Episode 164: Kara Taczak

Pedagogue podcast

Transcript

Welcome to Pedagogue, a podcast about teachers talking writing. I'm your host, Shane Wood.

In this episode, Kara Taczak talks about writing across context, research on transfer, teaching transfer in

Spaces, International Journal of Work Integrated Learning, the WAC Journal, Composition Forum,

teaching English in a two-year college, and across the disciplines. Her upcoming work will appear in

CCC and Writing and Pedagogy.

Kara, thanks so much for joining us.

SW: In 2014, you published Writing Across Contexts with Kathi Yancey and Liane Robertson, where you

all write about reflective practice and transferring composition and how "we can help students develop

writing knowledge and practices that they can draw upon, use and repurpose for new writing tasks and

new settings." Do you remember the moment when you decided to collaborate and work on this book

moment that it came to be and when the book came into fruition is really kind of exciting for me.

And ironically, I've already thought about this, because Kathi, Liane and I just wrote a teaching for

transfer encyclopedia entry, and I was thinking back to the moment that it kind of all came together. It

didn't actually start with the book, because Liane and I were at Florida State University and Kathi was our

dissertation head, and we were trying to think of dissertation topics, as one does when you're in grad

school. For me, and I've written about this with Kathi, I went to the Writing Across Borders Conference,

the WRAB Conference, and it was only my second conference and it was in California.

I remember I had never been to Southern California before and everybody told me it was going to be

beautiful, warm, sunny, and I got there and it was fucking freezing, rainy. And I was like, "Well,

I walked out, and I remember exactly where I was on that campus, UC Santa Barbara campus. I sat down

on a bench and I had a notebook of New York, because New York is one of my favorite cities. And I

started making a list of possible dissertation topics. Now mind you, this is February of my first year in

grad school, so super early, but I'm a little type A. I wrote "transfer." Right above that I had a post-it from

Kathi that said, "Trust the process." And below "transfer" I wrote "reflection," because Kathi of course is

one of the leading theorists in reflection in the writing classroom. And so just put those two thoughts

down and kind of went about my business.

And then Liane had done a master's thesis on transfer in the workplace. Liane and I used to have coffee at

a Starbucks on Monroe Street, and we started to think about what would it look like if students could

make use of writing knowledge past the first year classroom. We just started having conversations, and

those conversations led to talking with Kathi and turning those conversations into dissertation topics.

please." Who's going to turn down Kathi Yancey when she's like, "Would you please co-author a book

with us?" And we did. Liane and I's first year out of grad school, we started writing that book, Writing

Across Contexts, and it was really fun and exciting to write. Writing with Kathi is very easy and we write

very well together, I think.

We had a very clear picture of what we wanted to put in the book, which is we needed a history of

transfer, because no one had done that before, and we really wanted to focus on specific findings that had

come from both our dissertations. Prior knowledge was a huge thing for us, and we put that in. And of

course, reflection was another big thing for us. That's how the book kind of came to be. It really did start

for me from a conference in cold and dreary California, to coffee conversations with Liane, to Kathi

KT: I think the interesting thing is we are still learning a lot about transfer. I think that's the first thing. I

think there's still so much that we can do. For one, there's still research coming out on it from lots of

really exciting places. Two, I think there's things that we can still test within the transfer curriculum.

Liane and I talk about this all the time and we talk about it with our colleague Matt Davis, who was a year

behind us. His dissertation wasn't necessarily on transfer, but since then he has become a part of our

transfer group and done a lot of work in multi-modality and transfer. We are constantly thinking about, in

what ways do we evolve our transfer research? And I think in 2024, it means a couple different things.

One, I think very obvious answer, and people ask us all the time, is what does it look like in terms of anti-

curriculum to them. I think it also suggests what students will take out of the classroom. How we taught

10 years ago, since the book is now 10 years old, is not the same as we are going to teach nowadays.

The third thing I would say, and I've really been thinking about this a lot, is students are in a different

place in terms of wellbeing. I think it's this different generation really focuses a lot on their wellbeing.

They think about it in ways that other generations have not. And so that's something that I don't think we

ever thought or accounted for in the transfer question, in the teaching for transfer curriculum. So what

would that look like to account for it now or should we account for it now? I think we should, and I think

we should build it into the reflective framework.

I think it ties in really nicely to the reflective framework, but I think there's always going to be ways to

challenge the transfer question. And I think if we are good educators, we always want to challenge the

transfer question, because we want our students to learn knowledge and practices that they're going to use

pedagogy and research on transfer? You've taught in several different institutional contexts now as well.

How has your own understanding and how has the curriculum changed now that you're no longer a

graduate student at Florida State?

KT: That's a great question. Right out of the gate I had to change, because I moved from an R1 flagship

school to a private elite school. Slightly similar, but not really, student demographic. And I went from a

16-week semester to a 10-week quarter, and I went to an independent writing program from an English

department. So those are some different changes, not necessarily huge changes, but big. I would say the

10-week quarter was probably one of the biggest, so trying to adapt to a 10-week quarter. And then of

course you have to account for an independent writing program has really specific goals and objectives,

I developed classes for e-portfolios, writing minor. I taught within our upper level writing classes, our

ASM, our first year seminar. In all of those classes, I took up the transfer question, because I do believe...

And I also taught within our embedded college, and I taught ironically, and I mean ironically because this

is not my content area, environmental management and policy. But I think one of my areas of expertise is

curriculum and development, and I'm really good at designing curriculum.

I think it's because I do think about transfer and I think about it from a reflective standpoint. And for me,

the question that you asked is, what is it that I want students to value and what is it do I want them to take

forward? Very early on in my career, and when I went to DU, I had a conversation with someone, and I'm

not going to say whether it was from DU or where it was, but early on, right after I graduated, I had a

came up during a time when No Child Left Behind was happening, highly qualified teacher, and I learned

alongside some pretty burnout teachers. They taught me a lot about education and they taught me a lot

about how to think about classroom practices. And I think because of those experiences, I've always

thought about students in terms of moving knowledge forward. So it makes sense that transfer became my

area of research because I learned alongside people who were really questioning why they were even

having to go back to school. So they were trying to question what they should take out of that experience,

as students themselves, I mean.

So for me, the transfer question always comes back to what do I believe students need? And I think you

have to look at students themselves, and I think you have to look at the moment in time, and then I think

you have to look at the content. And then of course you create objectives based on that. I think the

challenge becomes... Well, there's a lot of challenges. Transfer is not easy. One of the things that the last

SW: Kara, you've taught in so many different classes and so many different students. You made a

comment about how students' needs change alongside the curriculum depending on the classes we teach.

It seems to me that foundational to your approach to teaching, regardless of the class, is transfer. Can

you talk about how you negotiate this teaching philosophy or pedagogical value with the changing needs

of your students and the changing classroom environments in which you teach?

KT: I think it goes back to, because my second area is reflection, I always try and place the agency back

on the students and look to them for what they need. I mean, I was trained by Kathi, and so this of course

is coming directly from her. And then what we learned from our transfer research is you do need to ask

the students what do they come into the classroom understanding. And my good colleague Jesse Moore

on Batman, feminism and romance and environmental policy, if we ask them for their own goals and

expectations, then we can start to figure out what it is that they need. I understand that sometimes my way

of teaching is not necessarily the same as others, but I can revise... I mean, I tend to revise, not that I can.

I just tend to revise my syllabus as I go so I can hear what the students are telling me they need.

SW: In your article “The Importance of Transfer in Your First Year Writing Course,” you write, "When

we think of transfer, we hope it's successful or effective at moving writing practices forward." Then you

share two less positive types of transfer: negative transfer and resistance transfer. Do you mind talking

about these two less positive types and how teachers can acknowledge and address them in the writing

classroom?

that they can use for their future or use in something that they're currently doing, because it could be

concurrent transfer. But there can be less positive types of transfer. The first one I talk about is negative

transfer, which is just when the knowledge or practice is used negatively impacting their ability to

perform in a new context, which is pulling directly from Ed Psych, Perkins and Salomon.

are taught the five paragraph essay because it works for that context. And when they come to college,

they write a five paragraph essay and then it doesn't work, and then that's negative transfer, because they

get a "bad grade", whatever that bad grade is, and they get really upset about it. And so the negative

transfer is the five paragraph essay worked for the context of high school, but coming to college it didn't

work, and they're really upset because they don't understand why the five paragraph essay didn't move

forward successfully.

letter, well, let's talk a little bit or at least define what the genre of a reflective letter is and let them know

that there are certain genre conventions of a reflective letter that you are looking for. If we unpack the

rhetorical situation for students a little bit, we help set them up for more success and they start to

understand that what happened in their prior experiences isn't necessarily the same set of expectations that

is expected for this current writing moment.

The second type that I talked about was resistant transfer. This is coming from our research, the teaching

for transfer research. I said that resistance transfer is when a writer's past experiences with writing

encourage resistance to new learning, which often result in a roadblock. And I connected the roadblock to

general types of resistance, from fear of failure to anger. And I found the resistance transfer to be... I

students have thought about it a little bit. I think this is a good example of why reflection is so important.

SW: Kara, you've done a lot of work with portfolios and e-portfolios. Do you mind talking about the

benefits and values of e-portfolios in first year writing? What do you think are some of the affordances of

using e-portfolios in writing classes?

KT: The really cool thing about e-portfolios is it kind of forces students to pause both internally and

externally because it's got that built in reflection. Kathi always says, or she defines it as collect, select,

reflect. And so when portfolios are part of the reflective classroom, you're asking students to reflect on

multiple levels. So when they collect the artifacts, when they're thinking about what artifacts to include,

like Kathi talks about. For me, it's the theory of writing that they do as part of the teaching for transfer.

And that component allows students to really dig into what have they learned and can they make sense of

that learning? That is where they start to become reflective practitioners. And we know from research in

transfer that students can and carry that knowledge forward better when they are reflective practitioners,

because reflective practitioners develop a repertoire, and I've argued this elsewhere, but they develop that

repertoire of knowledge, past knowledge, current knowledge, future knowledge, and the repertoire is this

thing that they can pull from.

It's like they can bring it out and use it again. The portfolio is that opportunity for students to really create

that repertoire, because then it makes it real, right? They literally see it in front of them. They can

manipulate it. They can revise it. It shows them how they evolved as a learner in different spaces. And so

it's really this great opportunity to show them in many different ways themselves as learners, as writers, as