Teaching for Transfer in FYC: Mindful Reading Strategies

The issue of transfer has been explored by many scholars. However, for many instructors, helping students achieve successful transfer remains a vague ideal whose specific pedagogical requirements are nothing but elusive. In response to this exigence, many scholars have attempted to outline pedagogical strategies that will increase a student’s odds of achieving transfer. Case studies, for example, are becoming popular tools to “reduce transfer distance” by creating a classroom environment—the source context—that more closely mirrors a given profession—the target context (Balzotti). While innovative projects like these are promising, they can decrease transfer distance only for students whose target contexts align with the content of the case study. Thus, while such tools may be ideal for a major-specific course, they are inadequate for first-year composition (FYC), in which students’ goals are varied and liable to change.

This obstacle—the variability of FYC students’ target contexts—seems to be in direct conflict with any specific pedagogical practices that might promote transfer. How can a teacher show students how X (prior learning) applies to Y (target context) if every student’s Y looks so different? Instead, students must learn the more general skill of choosing which X to apply to which Y. This tension has resulted in a divide in conversations about transfer between practice and principle. For those who can predict their students’ target contexts, the focus is on practical transfer-promoting activities. For those who must account for their students’ variability, the focus is pulled away from practical activities and directed toward more abstract and generalized principles; the task is to teach transfer theory generally without delineating its outcome. The first camp includes people who are developing case study tools for classrooms. The second camp contains scholars like Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, who explore theories like metacognition and “writing about writing” on a broad scale, which could be applicable to a wide range of FYC students. Wardle and Downs do offer some concrete practices to encourage writing transfer, but, as Ellen Carillo argues, reading transfer is equally important to FYC students moving into the public sphere. Carillo begins to suggest concrete pedagogical practices to back up the principle of mindful reading but lacks the specificity and thoroughness found in the first camp.

As our field’s understanding of transfer in FYC has grown, I propose that it’s time to identify concrete transfer-promoting practices for reading that support the established principles. While variability in students’ target contexts still requires a level of generalization, there is room for more specificity in how we can teach those generalizable principles. Building on the work that Carillo began, I will attempt to bridge the divide between the theoretical and the practical by outlining what it looks like to teach mindful reading in a classroom. First, I will outline in greater detail the challenges of transfer from FYC. Then, building on the work of Carillo, I will discuss the merits of mindful reading as a transfer-promoting principle. Finally, I will outline specific reading strategies as an arsenal of principle-promoting practices.

Despite countless honorable attempts to rein in the complexities of transfer, it remains what Horst Rittel would call a “wicked problem” in its ability to defy simple answers. First of all, transfer is difficult to evaluate. The teacher who strives to promote transfer is inherently not present when the fruits of her labor are realized, given that the existence of transfer is contingent on the fact that the target context is distanced from the source context in which learning originally took place. Further, whether or not transfer is being evaluated, it is also difficult to achieve, especially when the source context and target context are vastly different.

While instances of near transfer—the application of knowledge across two similar contexts—may seem relatively straightforward, far transfer—the application of knowledge across two contexts which, “on appearance, seem remote and alien to one another”—is not (Perkins 4). It may come naturally, for example, to apply knowledge from an ACT prep course to the actual ACT, but applying those same critical reading skills to understanding a political debate would be a lot more complex. Douglas Detterman, who studies transfer through the lens of psychology, even goes so far as to say that instances of far transfer are “rarer than volcanic eruptions and large earthquakes” (2). Detterman isn’t alone in his skepticism. A widely cited study by Edward Thorndike, one of the earlier psychologists to study transfer, concluded with the hypothesis that transfer only occurs between contexts with “identical elements”—in other words, successful instances of far transfer are essentially nonexistent (75).

If the odds of successful far transfer seem so dim, why haven’t scholars just thrown in the towel? Unfortunately, situations that call for far transfer prove much more common than those that call for near transfer for FYC students. Few students in FYC will go on to write opinion editorials for a living, for example, which would be an instance of near transfer. More commonly, the skills of argumentation learned in this assignment will be applicable to more “remote and alien” contexts, like job applications or familial disagreements. Thus, if successful transfer is really as rare as a volcanic eruption, wouldn’t that put into question the value of FYC for any student whose future plans don’t directly involve writing? In other words, doesn’t our justification for FYC rely on the possibility of far transfer? Therefore, despite the difficulty of the task, it is not only worthwhile but necessary to teach in a way that gives our students the greatest opportunity for successful transfer between the source context of the FYC classroom and the target context of the post-college public sphere, however varied that may be from student to student.

In response to this need, the general consensus among scholars—including Carillo, Wardle and Downs, David Perkins, Gavriel Salomon, and others—is that metacognition is “the hinge upon which transfer depends” (Carillo 10). Carillo identifies the two key pieces of metacognition as recognition and generalization, without which transfer will not occur. In other words, students must first recognize that they are learning a transferable skill, and then they must generalize it to the broader contexts to which that skill will transfer. This requires a “deliberate” and “reflective” approach both to the skill and to the ways in which that skill interacts with context (Carillo 11). This focus on context is critical to metacognition as a transfer-promoting principle.

Carillo proposes that mindful reading is a specific skill that will “encourage the development of metacognitive practices” and, therefore, transfer (10). While I endorse this claim, Carillo doesn’t spend a substantial amount of time explicitly justifying this connection. Although Carillo’s work was sufficient without this justification, it is important to my project of outlining transfer-promoting practices. Therefore, in the form of learning outcomes, I support Carillo’s assessment that mindful reading promotes metacognition and, therefore, transfer for the following reasons:

1. Through mindful reading, students will be able to demonstrate an awareness of context and the “demands that contexts place on their reading” (Carillo 11). Analyzing the source context, target context, and their relationship is crucial for successful transfer.
2. Through mindful reading, students will be able to choose from an arsenal of reading strategies to best meet the demands of a given context. As students develop this arsenal of strategies, they will be prepared for a greater variety of target contexts—a skill that complements the diversity of FYC students.

These learning outcomes describe a student who can recognize the affordances and constraints of a specific reading strategy and then use their awareness of context to generalize that strategy to fit the demands of different contexts. Therefore, as students become more mindful readers, they will be equipped to apply their knowledge of reading strategies to instances of transfer.

It is important to note that this concept highlights “not just the task that one does mindfully” but “the individual, the reader, who is learning to be mindful.” In other words, mindfulness is a “way of being” (Carillo 11). This is an essential distinction because successful transfer demands not only the ability to complete a given task but also the ability to become someone who knows when to apply the skills learned through that task at any moment.

So, how can a teacher teach a “way of being” as opposed to just a task? Essentially, just as one becomes a mindful yogi one asana at a time, a student can become a “mindful reader” one “mindful reading” at a time. In other words, teachers can guide students through mindful readings in various contexts, not only with the short-sighted goal of completing that task successfully but with the broader goal of building up the students’ arsenal and enabling them to adopt this new way of being. As Carillo articulates, FYC instructors must “explore multiple ways of reading in a single course” in order to give students “access to multiple approaches” and, therefore, the increased agency to make transfer choices in future contexts (11–12).

With this in mind, Carillo begins the project of enumerating specific reading strategies to give students access to an arsenal of approaches. Explicitly, she refers to rhetorical reading and critical reading. Less explicitly, she describes what could be called disciplinary reading—a reading that demonstrates an awareness of “discipline-specific reading approaches” while still utilizing broader strategies that “transcend their disciplines” (Carillo 17). This is a great step toward the need for specific transfer-promoting practices for reading, but Carillo ultimately dedicates her time to the theoretical backing of this practice. Upon the theoretical foundation laid by Carillo, I intend to outline shortly a more specific and diverse arsenal of reading strategies for instructors who hope to implement mindful reading in their classrooms.

In order for a student to turn individual “mindful readings” into a transferable identity of “mindful reader,” they must be able to engage with the following questions about each reading strategy in their arsenal:

1. What does this strategy look like? Of course, students cannot utilize a strategy that they cannot recognize and replicate. For a reading strategy to be added to students’ arsenal of approaches, they must develop a “conceptual framework” of it by understanding its characteristic features (Yancey 43).
2. What are the affordances and constraints of this strategy? The answer to this question prepares the student to identify contexts in which the transfer of the strategy would be appropriate. When faced with a context disparate from the context in which learning originally took place, students will be able to choose a strategy whose strengths and weaknesses best complement the demands of the new context.
3. How might this strategy be adapted to meet the demands of various contexts? Transfer, by definition, takes place between two differing contexts. It is unlikely, therefore, that a skill will be able to be applied in exactly the same ways in the target context as in the source context. By exploring the limits and freedoms within a certain reading strategy, students will be able to adapt the strategy to a greater variety of contexts—i.e., students will be enabled to negotiate a farther transfer distance.
4. Once students are able to answer questions A–C, they will be able to answer the central practical question, which is so important to mindful reading: Does this reading strategy make sense for this context?

With this theoretical backing, we are able to move into the practical portion of this paper. I will describe three specific reading strategies, using questions A and B above to outline each one. Together, these can provide the arsenal of strategies needed for mindful reading. Specifically, I will look at aesthetic reading, utilitarian reading, and genre reading. These three (made six by the addition of rhetorical, critical, and disciplinary reading as discussed by Carillo) are, of course, an incomplete representation of the myriad reading strategies with which students could engage. However, they each exercise different reading muscles, if you will, and serve different purposes. In this way, engaging with these six reading strategies through the lens of the previously established questions will encourage flexibility, creativity, and overall mindfulness in students such that they will be prepared to transfer their reading knowledge from the source context of FYC to the target context of whatever their future holds.

Aesthetic Reading

Aesthetic reading is often looked down upon in scholarly contexts. As Joseph North discusses in his book Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, aestheticism has long been viewed as “amateur” (15). While some, like philosopher Edmund Burke, explore the possibility of objective standards for beauty, the general consensus is that aesthetic experiences are primarily deeply subjective. Especially in light of modern calls to change “the public discourse about writing from belief to evidence, from felt sense to . . . what we can know,” the subjectivity of aestheticism does not seem to have a place in most scholarly discussions (Anson 11). However, as John Dewey points out, it is impossible to read in a vacuum, with “an attitude of detached contemplation, looking down on the world as if from a mountain top” (qtd. in Pike 62). If a completely objective analysis is impossible for student readers, shouldn’t we teach them how to engage with subjectivity and give them the vocabulary to describe it? Additionally, there are some scenarios that do benefit from aesthetic reading—book clubs or individual reading, for example—making it a worthy addition to the arsenal of reading strategies from which a mindful reader can choose.

What does this strategy look like? If expressivism gives space for the student-writer to honor their personal emotions and experiences, aestheticism runs parallel to this purpose for student-readers. As described by Louise Rosenblatt, the aesthetic reader “pays attention to the associations, feelings, attitudes, and ideas that these words and their referents arouse within him” (25). Mark Pike calls this “the reader’s transaction with texts” (62). In order to help students think deliberately and metacognitively about this transaction, I propose a few potential prompts for activities:

1. A good place to start would be establishing a lexicon of aestheticism. This would include vocabulary related to figurative language and structure. The class might work with the instructor to define a list of terms, and then they might practice recognizing them in texts. Then, additional vocabulary terms related to affect could be added to the lexicon, initiating a discussion on the students’ affective response to the figurative language and structural strategies already discussed.
2. Students might be asked to bring a beloved text to class with them—any genre, any level.
   Through individual presentations or class discussions, the instructor would ask students to articulate why they love the text. Further, students should explain the text’s aesthetic effect, noting specific examples of how the language itself (as opposed to simply narrative content) contributes to that aesthetic.
3. The instructor can choose an aesthetically powerful poem or excerpt from a text and break it down as a class. This would involve an initial read straight through for first impressions, followed by a zoomed-in focus on the text’s most basic elements. Students might then privately journal about their aesthetic transaction with the text.

What are the affordances and constraints of this strategy? Aesthetic reading provides a solid foundation for students to move into expressivist writing; much of the vocabulary will transfer, and the focus will be on the reader experience. Additionally, engaging with the aesthetics of texts may inspire a student’s own aesthetic endeavors. Thus, as Peter Elbow claims that expressivism can empower student-writers, I suggest again that aestheticism can empower student-readers. Aestheticism allows students to engage with their own experiences and preferences, which contrasts with the all-too-common anxiety among students and scholars alike that they must fit into a specific scholarly mold. While there are many articles that ask, “Are we teaching the joy out of reading?” the joy of the art of reading is central to aestheticism (Dacosta). This reading strategy is an effective choice for contexts in which appreciation of form and reader-content transaction are the primary goals.

As with any strategy, aestheticism also has its constraints. Most professional and academic contexts will not care about aesthetic readings of text. The majority of professional and academic assignments will prioritize attention to content as opposed to structure or artistry. This is largely because it is difficult to evaluate the “correctness” of an aesthetic reading. If a reader says that Walt Whitman’s line “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love” is downright uncompelling, it could stem from the reader’s unique taste just as easily as it could be from a lack of aesthetic understanding. Given that most reading done in professional and academic contexts will be for the purposes of evaluation and generalization beyond the individual reader, North’s assessment that aestheticism is not “self-sufficient” seems appropriate. The insufficiency of any single reading strategy is, however, the very reason why students must build up an arsenal of many strategies that together open the door to mindful reading.

Utilitarian Reading

Commonly in college classrooms, utilitarian reading is treated as a vice—a sin that the procrastinators and the disorganized are forced to commit due to time constraints or laziness. When a student admits to merely skimming a reading, it is usually in a bashful or ashamed voice. The unspoken assumption is that utilitarian reading is a cop-out, inferior to other reading strategies. At the very least, as pedagogy researcher Dr. Ng Chiew Hong acknowledges, skimming is often “dismissed as a skill too basic to be taught” (1). However, the taboo nature of utilitarian reading does not stop students from practicing it—it just impedes students from learning how to practice it well. In making a pariah out of utilitarian reading approaches, we stunt their potential and underestimate their complexity.

What does this strategy look like? While a broad enough definition of utilitarian reading could encapsulate many of these reading strategies, given that each has a practical goal of accomplishing a specific task, I define it here more narrowly: utilitarian reading is a strategy in which only specific, predetermined portions of a text are studied while the remaining portions are essentially—at least initially—discarded. This act of discarding portions of the text is what makes this strategy seem like a cop-out. However, effective, utilitarian reading is not simply a result of laziness or poor time management but rather a hyper-focused and purpose-driven approach.

In order to implement a utilitarian approach to reading, the student must ask themselves two initial questions:

1. What information do I need?
2. Where is that information likely to be located?

The information needed could be as specific as the text’s central claim or as general as an understanding of the scholarly conversation surrounding the reading. The possible locations, then, are also various. The former example may be found by reading the topic sentences from each paragraph or even just the abstract. The latter may be found by closely reading the text’s literature review and then scanning the remaining body for in-text citations.

Once the student has determined the information and its respective location, they will turn to the text. The student will study only the predetermined locations, ignoring the rest (at least for the moment), and look only for the predetermined information. If the student is not satisfied with the knowledge gained from this initial scan, then they might broaden their scope for Question 2 and try again. If the student can’t anticipate where the information will be located, they may have to skim the entirety of the text until they find it—or, better still, keep making educated guesses until they find it.

In her article in English Teaching Forum, Nebila Dhieb-Henia proposes a few additional questions that can encourage metacognition about the utilitarian approach: What “skimming speed” should I start with? What “level of processing”? I would also add a post-reading reflection question: How well did that go? These questions will teach the student to closely tailor this reading strategy to their specific context (Dhieb-Henia 5).

What are the affordances and constraints of this strategy? Utilitarian reading is, of course, practical. When done well, it allows students to gather specific information in an efficient way. As a result of this efficiency, students will be able to explore a broader information landscape—for example, in the context of research, when the student wants to become familiar with the general trends of a scholarly conversation.

A major constraint of utilitarian reading is its potential to be misused. In a study done by cognitive psychologist Michael Masson and replicated by a team of psychologists at the University of Manchester, it was found that participants’ “recognition of important, unimportant, and inferable information declined equally” at higher skimming speeds—meaning, readers may “struggle to effectively . . . find information that is relevant to their goal” when skimming (Masson; Duggan and Payne). This may seem like a mortal defect for utilitarian reading, but neither of these studies instructed their participants very thoroughly on how to effectively skim the text given to them. Participants in Masson’s study were instructed to attempt to “understand the gist of the content.” In contrast, Duggan and Payne’s participants were expected to “attempt to glean as much information from [the text] in as short a time as possible” (Masson; Duggan and Payne).

This is not a flaw in these studies—their chosen methodologies were appropriate for their specific goals—but it does illustrate an important point about skimming: it is easy to do poorly. In other words, these studies suggest that skimming is ineffective insofar as the reader does not embark with a specific purpose and plan. If students fail to answer the aforementioned questions (What information do I need? Where is that information located?), their experience with skimming will likely only perpetuate the approach’s poor reputation. When utilized by a mindful reader, however, utilitarian reading can serve as a valuable addition to a student’s arsenal of strategies.

Genre Reading

Amy Devitt, a leading scholar in conversations of genre, offers three potential approaches to genre reading: learning particular genres, genre awareness, and genre critique. Directing students to read particular genres introduces the obstacle of choosing which genres, which is especially difficult for a diverse class of FYC students. Genre critique—asking who is empowered by a given genre and who is disadvantaged—could also fall under the umbrella of critical reading, as already discussed by Carillo. Therefore, genre reading in this paper will refer specifically to genre awareness, a widely transferable skill that teaches students how to learn any unfamiliar genre that they may encounter in the future. This emphasis on the future is what makes genre awareness particularly pertinent to the conversation on transfer.

What does this strategy look like? The exigence for genre reading is genre writing. If students are unable to demonstrate genre awareness, they will be unable to replicate genres using appropriate conventions, as is necessary in the professional world. Genre reading is, therefore, different from the previously discussed strategies in that it is done with the intent to replicate—that is, to write. To develop this type of genre awareness, I offer Devitt’s four-step process:

1. Start with either a collection of samples from a genre you want to learn or, I would add, a text whose genre you want to uncover.
2. “Identify the larger context and the rhetorical situation in which the genre is used” (including setting, subject, participants, and purposes).
3. “Identify and describe patterns in the genre’s features” (including content, rhetorical appeals, structure, format, and sentence and word style).
4. “Analyze what these patterns reveal about the situation and larger context” (152).

Devitt’s steps do a great job of setting a reader up for successful genre readings. The critical word in these steps is patterns: if one instance of a genre has a certain structure but no other instances do, a student who has developed genre awareness will be able to view that as an anomaly as opposed to a rule. It is for instances like these that I propose an additional step in Devitt’s list:

• Reflect on the variation between instances of this genre to identify which of its features are flexible and to what extent.

This additional step also answers the fear that genre conventions suppress writers’ creativity and individuality. There is space for individuality when writing within genre conventions, but the writer must know where that space is.

What are the affordances and constraints of this strategy? One major affordance of genre awareness is that it encourages the same level of mindfulness, which is critical for mindful reading, just from a slightly different angle. Like mindful reading overall, the specific approach of genre reading requires an intense focus on what a text is doing and what that requires from the reader. While I am portraying genre reading as just a single tool in the toolkit of mindful reading, it can also stand as a tool on its own to encourage transfer. Whether FYC students go on to pursue writing-heavy jobs or not, most people are required to conform to various genres professionally, socially, or otherwise throughout their lives—in other words, genre awareness is a universally valuable skill.

The constraint of this strategy is that it requires the students to tap into an already established repository of knowledge. In order to gather samples of a specific genre, for example, the student must be able to label that genre well enough to track samples down. In order to uncover the genre of a given text, the student must know their options. A student may still develop high levels of awareness of the conventions of a text, but engaging with that text’s genre requires deeper engagement with texts outside the text in question. This requires nothing less than time and experience. Luckily, this time and experience is exactly what will be cultivated as students mindfully practice other reading strategies in their arsenal.

Conclusion

While this list is far from complete, it will provide a starting point for students to develop an arsenal of reading strategies that will enable them to practice mindful reading. It is important to note that the activities suggested here for each strategy are not meant to occur within a single class period and then never again. Mindful reading is meant to be a “way of being,” meaning that it is habitual. When engaging with a new text in FYC, an instructor might ask, “Which of our reading strategies will serve us best for this text?” to create a culture of mindfulness. As students are continually exposed to these various reading strategies, gaining an ever-stronger grasp on the affordances and constraints of each kind, they will be prepared to approach all reading mindfully. By teaching these concrete reading strategies throughout an FYC course, students will increase their ability to think metacognitively about their reading choices and, therefore, be better equipped for successful transfer from the source context of FYC into whatever target context is relevant to them.