Brent (2012)

...will help students develop rhetorical knowledge that they can transform when thrown in the deep end of new rhetorical environments. In addition, if we can help them become more conscious about what to observe and what questions to ask in new rhetorical environments, we will have gone a long way toward helping them transform, if not simply transfer, this knowledge. (590)

In two recent articles, Brent tackles this question of how to teach for learning transfer in PW courses. Drawing on studies he conducted with university students participating in internships, poised at the transitional moment between school and work, Brent attempts to mine his students’ experiences to understand the kinds of rhetorical knowledge they draw on as they confront new writing situations at their internship sites.

articulating the similar but different challenges faced by those seeking to teach PW courses in post-secondary contexts. We review various teaching strategies that have been devised to meet these challenges and then articulate a rationale for and description of WAW-PW, sharing elements of our classroom practices as well as the voices of students who have experienced our WAW-PW curriculum. In all of this, we revisit a question of ongoing significance, posed by Elizabeth Tabeaux in CCC in her 1985 article “Redesigning Professional Writing Courses to Meet the Communication Needs of Writers in Business and Industry”: “How can we make our writing courses more relevant in preparing students for the work place?” (427)

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What does this tell us about what we should do as teachers of writing? It does not give us a detailed prescription for reforming the curriculum of professional writing courses. (589)

Rather, it suggests that if explicit teaching of rhetorical principles does anything for students, it does so because it works in concert with a complex rhetorical environment in which they must rapidly adapt to competing rhetorical exigencies. The academic experience as a whole enculturates students, in Tishman, Jay, and Perkins’ terms, into rhetorical thinking at the same time as specific rhetorical instruction gives them a more principled and more conscious awareness of the rhetorical moves they make. (590)

...a conscious understanding of general principles is an asset to transfer (or transformation) of learning, as is what Perkins and Salomon call “mindful metacognitive activity”—that is, thinking consciously about certain aspects of one’s own thinking. (590)

...what, if anything, we can legitimately expect a rhetorical education to do for students when they cross the boundary from our classroom into the classrooms of other disciplines or the much larger boundary between school and workplace. While the case studies I have presented don’t settle any details of exactly what a rhetorical education might look like, the study does suggest that...

• an understanding of how to extract genre features from models,
• how to analyze an audience, and
• how to use genre knowledge to interpret information

...will help students develop rhetorical knowledge that they can transform when thrown in the deep end of new rhetorical environments. In addition, if we can help them become more conscious about what to observe and what questions to ask in new rhetorical environments, we will have gone a long way toward helping them transform, if not simply transfer, this knowledge. (590)