Devet’s “The Writing Center and Transfer of Learning: A Primer for Directors”

Devet, Bonnie. “The Writing Center and Transfer of Learning: A Primer for Directors.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, 2015, pp. 119-151.

Devet’s primer is comprehensive in scope, a useful introduction for any scholar-educator interested in learning more about transfer of learning. Devet helpfully pulls from educational psychology and composition studies to define transfer of learning (as opposed to transfer of knowledge), emphasizing that learning assumes knowledge is applied to new contexts. Devet’s text is one I can see myself consulting in the future, as it defines terms very well and offers a useful bibliography on transfer in our field.

Consistent with scholarship in writing studies, most of Devet’s article focuses on transfer as related to student writing. This is expected and overall really great. While this work will help me teach tutors to better understand transfer as related to their sessions and also supports me in work I do in FYC, my research on tutor transfer beyond the center deviates from this. In fact, the more I read about learning transfer and student writing the more I feel the intense limitations of class-based learning in general. The writing center–as a professional space and site dedicated to a more project-based learning (that’s not really the right term here)–has the potential to grow our field’s understanding of learning transfer beyond writing contexts to professional ones.

For this reason, Devet’s literature review on “dispositions, or habits of mind [that] affect transfer” (130, emphasis in original) is relevant to my work. Disposition as it affects learning extends beyond an assignment or tutoring session. The kinds of interpersonal interactions that tutors’ engage in, both with writers and with their tutor-colleagues, can support abstraction–thus, learning transfer–beyond the writing center and into other civic, professional, and social spaces. Further, Devet’s turn to situated learning and communities of practice are all also useful lenses through which to see my work (132).