In 2013, I interviewed Kathi for a series of videos on transfer of knowledge. She was participating in Elon University’s research seminar on Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, and I was working on video compilations, featuring seminar participants, that explored studying and designing for transfer. While talking about relevant theories of learning – and reminding us of the value of How People Learn – Kathi said in passing, “All of us as learners are novices… When I say students, I don’t just mean the 21-year-old sitting in my class. I actually mean all of us.” And students have always been central to Kathi’s work.
In Reflection in the Writing Classroom, Kathi recounts composition studies’ shift to students as participants in writing research in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as her own intentional focus on students as agents of their own learning. She writes:
I had indeed bootlegged into my class a key tenet of the methodology of early process research: the idea of students as authoritative informants…. You want to know how students learn to write? Try asking 'em…. But we shouldn't lose sight of a key rhetorical move here on the part of the early researchers. In crediting students with knowledge of what was going on inside their own heads and in awarding it authority, they did something very valuable and very smart. These students are the ones who have allowed the rest of us, the teachers, to investigate, to understand, to theorize our classroom practice. One purpose of this volume, then, is to recover this strand of student talk, but to do so in a new setting and to use it quite differently: to ask students to participate with us, not as objects of our study, but as agents of their own learning… (1998, p. 5)
A decade later, this valuing of student perspectives would become a central tenet of student-faculty partnership and co-inquiry movements (“Students as Partners”) – as well as a principle of good practice for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL; Felten, 2013; “What is SoTL?”). Kathi wasn’t simply trendsetting; she was repeatedly reminding us that students (whether 21-, 41-, or 61-years-old) are central to our teaching of writing, and to our research about writing.
Of course, if students are central to our work, we need to understand who our students are. As Kathi says, we need to see our students:
Drawing on census data, Melanie Hansen (2024) reports that 15.44 million undergraduate students enrolled in college in fall 2021, which reflects a significant decline from peak undergraduate enrollment of 21.02 million in 2010 (Hansen, 2024). In 2023, 73.19% of undergraduate and graduate students were enrolled at public institutions (Hansen 2024). While early enrollment reports focused primarily on full-time students and institution type, we now can track more demographics about students, including how many transfer among institutions or are first-in-family to attend college. Table 1 offers a snapshot of enrollment over time from 1970 to 2020, giving us additional context for seeing our students.
|
Table 1 U.S. post-secondary student enrollment over time. | ||||||
| 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | 2020 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Undergraduate Enrollment | 6.3 million |
10.5 million |
12 million |
13.2 million |
18.1 million |
15.9 million |
| Full-time enrollment | 5.8 million |
7.1 million |
7.8 million |
9.0 million |
13.1 million |
11.6 million |
| Transfer Students | 1.5 million* |
1.2 million* |
||||
| First-time college enrollment | 3.4 million* |
2.7 million* |
||||
| Percentage of undergradauate and graduate enrollment at public institutions | 74.91% | 78.18% | 78.48% | 76.75% | 72.04% | 72.97% |
| Data sources: Hanson, 2024; *National Center for Education Statistics, n.d. | ||||||
Students also are shaped by – and shape – the sociopolitical contexts they occupy, so when we see our students, we also need to be attentive to the challenges and affordances they face as they navigate learning. As Kathi reflects in the video below, today’s students may not face the same challenges that their faculty encountered. Attending to the rhetorical situation for students’ learning, however, can help teachers understand the constraints in play and partner with students to navigate them.
National data sets and institutional factbooks give us 1000-foot views on who our students are, but we also can ask our students about the characteristics, dispositions, values, and experiences that they believe are central to their learning. Addy, Mitchell, and Dube (2021), for example, share a “Who’s in class?” form that students can use to anonymously disclose aspects of their identity and their expectations for inclusive learning.
The shift towards understanding students as active agents of their own learning parallels evolutions in scholarship on student engagement and engaged learning. Kathi describes this progression in the video below, and I map her continuum alongside related scholarship in table 2.
|
Table 2 Relevance to Participation Continuum | |||
| 1960s – 1980s | 1990s | 2000 - 2020s | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kathi's Continuum | Relevance | Engagement | Participation |
| Related Scholarship | Involvement(e.g., Astin) | Engagement (e.g., NSSE) | Engaged Learning (e.g., Moore) |
In their exploration of these “tangled terms,” Lisa Wolf-Wendel, Kelly Ward, and Jillian Kinzie (2009) highlight Astin’s scholarship on involvement as guiding discussions of student success in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Kathi’s identification of relevance, in his interview with Wolf-Wendel et al., Astin emphasizes that involvement looks different for each student because they have to identify the activity that’s most relevant for their investment of time and energy.
Kathi also references surveys of student engagement as she describes the participation continuum. The scholar-practitioners originally involved in developing the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) – George Kuh, Alexander Astin, Arthur Chickering, John Gardner, Richard Light, and others (predominantly white males) – understood engagement as “what the student does and what the institution does” (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2009, p. 413). In other words, students aren’t solely responsible for their involvement in their learning. With the focus on engagement, institutions shared that responsibility, recognizing that institutions could provide activities that foster “academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environment” (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2009, p. 414).
What Kathi calls participation, I identify as engaged learning, which “entails students actively and intentionally participating in their own learning, not only at discrete moments but rather as an ongoing, lifelong activity” (Moore, 2023, p. 3). When we trust students to be agents of their own learning, we (hopefully) also are creating opportunities for their intentional participation. In her scholarship and interviews, Kathi offers several examples of how we can foster these opportunities.
As teachers, we have several avenues for fostering students’ intentional participation in their lifelong learning in our classrooms and curricular structures. My own focus (Moore, 2023) on acknowledging and building on students’ prior knowledge and experiences as a key practice for fostering engaged learning is partly inspired by Kathi’s frequent reminders that the prior matters, something she unpacks as a threshold concept in “Assembling Knowledge: The Role of Threshold Concepts in Facilitating Transfer.” Kathi writes, “Prior knowledge, experience, attitudes, and beliefs set the stage for writing and shape new writing experiences and learning” (Adler-Kassner et al., 2016, p. 37), and this threshold concepts informs the design of the teaching for transfer curriculum (Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). Given that our students bring varied prior experiences to each of our classrooms (e.g., Farrell, Kane, Dube, & Salchak, 2017), acknowledging that prior and encouraging students to actively engage with their own compilation of priors increases the likelihood that students will not only find relevance in the classroom content and opportunities for engagement, but also actively and intentionally participate in their learning.
Other chapters in this publication unpack other strategies Kathi has advocated for fostering engaged learning in curricular spaces. Portfolios [link to /p/section1.html], for example offer space for students to share their voices as emerging professionals. Reflection [link to /r/index.html] helps students make meaning of the interplay between their prior knowledge, their new experiences, and their future goals. And attention to transfer [link to /t/] promotes students’ intentional participation in their lifelong and lifewide learning.
In her interview for this project, Kathi shares two examples of out-of-class composing that fostered active participation in the student’s own learning. The first example comes from her own experience, as Kathi recounts learning on location (e.g., Holmes, 2023) as a news editor for the school paper, traveling to the press to read the gallies and edit on the fly to cut pieces to fit on the page:
As she describes writing for the newspaper sphere (e.g., Yancey et al., 2022), we understand that the experience required putting learned knowledge into practice while problem-solving on site. This opportunity to frame connections to broader contexts offered a chance to practice responding to wicked tendencies while Kathi and her peers still had the metaphorical safety net offered by her teacher (Moore, 2023).
Kathi’s second example stems from her son’s college experience, as she recounts the impact undergraduate research had on his learning journey:
As Kathi notes, her son’s experience being invited into a high-impact educational practice by his faculty mentor “speaks to the power that we have [as teachers]…. We don’t think about this very often. We have enormous power to help students see who they are and what they can become.”
In writing studies, we have multiple undergraduate research spaces we can invite students into. In 2012, I founded the annual CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session, intentionally naming it to focus on the student – the researcher – rather than the research. The poster session now is organized by the CCCC Undergraduate Research Committee and accepts proposals every December for the following spring’s poster session.
Since 2014, York College of Pennsylvania has hosted the Naylor Workshop for Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies. Most students receive travel grants to support their participation, and they have the opportunity to work with multiple mentors over the three-day workshop. Many ultimately present at the CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session or other conference venues, and some submit their projects for publication in Young Scholars in Writing or other journals.
These opportunities exist because faculty see their students, invite them to be active participants in their learning, and foster spaces for that engaged learning. Yet we – faculty in higher education – haven’t fully maximized the potential of Kathi’s call to see our students. In a 2024 national survey of recent college graduates, only 43% had participated in undergraduate research during college, and only 31% had taken part in mentored undergraduate research experiences outside of classes (Moore, 2024). NSSE results often place this percentage for undergraduate research participation even lower. Twelve percent of recent graduates had never had faculty ask them to draw on their prior experiences when they learned new things. Similarly, 12% never had opportunities to practice what they were learning with real-world applications (Moore, 2024).
So, in recognition of Kathi’s ongoing efforts to position students as agents of their own learning, I invite you to pause and see your students. Reflect. What do you know about them? What do you know about their prior knowledge and experiences? How might you invite them to be active in their learning and create learning experiences that foster their successful participation?
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Adler-Kassner, L., Clark, I., Robertson, L., Taczak, K., & Yancey, K.B. Assembling knowledge: The role of threshold concepts in facilitating transfer. In C. M. Anson & J. L. Moore (Eds.), Critical transitions: Writing and the question of transfer (pp. 17-47). The WAC Clearinghouse/University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2016.0797
Center for Engaged Learning. (n.d.). Students as partners. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/resources/students-as-partners/
Center for Engaged Learning. (2013, September 11). Studying transfer -- relevant theories of learning. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/853n57Dfb7Y?si=vS3roTWV6MHnZ3XD Center for Engaged Learning. (n.d.). What is SoTL? https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/studying-engaged-learning/what-is-sotl/
Farrell, A., Kane, S., Dube, C., & Salchak, S. (2017). Re-thinking the role of higher education in college preparedness and success from the perspective of writing transfer. In J. L. Moore & R. Bass (Eds.), Understanding writing transfer: Implications for transformative student learning in higher education. Stylus.
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Hanson, M. (2024). College enrollment & student demographic statistics. EducationData.org. January 10, 2024. https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
Holmes, A. J. (2023). Learning on location: Place-based approaches for diverse learners in higher education. Routledge.
Moore, J. L. (2023). Key practices for fostering engaged learning: A guide for faculty and staff. Routledge.
Moore, J. L. 2024. High-impact undergraduate experiences and how they matter now: April 2024 survey of recent U.S. college graduates. Center for Engaged Learning, May 28, 2024. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/surveys/april-2024-survey/
National Center for Education Statistics. (N.d.). Student enrollment: How many degree-seeking undergraduate students are enrolled in postsecondary institutions as transfer-in students in the fall? https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/TrendGenerator/app/answer/2/4
Wolf-Wendel, L., Ward, K. & Kinzie, J. (2009). A tangled web of terms: The overlap and unique contribution of involvement, engagement, and integration to understanding college student success. Journal of College Student Development 50 (4): 407-428.
Yancey, K. B. (1998). Reflection in the writing classroom. Utah State University Press. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/120
Yancey, K.B., Hart, D. A., Holmes, A. J., Knutson, A V., O’Sullivan, Í., & Sinha, Y. (2022). “There is a lot of overlap”: Tracing writing development across spheres of writing. In J. Bleakney, J. L. Moore, & P. Rosinski (Eds.), Writing beyond the university: Preparing lifelong learners for lifewide writing (pp. 74-90). Elon University Center for Engaged Learning Open Access Book Series. https://doi.org/10.36284/celelon.oa5.5