Implications
Chapter 4: Pathways to Future Transfer
Chapter 4 is an example-rich summation of VanKooten’s findings, offering student video description and explanation of their transfer of learning through various pathways and across media. The chapter is divided into four sections: Compositional Knowledge, Meta-Awareness of the Writerly Self, Meta-Awareness Of Process, and Meta-Awareness Of Techniques and Intercomparativity, analyzing student’s video composing processes and contexts for potential future transfer.
This chapter highlights many student voices from the study. Readers can witness the participants reflect on their own learning in response to VanKooten's interview questions. For example, Travon, explains his process, revisions, rhetorical choices, peer critiques, and self-assesses the video he made about his campus' summer bridge program. Travon voices many of the book's purported goals for using video to teach transfer in a Writing course, explaining that he differentiates video from writing a paper because making video is like "watching something grow." Describing the assignment as "fun" and "interactive," he says he can use the "same techniques as writing a paper and incorporate them into making this video."
This chapter highlights many student voices from the study. Readers can witness the participants reflect on their own learning in response to VanKooten's interview questions. For example, Travon, explains his process, revisions, rhetorical choices, peer critiques, and self-assesses the video he made about his campus' summer bridge program. Travon voices many of the book's purported goals for using video to teach transfer in a Writing course, explaining that he differentiates video from writing a paper because making video is like "watching something grow." Describing the assignment as "fun" and "interactive," he says he can use the "same techniques as writing a paper and incorporate them into making this video."
Video is a site where students can connect, strengthen, and extend the web of their writing knowledge through multimodal production."
Chapter 5: A Pedagogy of Teaching for Transfer across Media
The final chapter offers video of the study’s three featured instructors sharing their experiences. A student, Evan’s, video “College Collage” is a compelling example of video composition sharing Evan’s personal experiences with higher education. This example bolsters VanKooten’s central argument that video can be a particularly generative medium for understanding and teaching transfer while addressing pedagogical challenges to teaching multimodal assignments including student privacy, copyright, and fair use.
VanKooten offers five best practices for teaching across transfer:
VanKooten offers five best practices for teaching across transfer:
- Ask students to write and compose using a variety of media, tools, and technologies for different rhetorical situations and contexts.
- Use digital media composition before, alongside, and after more traditional alphabetic composition assignments.
- Support the development of different kinds of meta-awareness about composition (of process, rhetoric, techniques, intercomparativity, and of writerly self) and different kinds of learning that might transfer, such as developing functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies. This support will require emphasis on both student actions and articulations.
- Guide students in moving toward, beginning, and continuing multiple steps in a transfer across media process. This may involve supporting and scaffolding processes of consideration, reuse, application, and reconstruction. Specific and direct guidance and support may be especially important for students who have not previously reused or built on writing knowledge and skills.
- Use assessment as an opportunity to provide additional support for learning goals and transfer across media.