I want to help teachers better understand the complex process of writing and the many factors which can influence it. As a graduate student I have been involved in a variety of research opportunities, all related to writing pedagogy, but my main focus has become the study of knowledge transfer and the transition of advanced English high school students to college. The boundary between high school composition and college composition is becoming more blurred with options such as Advanced Placement and Concurrent Enrollment; I seek with my research to help teachers on both sides of the boundary understand best practices for encouraging transfer.
As I begin my academic career my research plans include
- further mining my dissertation data–my data has many rich avenues I can pursue for presentations and publication. One in particular is an instance of a student who showed signs of negative transfer and would make an interesting case study involving, among other things, attention to formulaic practices. Another is an exploration of how instances of positive transfer correlate with threshold concepts as defined by scholars of writing studies.
- studying new secondary teachers and/or college teaching assistants to see how they transfer writing knowledge from their own prior experiences and how those personal experiences correlate with or contradict what they learn in methods classes. The boundary is also blurred between new teaching assistants and secondary student teachers–both need to learn how to better understand and teach writing as a complex process influenced by many situational factors across time.