of writing studies that looks at how transfer occurs in writing courses. Its situated location within an upper-level writing course, "Writing and Editing in Print and Online," provides the opportunity to look at a class in which students are explicitly called upon to recontextualize, that is to transfer, their writing practices across three contexts: print, screen, and network composing. This study made use of think-aloud protocols to render visible the decisions students made while they remediated a previously-created text for a new context and resulted in the development of three characterizations of student participants as Remixers, Assemblers, and Synthesizers. These three characterizations reflected the ways in which student participants relied upon prior knowledge, material composing knowledge, and their stances as what Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi describe as border-guarders and border-crossers. The study resulted in the following four claims: (1) considerations of surfaces, environments, and tools play a large role in how these students approached recontextualizing their writing across print, screen, and network contexts; (2) students relied heavily upon prior knowledge—in particular, their out-of-school literacies, when recontextualizing their writing practices; (3) the kinds of prior knowledge these students had with varied materials—tools, surfaces, environments—greatly influenced how they approached the recontextualization of their writing; and (4) the concepts of border-guarding and border-crossing extend beyond students' knowledge of genre and beyond the transition from high school to college—these concepts can be seen in the ways that these students employed and repurposed materials while composing. As a result, this dissertation suggests that material composing knowledge can serve as another valuable knowledge domain that would fit within the model developed by Beaufort, and that this domain would prove especially useful when students engage in transferring their writing knowledge and practices across dissimilar writing tasks. Additionally, this research suggests three pedagogical applications, that we should (1) incorporate activities that emphasize reflection-in-action as a way to assist students articulate their decisions, (2) emphasize the role of workarounds as opportunities for transferring writing knowledge and practices from one context to another, and (3) provide models or detailed scenarios that describe what successful and unsuccessful attempts of recontextualizing writing look like. === A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. === Summer Semester 2015. === June 8, 2015. === composition, materiality, transfer, writing studies === Includes bibliographical references. === Kathleen Blake Yancey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jonathan Adams, University Representative; Michael Neal, Committee Member; Kristie Fleckenstein, Committee Member.