Research & Projects

After my 5th quarter teaching English 101 at Central Washington University, I conducted a transfer study using qualitative interviews and surveys to see how multimodal pedagogies and visual exercises help students transfer threshold concepts about rhetorical situations, writing processes, genres, and discourse communities. This study is currently ongoing, and the survey and volunteer interviews are still open. This project's preliminary findings were presented at the Symposium of University Research and Creative Expression and the presentation was nominated for a department award. 

Objectives

This study was conducted in order to reflect on the effectiveness of my teaching strategies. After five quarters of teaching ENG 101, I was at the point in my pedagogical practice where I wanted to see how I could more effectively channel my teaching energies and budget classroom time based on what skills students were actually transferring into their professional and personal discourses after completing my course. More specifically, I wanted to see if and how multimodal activities--especially visual brainstorming--impacted my student's concept retention and helped students transfer writing strategies into other discourses. These exigencies lead to the following research questions: 

1. How do English 101 students transfer threshold concepts, about writing process, rhetorical situations, and discourse communities, to their other classes and professional discourses? 

2. How does the learning environment impact concept retention and transferability? 

3. How did technology and multimodal activities help students form an understanding of FYC course outcomes and threshold concepts?

To answer these questions, I conducted an IRB-approved survey and interview study on my past English 101 students for four quarters between the Winter quarter of 2023 and the Winter quarter of 2024. Part of the interview methods included volunteers bringing an artifact from another class or discourse to show and explain direct moments of transfer of English 101 threshold concepts. These interview questions and recruitment emails can be seen below in the Study Overview, Methods, and Lit Review document. 

(Preliminary) Results

At this time, this study is still ongoing. Originally, I was hoping to conduct several interviews with past students and collect substantial survey responses. At this point, I have conducted one interview, and have received 10 survey interviews. One of the primary takeaways from this study was learning the IRB approval procedures. These processes took up quite a bit of the study timeline, and while it was an extremely beneficial learning process, it did increase the time constraint of the study and limited the amount of time I had to conduct interviews and code my data. I hope to continue this survey, and to emphasize the survey to my current students, giving them a heads up at the end of the quarter about the ongoing study. I will also need to make a recruitment plan for meeting my participant goal. This will likely be a long-term study. 

Using research on multimodal pedagogy (Jennifer, 2008; Griffin & Minter, 2013), transfer theory (Kuglitsch, 2015; Downs & Robertson, 2015; Kahu, 2008), and threshold concepts (Kain & Wardle, 2004; Barwarshi, 2003), I coded the 10 survey responses and interview transcript. I used a grounded coding method (Saldana 2013) and consulted Dr. Dan Martin to organize emerging themes in the data. The following themes are discussed in the mock presentation recording below.

Survey Findings

• Students are, in fact, transferring (Yay!)

• Students transfer writing process data by changing their writing environments to improve their writing processes

• students keep in mind the emotional buy-in of giving and receiving feedback, using greater audience awareness to better give and take feedback on writing

• students see their classes and majors as discourse communities and understand what kind of knowledge they need to succeed in that discourse community

• students make rhetorical choices to change language based on the pre-knowledge of their audience, they understand the specific lexis within the discourse communities  they are experts within

• students use rhetorical situations to think critically about the online media they consume, especially ads

Interview Findings

• the student's identity is central to the kinds of knowledge they transfer

• the student sees their academic papers for other classes as rhetorically situated

  • for an audience who is an expert in their discourse community

  • as a genre with constraints of a rubric, timeline, and word count

• the student sees specialized lexis as a rhetorical choice in order to engage a specific discourse community

• the student identifies pathos in his academic paper in order to persuade and please their audience 

• the student identifies specialized lexis in their work discourse community (fast food)

• the student incorporates visual, nonlinear drafting in their writing process

• the student understands the negotiating rhetorical stations in a coinciding interview

• the student retained the concept of rhetorical pathos from a visual poster exercise

Continuing This Study

While presenting my preliminary research, I received excellent feedback from my audience: "What is the value of this research? How do you see it changing the way you teach in the future? What will you do differently now?". While my research is incomplete, I have some actionable steps. 

First, the interview showed that the visual exercises (poster activity and visual brainstorming) did encourage transfer, even in a student who claimed they "never considered themselves a very visual learner." So, I am encouraged to continue my visual exercises, even incorporating more opportunities for visual drafting, or even messier forms of drafting, in my class during the writing process unit. 

Additionally, when I shared with my current class that I was presenting some transfer research at SOURCE, a group of students actually showed up to support me. Unfortunately, they were too late to the session due to some scheduling issues and missed it... but they wanted to hear about the research to the point where they convinced me to reenact the presentation, hence, the recording below.  This showed me that students are genuinely curious about transfer. Students want to know why what they are learning is valuable, and how it might be used in the future. CWU's English Department Chair, Dr. Schedler, further emphasized this position after my presentation. He encouraged me to use these examples of transfer to emphasize the importance and transferability of the course concepts and strategies. I plan to use these interviews and artifacts as a way to increase buy-in in my English 101 course. I am excited to see what data and testimonies I can collect from future English 101 graduates.