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The relevance of school?

As I wrote recently [1], I’m fascinated by what influences people to be who/what they are. Perhaps in the same vein, I’m also curious about how what we learn transfers to other situations. There is a robust body of research studying learning transfer; [2] it’s elusive to pin down how what we learn in one situation can be applied to another.

I’m a teacher, a writing teacher, and coach, so learning transfer is perhaps a natural interest, but I also have thought about such transfer in my role as a parent. Think about the number of things you do with your children in the hopes that such things will help them later. I mean, do we need them to say “Please pass the peas” to us, or do we mainly want them not be jerks when they go to a restaurant?

This idea of transfer helped frame my online first-year writing course this past winter. I owe thanks to University of Washington professor Anis Bawarshi, [3] who came to Philly for the fall meeting of the Philadelphia Writing Program Administrators [4] at Penn and talked about genre and knowledge transfer. I can’t do justice to his ideas here, but he discussed with us how people use genres to take knowledge from one setting and apply/use it in another setting. I asked my students to tackle this problem throughout the course, including completing this challenging assignment:

This will be an open-ended, exploratory project through which you will assemble various components of what you know (and perhaps who you are), examine and analyze those influences/resources, and then argue that you have been successfully building through them the background, knowledge, and experience you will need for your future – or that you think you have a long way to go yet.

In some way, you will be creating a project that shows how you are solving/confronting issues and challenges about transferring your learning and experiences in high school, college, and other parts of your life. This project could turn into an argument about how you do not understand how the things you are doing right now in college – both in class and beyond – are building toward your desired future.

The project should be no shorter than 1,500 words. This is a writing class, and I’m happy to read as much writing as you would like to compose – please write as long as you like.

 As a stage of the project, I asked them to create a 12-source annotated bibliography of these “components of what [they] know.”

 Annotated bibliography of your own knowledge and experience. You will write an annotated bibliography of your own knowledge and experience. You will think about what you know and how you know those things, and then you will compile a list of at least 12 items, works, people, or things that contribute to your learning. Each of these entries should be cited as best you can and will follow this three-sentence annotation structure:

The annotated bibliography is its own assignment.

I received 134 sources from these students, a smart, motivated bunch who in general thrived in the robust writing environment of our online course. When I read their bibs, I noticed how few mentioned anything about school, so I started counting. I was surprised to find that only eight of their sources had to do with experiences or people at school: less than 6%.

In short, when these solid students were asked to identify significant “sources” in the ongoing development of their lives, school rarely made the list. Instead, they described family members, notable experiences, jobs. They did include books and movies, but in most cases even these were encountered outside of school.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. My personal list would include school-centered things like reading Gravity’s Rainbow or having Mr. Stead in eighth grade, but, hey, I did get into education.

But, because I am in education, I find this all the more sobering. I not only believe in the educational experiences of students, but I believe in the power of teachers and what they do every day.

Is it the way I framed the question? You see how I did that above. What are the things they’ve done and how will those things add up to who they will/want to be? Overwhelming, school was not in those memories.

I don’t know what to do with this information. Part of me doesn’t want to talk about it. But this sliver of data has got me thinking. What do we count as significant in our life experiences? And where are those lessons being learned?

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.

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