The purpose of this study was to determine how faculty members' previous writing experiences in a variety of activity systems shaped their current understanding of writing, as well as to analyze the ways in which this understanding manifests itself in the courses they teach.  Using a survey, interviews, genre analysis, and class observations, I aimed to gain an understanding of the ways that faculty members across disciplines transferred and/or recontextualized their own disciplinary writing knowledge.  Previous research on faculty writing knowledge is often limited to participants at universities with long-standing, formalized WAC programs.  Through nine case-study analyses of faculty across disciplines, this study expands the scope of previous research by focusing on a more diverse set of faculty to contribute to our knowledge of how faculty members negotiate their own understanding of writing with their goals for student writing.  The participants' ability to transfer writing knowledge was largely determined by the way they understood their own processes of learning to write. Those who understood learning to writing from a social interactive perspective transferred rhetorical knowledge among activity systems, while faculty who understood learning to write from a text-based ideology relied on their knowledge of form, grammar and/or mechanics.  Participants who shared a writer-based understanding, on the other hand, were resistant to the notion that writing can be taught.  Though not entirely inclusive, these unique understandings of how writers develop manifest themselves in the ways disciplinary faculty include writing in their courses. This study demonstrates the nuanced and complex reasons for faculty choices in relation to student writing and encourages WAC/WID writing scholars to consider the complexities of faculty understandings of writing knowledge. / Ph. D.

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<p>The Elon Research Seminar, <i>Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer</i>, was a coalition of rhetoric and composition scholars’ attempt at codifying writing transfer knowledge for teaching and research purposes. Although the seminar was an important leap in transfer research, many ‘behind the scenes’ decisions of writing transfer, often those not involving the writing program, go unnoticed, yet play a pivotal role in how writing programs encourage and reproduce writing transfer in the classroom. This dissertation study, inspired by a pilot study conducted in Fall 2018 on writing across the curriculum programs and their role in writing transfer, illustrates how an institution’s context systems (e.g., macrosystem, mesosystem, microsystem, etc.) affect writing programs’ processes—i.e., curriculum components, assessment, and administrative structure and budget—and vice versa. Using Bronfenbrenner and Morris’ (2006) bioecological model, I show how writing programs and their context systems interact to reproduce writing transfer practices. Through ten interviews with writing program administrators at state comprehensive universities, I delineate specific actions that each writing program could take to encourage writing transfer. I develop a list of roles and responsibilities a university’s context systems play in advocating writing transfer practices. The results of the study show that research beyond the writing classroom and students is necessary to understand how writing transfer opportunities arise in university cultures of writing.</p>

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