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Copyrighted Material CC BY-NC-ND

Published: June 2020

ISBN: 9781646421077

Link to e-book:
https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/transfer-across-media/index.html​

Introduction

This review discusses: Crystal VanKooten begins Transfer Across Media: Using Digital Video in the Teaching of Writing (2020) acknowledging that “transfer—the act of connecting learning from site to site—is a big deal.” Big deal seems apt for describing teaching in 2020 given the massive pedagogical and technological shift teachers had to make in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While VanKooten’s research occurred before COVID-19, her study theorizes, argues for the value of, and provides practical pedagogical approaches for utilizing video in the teaching of writing. VanKooten offers timely guidance for teachers of writing and their students to engage in more nuanced understandings of digital literacies, transfer, and meta-awareness.
 
Acknowledging the concept of transfer’s complexity and slipperiness, VanKooten studies digital composing processes of first-year writing students to build her central argument that “video provides useful opportunities for transfer across media through multimodal production.” Building on Stuart Selber’s (2004) Multiliteracies for a Digital Age and Rebecca Noawcek’s (2011) Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act, VanKooten investigates students’ digital video compositions and written essays attempting to strengthen knowledge transfer across medium.  The book presents and analyzes VanKooten’s empirical research highlighting the “voices, bodies, and experiences of eighteen students from six separate courses who were all working through different video assignments, as well as the experiences of their teachers” and her own as a researcher.
 
While the concepts of multiliteracies, transfer, and meta-awareness aren’t new to Writing studies, VanKooten’s exploration adds richness and multi-sensory understanding that puts student learning, described by students themselves, at the forefront. Her reliance on video (from class sessions, interviews with students and teachers, samples of student video projects) and her own research synthesis and reflections offer an accessible, approachable pedagogical model to include video assignments in ways that support transfer.