Identity: A Potential Key “Factor” in Knowledge Transfer Ed Jones Seton Hall University edmund.jones@shu.edu

Theoretical Basis for an Identity Approach to Knowledge Transfer Knowledge transfer and traditional cognitive psychology: focus on individuals doing tasks (James, 2008) Kain and Wardle’s (2006) application of activity theory (Engestrom & Tuomi-Grohn, 2003) Slomp’s (2012) application of bio-ecological theory (Bronfenbrenner, 2012) Ira Glass, This American Life. “Every week we take a theme . . . “ When I first looked at the data from last year’s collection from my two sections of WAW-based FYW course, I was trying to understand why the response to the WAW pedagogy was so varied. At the same time, I was being influenced by theorists who represent a shift in the approach to knowledge transfer over the past few decades. The long tradition of studying knowledge transfer had been housed in the discipline of psychology, most recently cognitive psychology. A fairly recent example by Mark Andrew James appeared in Written Communication in 2008. But increasingly, as Dana noted, both in psychology and in composition, there has been increased emphasis on more contextual approaches: Wardle’s application of activity theory from Engestrom and David Slomp’s application of Bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological theory. Among those theorists, Roz Ivanic’s approach leapt out as having something profoundly relevant to offer to the data I confronted.

Situated Learning Theory “Learning and a sense of identity are inseparable: They are aspects of the same phenomenon” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 115).” Learning is not simply a cognitive activity. The writing choices that we make inside the university position us in relation to the “interests, values, beliefs and knowledge-making practices which are specific to higher education as an institution” (Ivanic, 1998, p. 256). Earlier, Lave and Wenger set the larger stage for connecting learning and identity. Read quote. Ivanic then develops a socially constructed model of identity specific to writing. Part of her argument is that the writing choices that we make inside the university position us in relation to the “interests, values, beliefs and knowledge-making practices which are specific to higher education as an institution.” Thus writing choices are choices about identity. Students are always responding to the choices they are being asked to make. Certainly we’re all familiar with how students are often uncomfortable giving up the “I” in their writing. It is a marker—however contestable—of the academic community’s belief in the importance of objectivity.

My super-initial hypotheses The level and type of a student’s writing identity should impact knowledge transfer potential and development of rhetorical constructs, as well as correlate with discoursal measures of writing identity. Read hypothesis. The rest of my presentation will unpack this fairly dense statement and provide the evidence for it.

Writing Identity: Quantitative Case History Approach Initial data led to new codes and new data Reflections and interviews coded on a 1-4 scale for students’ level of writing identity Second interview coded for types of writing identity Coding for Wenger’s participation and trajectory constructs adapted to writing Lexical density Interviews coded for WAW concepts Writing Knowledge Transfer Survey I decided upon what I call a quantitative case history approach because it allows us to include a variety of data, some strictly quantitative in the traditional sense, including survey data and lexical density. Other data is qualitative, such as the coding of reflection and interview data, but of course codes can be counted. I will briefly explain each set of data.

Examples of General Writing Identity Think about you and writing being in a relationship.  How would you describe it? I don’t really feel like I’m a writer but I am a writer in so far as I’m a student. And so in that way, I’m a writer. Writing and I have an on and off again relationship in terms of working well together and liking each other. Many times I feel like I have no problem writing and I don’t mind it. In fact, I enjoy writing research papers because I love learning about what I learned and then forming my opinion about it on paper . . . . I feel as if I am an unmotivated writer. Many times, I write just to get the grade. I came in thinking that I was a strong writer and left knowing more than I bargained for. It was a definitely a positive experience that had its negative sides but an educational experience none-the-less. If writing and I were in a relationship, it would be a serious and committed long-term relationship. Writing and I, like any other relationship, would allow room for us to grow and improve, that way our relationship would be both better and stronger. I absolutely love writing.  Initially, I thought in terms of a general writing identity and we therefore coded the data based on a 1 to 4 scale from low to high identification as a writer. Many of the coded passages that you can see on the screen came in response to the very first writing prompt about what students’ relationship with writing.

Codes for Kinds of Writing Identity No writing identity As a student As a journal or diary writer As a creative writer As a first-year colleague As a researcher As an emerging scholar Later, as I read the reflections and interviews, I came to see that engagement with writing could mean many things. Some students identified as creative writers, others as future professionals, a few even as potential scholars, and some as students. It also became clear that a single student could have multiple identities. These are the identities that emerged for me last year. Since then, our team has further refined the codes.

Application of Wenger’s Constructs for Coding Reflections and Interviews Participation: Student experiences him/herself as belonging in the writing classroom. The writing activities seem familiar; s/he finds ways to participate, to be/feel engaged. Excerpts selected should reveal that the student feels that s/he belongs in some way—or not—in relation to a specific task Trajectory: Experiences of being in a place (classroom or less literal place) that supports one’s personal trajectory of development (or not) from one's past identity as a writer or past experience of writing classrooms through the present into the future. Involves fulfilling a role, seeing opportunities for self-hood, noting when writing will or might meaningfully occur in one's future. Etienne Wenger’s book lays out a thorough model for the concept Communities of Practice proposed several years earlier by Lave and Wenger. Wenger’s breakdown of identity—how it forms in relation to community—was invaluable for conceptualizing the concept. His terms participation and trajectory provided a very useful way to code the data we had collected. The language you see on the screen comes from the part of our training manual for the grad students who coded our data.

Lexical Density Content words divided by number of nonembedded clauses Sample excerpt from Ivanic’s text // Another significant characteristic of these extracts is that / they are about relationships between abstract entities and about people’s mental activities,/ rather than about human actions.// // This positions the writers as being concerned with ideas and mental activities: the business of the academic community.// // It also positions them as believing that / intellectual activity involves explicit mention of relationships between ideas/ and of / who thinks or writes what, / rather than the understandings / which are implicit in accounts of actual experiences. / // This characteristic shows itself in the choices of verbs.// lexical density: 39/4 = 9 Single slash indicates embedded clauses. (Clause has a broader definition for Halliday than for classroom grammarians.) If we’re investigating identity, though, we also have to look at students’ text, not just their reflections. One solution for how to read student texts in relation to identity was laid out by Ivanic in her book Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Academic Writing Identity. She has developed a systematic way of measuring students’ alignment with the academic discourse community by borrowing heavily from Halliday’s functional grammar constructs. Although her approach involves several components, I focused on lexical density because Halliday offers a ready-made quantitative measure that Ivanic connects to discoursal identity in the academic sphere. The more dense the language, the more academic it is. And—here’s the connection to identity--this compaction reflects the values placed on abstraction, categorization, and qualification. Ivanic, it turns out, writes like an academic!

Writing Knowledge Transfer Survey 43 items, with overall construct validity, and reliability tested for three factors: Factor 1: approaches of current teacher that should impact knowledge transfer Factor 2: students’ strategies that should impact knowledge transfer Factor 3: ownership over writing tasks To measure their potential knowledge transfer all students took a writing knowledge transfer instrument that I had developed a few years before and tested for validity and reliability. Students took this survey at the beginning and end of the first term and at the end of the second term. This instrument has three separate factors, each of which has adequate reliability. Of these factors, only the second factor emerged as a significant one. It includes items related to the students’ beliefs and strategies attributed to successful knowledge transfer (valuing complexity and working with peers, their belief in their having many strategies to succeed, their ability to analyze genres, their knowledge of how to write in their major, and their interest in making connections to other classes and reflecting on and applying what they learn).

Other Transfer-Related Codes in Elon WAW Project transfer-related connections Dispositions (subcodes: persistence, self-efficacy, etc.) rhetorical knowledge metacognition use of sources I wanted to understand the relationship between writing identity and all the other constructs that we believed were related to writing knowledge transfer, which you can see on the screen. I expected that students who identified strongly as writers would be more apt to have rhetorical knowledge, be more apt to think reflectively. I summed all the items subcodes under each code. For example, you can see the first two subcodes under dispositions, persistence and self-efficacy. This gave me numbers that in theory should have greater reliability than the individual subcodes.

Initial Analysis of Correlations Lexical Density WKT Survey Strategies Procedural Knowledge Trajectory .872 (p = .011) Writer’s ID .847 (p = .070) .718 (p = .069) .755 (p = .083) To get an initial sense of whether there were any meaningful relationships between the identity factors and other factors theoretically related to knowledge transfer, I obtained Pearson’s correlations using SPSS and, given the small number of cases, looked for both statistically significant results (p < .05) and marginally significant results (p < .10). P values are a standard statistical measure for significance. I was surprised at the number of high correlations, though of course these initial results are, at most, suggestive.

Chart Comparing Types of Writer Identification, by Student (late April) At this point, I’d like to get a bit more qualitative and share some of the characteristics of some of the seven students and to consider their identities with writing over the course of the year. On an intuitive level, it seemed, as I studied the students’ reflections and interviews, that the particular type of writing identity they had affected their ability to engage the course material. A chart based on their end-of-year self-scoring of different types of writing identities gives a snapshot of how various their identities are. The differences among the creative identity (green), the student identity (red), and the academic identity (blue) are especially notable. The remainder of this talk will explore how those varying identities appeared to impact their writing gains.

Lori Lori attended a Catholic school in an urban area of New Jersey that gave her a solid academic preparation. She took both AP Literature and AP Language and Composition and did lots of literary and rhetorical analysis, writing one five-page paper each month. In her history class she had to write in response to document-based questions in monthly papers. Lori has an uncomplicated writing identity inside the classroom, since she very strongly identifies as an academic writer and as a student writer. When she wrote for her art history class in the second semester, she imagined herself writing as an art critic. Her unsolicited reflections on the impact that WAW constructs had on her writing in both semesters put her at the far end of the knowledge transfer spectrum. You can see on the chart a comparison of Lori (in blue) with the participant average (in red). Her self-reported WKT strategies grew and her lexical density was by far the highest in the class.

Haley In contrast, Haley doesn’t see herself as an academic writer or a student, but she has a strong identity as a creative writer, which developed over several years in high school and culminated in a creative writing course her senior year that she loved. At the same time, she had a strong academic writing background, having to write a research paper every year at a very small Catholic school where there were only 20 students in her graduating class. Not surprisingly, she began the year with the highest lexical density. However, her differing levels of identity appear to provide a source of at least minor consternation for her. When she had to summarize a video for her education course the next semester, she felt frustrated by having to give her opinion about it afterwards. It’s as if she’s OK with doing the academic work of summarizing, but she keeps her personal opinions to herself and they get expressed only when she is writing creatively. Even in her College English II course, when she had a difficult time with the page length on a research paper, her solution was to “fluff it up” with summary instead of personal opinion. Her partial disconnect with academic writing may explain why her self-reported writing knowledge strategies and lexical density numbers actually declined some over the year.

Brenda Brenda presents a very different case. From the beginning she acknowledged a mixed relationship with writing and called herself an “unmotivated writer.” But she had also had a fairly strong academic background at a large public high school in suburban New Jersey. In her last two years of high school, she analyzed literature texts and cited them as sources. She took Honors English in her junior year and AP literature her senior year. Her senior year she wrote a research paper for history that was very challenging. English and history were her two favorite subjects. But when she did not do as well as she had hoped in my class, wasn’t able to revise effectively, she did not have the self-efficacy or persistence to maintain her confidence. As a result, her identity as a writer wained over the course of the year. She had never seen herself as having an academic writing identity, and now she actively embraced the identity of NOT being a writer. Her friend and classmate, Allie, embraced the challenge of the writing class, likely because of her identity as a future professional writer. Brenda had no identity to fall back on except that as student. Paradoxically, her lexical density score rose dramatically between the early and late writing samples and she did very well on her writing assignments in the spring. It’s not clear, then, what impact her varying writing identities will have on her academic career.

Next steps Expanding the database to the other institutions in the study Developing other ways of measuring discoursal identity through textual analysis Expand the factors correlated with identity to include knowledge transfer markers, dispositions, metacognition, declarative and procedural knowledge, and performance in future courses Explore causal relationships? Longitudinal case histories, as Roozen has studied, to understand better the way identity interacts with a variety of variables over time These quantitative case histories make it enticing to develop a hypothesis about the role that multiple writing identities have. Scholars such as Gee, Heath, and others have written about competing home and classroom discourses and the need to explicitly address those differences to help students. But my research suggests that there may be other discoursal identities that work together to affect student writing development. These case histories suggest that we should take the next step and perform the correlations for a much larger group of students in our database. Ivanic proposes other ways to evaluate students’ buy-in to academic prose that we could adopt, including students use of relational process verbs with abstract concepts. We will also want to explore the possible impact of different types of identities on students’ tendency to transfer writing knowledge, to adopt various dispositions, to be reflective, develop declarative and procedural knowledge, and write better in future courses. A final question is the causal relationship between identity and other factors. If identity is a major contributor to knowledge transfer then pedagogical approaches could be tested and their results evaluated. On the other hand, situated learning theory would suggest that learning is embedded in the very complex interactions that students have with types of writing and reading, their peers, their evolving sense of professional identity, their engagement with the course material. To extent that identity may be a powerful predictor of knowledge transfer, it may also be complicated to influence it or measure its effect—or even see it as an isolatable entity. Hence the quotation marks around “factor” in the presentation title.

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