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Drawing on the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) writing curriculum, this study documents how students in writing courses at four different institutions transferred writing knowledge and practice concurrently into other sites of writing, including other courses, co-curriculars, and workplaces. This research demonstrates that when students, supported by the TFT curriculum, understood that appropriate transfer of writing knowledge and practice is both possible and desirable, (1) they engaged in writing transfer during the TFT course into other sites of writing; (2) they transferred from in-school contexts into out-of-school contexts with facility; and (3) in both cases, they engaged in a just-in-time transfer.
How students transfer what they learn in first-year composition (FYC) to new sites of writing-that is, if and how students appropriately transfer writing knowledge and practice from one site for use in another site-has garnered considerable attention in rhetoric and composition. In 1987, for example, Lucille McCarthy's Dave, a "stranger in a strange land," perceiving no resemblance among the writings he composed in three writing sites- FYC, a poetry class, and a biology class-claimed that he made no use of FYC in the latter two college classes requiring writing. Likewise, twenty years later Anne Beaufort documented the experience of Tim, whose writing development progressed through college and into the workforce; while Tim may have seen resemblances across writing tasks, he did not seem to transfer what he had learned in FYC to new writing situations (College). And other scholars, among them David Smit and David R. Russell, have argued that given the general situatedness of writing, there's a reason why Dave and Tim experienced such difficulty; writing transfer, they claim, is difficult if not impossible.
During this same period, however, especially during the last fifteen years, many scholars have documented both students' unsuccessful writing transfer attempts and their successful transfer of writing knowledge and practice, even if scholars do not always agree on what to call it. Some, drawing on terminology common to literature in education and psychology, continue to refer to the phenomenon as transfer (Wardle, "Understanding"; Yancey et al., Writing across Contexts), while others coin language emphasizing specific aspects of the phenomenon-among them adaptive transfer (DePalma and Ringer); dynamic transfer (Hayes et al.); and repurposing (Wardle, "Creative"; Yancey et al., Writing across...