Composition Forum 51, Spring 2023
http://compositionforum.com/issue/51/

Making Self, Making Context: Personal Meaning, Generative Dispositions, and Transfer in First-Year Composition

Jerry Stinnett

Abstract: This article explores the sources of student dispositions toward rhetorical approaches to first-year writing instruction through a case study of Lora, a particularly motivated writing student. The study traces Lora’s performance and development of her identity through the imparting of personally meaningful objectives like “standing out” and “standing up for the right things” to particular activities across her primary, secondary, and university education. Lora’s attributing of these personal objectives to certain activities but not others is the construction and maintenance of her identity and correlates with her exhibition of generative dispositions. I argue that, in Lora’s case, dispositions are attitudinal and affective expressions of how and to what extent Lora has attributed personal meaning to a social activity in the process of identity formation. I then show how Lora identified my first-year composition (FYC) course with her personally meaningful goal of standing out as a student and, consequently, exhibited generative dispositions and productive learning practices to the challenges of developing a more rhetorical approach to writing. I conclude by suggesting that continued research on writing-related transfer must situate inquiry within the broader process of each individual’s repurposing of meaningful objectives across experience.

Scholarship in writing transfer has repeatedly demonstrated correlations between learners’ dispositions toward writing tasks and the effective repurposing of writing knowledge and practice. Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells, for instance, have shown that “individual internal qualities” such as “a student’s willingness to self-regulate or to positively value writing” along with students’ “belief in their own ability to achieve the desired outcomes and that they have some control over those outcomes” correlate positively with successful writing-related learning transfer (par. 38). Other researchers have similarly demonstrated connections between what are often termed “generative” dispositions and effective learning transfer, including a disposition to cross conceptual boundaries (Reiff and Bawarshi), a novice stance and growth mindset toward writing-related learning (Robertson et al.; Yancey et al.), regulation of emotions (Driscoll and Powell), a sense of self-efficacy (Pajares), a problem-solving versus answer-getting perspective (Wardle), seeking help (Williams and Takaku) as well as a tendency to avoid ease, to persist, and to take ownership of writing tasks (Baird and Dilger). The demonstrated range and impact of dispositions on successful writing transfer lends urgency to questions of “[h]ow and where are dispositions formed” (Driscoll and Wells par. 42) and how researchers can “bring together theories of transfer that fully account for individual dispositions in contexts” (par. 44).

Scholars have typically considered these questions by understanding dispositions primarily as characteristics carried by individuals to or across contexts or, as Driscoll and Jing Zhang describe them, “individual characteristics that learners bring to Writing Events” (par. 16). Elizabeth Wardle and Nicolette Clement, for instance, understand dispositions as making up the habitus by which individuals orient themselves in response to lived experience—for example, being “an obedient problem-solver no matter what the context” (163). Learners bring this habitus to learning situations where it shapes how they understand and navigate consequential transitions “and even whether they encounter such a transition at all” (163). For Wardle and Clement, dispositions reside in individuals, reflect the continuity of individual identity across contexts, and are deployed by individuals in or toward contexts that the individual encounters. Similarly Driscoll and Zhang’s model of writer development locates dispositions, along with cognitive and affective resources and identity, under “Person” characteristics that individuals carry with them to sites of writing. Driscoll and Zhang explain that “for a Person to engage in any development, that process begins with an individual person (who brings their experiences, resources, dispositions, and so forth), who sits in a set of nested Contexts, and who develops through the passage of Key Events in Time” (par. 9). In Driscoll and Zhang’s model, individuals are always contextualized but Person characteristics like dispositions have their locus in the individual who brings those characteristics to contexts and events across time (Driscoll and Zhang Figure 2).

This view of dispositions as “internal” or “individual” characteristics brought to or exhibited in contexts presumes that individual and context are ontologically distinct. Such a view can only account for writing development and transfer through an additive interaction of the separate entities of learner and activity, of subject and context. But as social psychologist King Beach notes, “demonstrating that individual psychological processes interact with task features to varying degrees does not provide an account of how these two forms of agency produce transfer” (Beach, Consequential Transitions: A Sociocultural 108) because the presumed ontological distinction between individual and activity obscures precisely “where the recursive relation between persons and society is played out” (Beach, Consequential Transitions: A Sociocultural 122). To study development and transfer effectively, the mutually constitutive relationship between individual and activity must be “the primary unit of study and concern rather than the individual or the activity per se” (Beach, Consequential Transitions: A Sociocultural 120). If we are to understand how and where dispositions toward particular tasks are formed and what their role is in transfer, we must situate dispositions in an account of identity emerging from the mutually constitutive relationship between individual and context.{1}

A. N. Leont’ev’s concept of personal meaning provides such an account. Despite the focus on the individual implied by the term, personal meaning is the process of constructing the self through and in conjunction with the construction of social activity. Activity theory understands individual consciousness not as applied to social relationships but rather as developing through an internalization of the social roles, actions, and tools (especially language) that are part of pursuing particular objectives (cf. Vygotsky 218-235). This development of individual consciousness occurs primarily in “leading activities,” the activities in a given society “in whose form other, new types of activity arise, and within which they are differentiated” (Leont’ev, The Development of Mind 359). These leading activities provide a sequence of development in which each leading activity is understood as providing the prerequisite knowledge and development for the next. For instance, “[p]lay, followed by learning in school, followed by work is the sequence of leading activity categories generally supported by North American and European societies” (Beach, Sociocultural 278). As individuals move through these socially-determined stages, they pursue objectives associated with each leading activity through the new actions, tools, and divisions of labor that characterize that activity. Individual consciousness is not brought to activity but develops through participation in leading activities.

This participation necessarily involves assigning particular values to the social objectives of the activity. The value individuals impart to particular social objectives derives from biological and libidinal needs, but these are accomplished and develop through social objectives of leading activities. Leont’ev calls this process “personal meaning” (The Development of Mind 413). Personal meaning involves the individual’s “mastering of certain modes and operations of action [as] a way of asserting, fulfilling his [sic] life, satisfying and developing his material and spiritual needs, which are reified and transformed in the motives of his activity” (The Development of Mind 415). For instance, grades in school are socially determined objectives that reflect particular social expectations at a given stage of development. But within this social framework a grade “may appear in the consciousness of each individual pupil in essentially different ways; it may, for example, appear as a step forward (or obstacle) on the path to his [sic] chosen profession, or as a means of asserting himself in the eyes of the people around him, or perhaps in some other way” (Leont’ev, The Development of Mind 413). For some individuals earning a good grade represents a meaningful objective, while for others grades may not be an important goal because of the particular meaning they have assigned to schooling itself, being a student, or earning a grade based on prior development in prior leading activities, like family life, play, or earlier schooling.

Individuals, thus, learn to pursue personally meaningful goals in particular ways in a given leading activity. In pursuing personal meaning, individuals “‘evaluate’ as it were, the vital meaning of the social subject of the objective circumstances of his [sic] actions in these circumstances” (Leont’ev, The Development of Mind 415). But as the individual transitions from one leading activity to another or among objectives within an activity, the changing conditions and objectives force the individual to adapt how personal meaning is accomplished. When these changes undermine an individual’s ability to accomplish personally meaningful social objectives, the result is a consequential transition in which the sense of self and activity are mutually redefined. This redefinition involves abandoning some knowledges and practices of identity and a greater generalization of those that can be retained or adapted. This is why Beach speaks of development in terms of knowledge “generalized, or propagated, across space and time” (Consequential Transitions: A Developmental 42). It is the investment in pursuing personally meaningful objectives that makes changes in objectives and conditions significant, prompting conscious reflection, struggle, and shifts of self. Personal meaning, thus, provides a way to better understand dispositions in the full complexity of contexts and selves as socio-material constructions.

In this essay I report the results of a case study of a student who exhibited generative dispositions in my first-year composition (FYC) class. I argue that the student’s performance of generative dispositions reflects a mutual construction of the social context of the FYC course and the student’s individual identity through the personally meaningful objectives the student ascribed to the course. I use the study to illustrate these dynamics, to theorize the role of dispositions and identity in transfer, and to explore pedagogical strategies for fostering generative dispositions in FYC.

Designing the Study

I began this study to understand why certain students invest in and undertake the challenging work of acquiring rhetorical writing practices in my FYC course and others do not. To study this question, I recruited Lora (a pseudonym chosen by the subject), who excelled in my FYC class through her deep investment in the course. Lora attended every class, participated actively in class activities, completed every homework assignment and all the major projects. On two occasions she met with me individually during office hours to discuss drafts of her papers. Though Lora ultimately did very well in the course, tying for the highest grade, her efforts were not always initially successful. She struggled along with many students to understand and implement the highly rhetorical practices of writing I used in the course to challenge popular misconceptions about writing many of the students appeared to embrace (Downs and Wardle). I wanted to know why Lora had exhibited dispositions in my class that scholars have described as generative and have linked to effective repurposing of writing-related learning.

Understanding Lora’s dispositional performances required beginning with Lora’s perceptions of the course and avoiding what Joanne Lobato calls an “observer-oriented” approach to transfer research (235). An observer-oriented perspective is in evidence “when inferences are made that the learner sees the same similarity [between contexts] as the observer” (235), when researchers take for granted the meanings associated with sites of learning and sites of transfer, or when research predetermines what constitutes successful transfer. Recognizing that “knowing and representing arise as a product of interpretive engagement with the experiential world through an interaction of prior learning experiences, task and artifactual affordances, discursive interplay with others, and personal goals” (234), Lobato calls for an “actor-oriented” perspective that focuses on learners’ “comprehension of transfer situations as an object of inspection” (241). Many scholars in educational psychology and learning sciences have affirmed this need to focus on the individual’s constitutive interpretation of learning experiences as important for researching and fostering transfer (Searle; Gee and Green; Kelly and Chen; Schwartz et al.; Engel; Engel, Nguyen et al.; Engel, Lam et al.). An actor-oriented perspective involves both selecting an object of study like the learner’s interpretation of an activity’s objectives and a method of data collection focused on understanding the learner’s construction of experience.

As part of taking an actor-oriented perspective of Lora’s behaviors I employed a case study method. Case study methods allow for extended interaction with subjects and the development of detailed accounts of subjects’ perceptions, objectives, and ways of responding to particular literacy tasks. Insights drawn from case studies are not generalizable, but they can provide the rich detail necessary to explore and understand dispositions from an actor-oriented perspective. Case study has been widely employed in writing studies research and is a key element particularly in studies conducted by researchers attempting to maintain an open and subject-centered approach. For instance, in their exploration of the impact of identity on navigating consequential transitions, Wardle and Clement employed case study “to predetermine much less and be open to challenges and use of prior knowledge in whatever context and form they might occur” (164). My use of case study methods is similarly an attempt to make research as iterative as possible by attending to the full complexity of Lora’s experience.

The subject Lora is white, identifies as female (she/her/hers), and was 19 years old at the time of the study. She grew up in a small town about two hours away from the university and attended a small high school of about 120 students. Lora remains close with extended family with whom she helped run family businesses, such as her grandfather’s apple orchard and her family’s service dog breeding and training business. Her family has a history of college education; both her mother and father have college degrees. Lora also has an aunt who is a professor at a major university. She intended to go to college for as long as she can remember and at the time of the study was pursuing a degree in Exercise Science.

To collect data, I conducted four interviews with Lora from January through May of 2020 and a follow-up interview in October of 2021. I compensated Lora for her participation at a rate of $25 per hour paid through gift cards to businesses of her choice. To maintain focus on Lora’s perspective, the initial interview began with basic questions to elucidate information about Lora’s goals in and understanding of the FYC course. After Lora had a chance to respond to initial questions, interviews attempted to follow the connections that Lora herself had made in her responses. Subsequent interviews would begin by collecting information to illuminate what seemed to be a focus of the prior interview or a point that required additional clarification, but I would then attempt to follow the connections and experiences Lora raised during our discussion. Consequently, interviews often involved associative developments and wide-ranging discussions of various experiences both in and outside the classroom as Lora deemed relevant.

In addition, I collected and analyzed Lora’s writing for my FYC course to corroborate information gathered in interviews (Roozen; Roozen and Erickson) and to provide additional insights into how Lora understood and to what extent she valued the goals of the course. I used the multiple drafts Lora completed for each major project as additional indicators of how she understood instruction and how this shaped her response to course instruction, activities, and assignments. After looking for these connections, I also analyzed the texts to identify prior knowledge that might have been used to compose them and cross-referenced these with the interview data. I wanted to identify what prior knowledge—of composing or anything else—Lora deployed when writing as another possible indication of her interpretation of the course.

I approached the initial design of the study and the initiating questions of the interviews from the perspective of activity theory as it has been applied to writing and transfer (Prior and Shipka; Russell; Wardle and Downs; Stinnett). I wanted to understand how Lora interpreted the course as a way of understanding why she had engaged in the course the way that she had. But the need for a more sophisticated account of dispositions and the use of personal meaning as a useful conceptual perspective for understanding the subject’s experience emerged from the interview data, her writing, and the behaviors I observed during the FYC course.

Lora and Personal Meaning

Lora seems to have always been what many people would call a motivated person. She is notably active both in school and in extra-curricular activities. For instance, she was a successful student in high school, even taking college Advanced Placement courses her senior year. In addition, Lora was heavily involved in school sports, serving as the de facto (and often official) captain of her track and basketball teams. She was also a member of the school band, playing flute in marching band and teaching herself tenor sax in order to play in her school’s jazz band (everyone in her family plays an instrument). In addition to leadership roles in sports, Lora also held a number of leadership positions in student government and extra-curricular organizations, including President of Student Council her senior year (she was also class president every year beginning in ninth grade), President of her school’s chapter of the National Honors Society, President of the Freshman Mentor Program (beginning her sophomore year), and President of the local chapter of Future Corps, a national college readiness program.

While Lora says that she was just “voted in” to her initial position on the student council in her freshman year, she explains her reasons for being so active in high school in terms of her identity and personal desires. She explains, “I want to say I’m like naturally kind of a leader. Like, that’s something I enjoy. I like having a positive influence on people.” Describing herself as “naturally athletic” and as having “always been really tall,” Lora says that her physical abilities and personality have always made her stand out as a leader in sports and dance, both of which she has been involved in from a young age, and aligned with her interests in fitness and health. She attributes these experiences with helping her gain the confidence and desire for self-distinction in social and schooling situations and her drive for active participation in extra-curricular activities.

Lora says her desire to influence people positively, especially in terms of social and political action, derives primarily from her mother’s influence. She describes how, from an early age, her mother “kind of like encouraged me and my sisters and, um, just like how out- outspoken she is about everything and how she talks to people and interacts when people say something, you know.” Lora’s mother is willing to challenge even total strangers on assertions that her mother finds politically objectionable or that are factually inaccurate. But as proactive as her mother can be, Lora says also that her mother “ has shown me a lot on how to interact with people and not speaking out of like emotion and just, and interacting at the, or like intervening at the right times and just kind of things like that.” But even though her mother is an important role model, Lora is quick to note, “I have my own opinions. My opinions don’t always correlate with hers. I mean, I have my own ideas.” As Lora explains:

I like to consider myself like a thoughtful person. Like, I like to have deep conversations about different things. I don’t just like small talk and that kind of thing . . . I think philosophy is interesting, and, like, considering what’s right and what’s wrong. Because, I don’t know, I’m kind of like into politics and all of that stuff. And ethics kind of correlates with that a lot.

She sums up these different interests and goals by explaining that she “likes standing out and standing up for the right things, backing the right things.”

Lora pursues these objectives through the leading activity of high school by imparting particular meaning onto social objectives of various high school activities. This dynamic becomes evident in Lora’s motivations for and methods of being a good student in high school. Describing why she wants to be a good student, Lora explains:

I mean my parents always kind of like got on me about A’s, A’s, A’s. And I remember in seventh grade I did really bad in my math class. I felt so dumb. It was pre-algebra [laughs]. And I remember my teacher in that class. I still don’t like her very much. But I remember she always made us feel, like, so stupid. And I remember thinking, like, “oh, I don’t want my teachers to think that I’m stupid.” So, like, I just worked harder after that. And I remember in eighth grade, I wrote a research paper that my teacher said was really good. And I remember that paper was about Papua New Guinea.

Lora’s description of her pre-algebra experiences reflects how she appears to have aligned her goal of standing out with being a good student—a social objective she apparently came to value as part of the prior leading activity of family life.

But how Lora pursues being a good student reveals how she has attributed the personal meaning of standing out to particular student activities and not others. Tellingly, Lora links her pre-algebra experience with a successful experience completing a formal writing assignment in eighth grade. Her approach to writing assignments suggests the personal meaning she has imparted to being a good student through such writing assignments. Lora describes herself as “terrible at math,” but she explains that when “writing papers” she actively seeks out feedback from friends and family. But she carefully distinguishes the feedback she wants from what her friends usually ask for and does so in terms that reflect her goal of standing out. Lora explains, “I have a lot of friends that, like, ask me to read their papers. And it’s, like, ‘Ok, this is all right.’ But, yeah, just handing them the paper and asking them, like, ‘Is this good?’ I don’t do that. I feel like everyone does that.” Lora’s process of seeking out and incorporating feedback into revisions is a site at which she seeks to distinguish herself from what “everyone does.”

This effort even involves a deliberate process Lora employs to ensure her success on writing papers. She explains, “I guess whenever I write something, um, I always have people read it and I don’t say anything. I just ask them to read it and like see if they can find any mistakes. And if they tell me that there is like mistakes or things that can improve then, like, it’s not good enough.” This approach is not surprising if we recognize that Lora incorporates feedback on writing formal papers for class as part of achieving self-distinction as a student. Describing others who ask if their paper is “good” Lora explains, “Like, if you’re asking me to read it, then clearly you think it’s good enough. But a matter of, like, is this really good or is this great? That’s what I want to hear.” For Lora, writing papers that are good enough is insufficient for the meaning she attributes to this activity. Because of her prior experiences in family life, her talents, and her available resources, writing great papers is an important action for accomplishing the goal of excelling as a student, a social objective to which she appears to have imparted the personal meaning of “standing out” and through which she defines her identity.

Connections between affinity, talent, opportunity, and social objectives play out as well in how Lora pursues her goal of “standing up for the right things.” As an example of her efforts to stand up “for the right things” Lora offers her actions as Student Council President in her senior year of high school when she coordinated her high school’s participation in a national student walkout to protest government inaction on gun violence. Lora’s actions were integral to the success of the walkout. Lora met with the principal to discuss how students could participate in ways the school would accept and directed other students to avoid confrontations when walking out to prevent critiques of the protest as overly emotional or making unnecessary trouble. ­­As Lora puts it, this approach reflects her general approach to “standing up for what’s right” of employing her mother’s active but deferential method of avoiding confrontation. She explains “ I want [people holding opposing views] to be, like, angry because they know that I’m right. I don’t want them to be, like, angry because I yelled at them or because, or, like, be happy that I got all worked up.”

As she has progressed through school and gained greater access to new opportunities, her efforts to stand up for the right things have taken more explicitly political forms reflecting these personally meaningful goals. In addition to the walkout, Lora also participated in a women’s march in a nearby city and attended in costume an event to set the world record for the most “Rosie the Riveter” impersonators at a single gathering, which Lora describes as “a women’s empowerment thing.” Lora says she was able to pursue her political goals in her senior year because by then she was at “the top of the food chain and popular—not like Mean Girls popular—but people knew me by then.” As her position in high school afforded her greater impact and self-direction, she was able to impart more of her personally meaningful goals to the social objectives of her experiences in high school.

In my discussions with her Lora identified goals like “standing out and standing up for the right things” as meaningful and important to the point of defining her sense of her own identity. Personal meaning is the process whereby Lora imparts these goals to particular social objectives of the leading activity of high school, such as completing formal writing assignments in school and staging a walkout as President of the Student Council. This attribution of personal meaning to particular objectives is shaped by Lora’s development of these personally meaningful goals in prior activities (such as family life or prior schooling) and how these do or do not align with her own talents and existing skills, and the affordances of social and material conditions of the leading activity of high school.

But this process is not simply Lora bringing personal meaning to these sites; certainly Lora is constructing specific sites as personally meaningful, but she is also simultaneously thereby constructing her identity through the sites that she constructs in this way. Imparting personally meaningful objectives onto particular social objectives of high school in particular ways, and not others, positions Lora as a certain kind of person. For instance, Lora imparts standing out to formal writing projects but not to her math classes, an attribution of personal meaning that is an act of identifying herself as a good student at writing assignments but “terrible at math.” Indeed, the very range of activities to which Lora attributes personal meaning is itself a construction of her identity as “naturally kind of a leader” as opposed to other individuals who do not think of themselves as laeaders and so may not consider such formal organizational participation as meaningful.

And Lora’s personal meaning itself is shaped in turn by this process. As she attributes personal meaning to certain sites and activities in high school and not others, she identifies herself with these sites and activities and redefines what it means to stand out and stand up for the right things. It is possible to imagine Lora as a good student in all of her classes in elementary school and, only when encountering greater difficulty in middle or high school, having to shift her sense of what standing out as a student means. “Terrible at math” from this perspective likely means that under the particular conditions of high school as a leading activity, Lora is not willing or able to devote the time and energy necessary to excel in math courses in middle school or high school to make them a site of “standing out or standing up for the right things.” As Lora progresses through leading activities, the very meaning of the terms of her identity change and develop leading her to attribute personal meaning to new sites and in different ways.

Personal Meaning, Consequential Transitions, and Generative Dispositions

This mutual construction of self and activity in pursuit of personal meaning is drawn into even sharper relief in Lora’s transition from high school to college and reveals insights about her dispositional performances. In the United States this transition from high school to college can be said to involve a shift from one leading activity to another insofar as high school is culturally, socially, and historically positioned “as providing many of the prerequisite needs and motivations” (Beach, “Activity” 278) for college. But this means also that the move from high school to college involves adapting the process of personal meaning to new social objectives and conditions that force individual development.

This repurposing of personal meaning is evident in Lora’s choice of career, a social objective traditionally distinguishing the leading activity of college from high school. Lora hopes to eventually become a Physician Assistant (PA). When describing what makes this choice of career compelling, Lora notes that in high school “I had a lot of influence. And like I don’t want to be a nurse. Like there’s millions of nurses. I wanted to be someone who could like implement my own way of going about things. And being a PA is like you’re one-on-one but you’re also like doing things outside of that. Like you can do research and everything and just kind of like, come up with your own ways.” Lora says she aspires to the independence of being a doctor but does not want to endure the schooling or the debt that becoming a doctor requires. Being a PA instead of one of the “millions of nurses” allows her to balance these practical concerns while pursuing her personal meaning of self-distinction, a pursuit that she feels involves activities allowing her the freedom to choose her own direction as she did in high school, which she tellingly references.

But being a PA is also compelling for Lora for more ethical/political reasons. Lora references this aspect of her chosen career without any prompting, explaining, “And also, because like being a female, like, having a higher position in health care is just kind of cool to me just, because typically, you know, people see male doctors and everything.” Explaining this point further, Lora references a final exam she took in the context of her “Social Problems” course her sophomore year in college. She explains, “For our final exam we had to write about this picture that [the professor] put on the board. And this picture was like Halloween costumes. The different female and the sexy nurse outfit and then the doc-, the male is the doctor. It’s just kind of like those stereotypes and just kind of like you know those boundaries. So that’s what like really attracted me to [being a PA].” The explicit connection Lora makes between the critique of traditional gender stereotypes and being a PA speaks to the ways in which she has adapted her desire to “stand up for the right things” to the social objective of a career choice.

But not all of Lora’s attempts at repurposing have been so successful. Lora’s experience with sports is revealing. She explains, “I actually was really big into track [in high school]. And I was going to run track [on the university track team]. But that didn’t work out so I joined rowing. And I rowed for a year.” Rowing is a club sport at the university with lower performance criteria for joining the team which afforded Lora the chance to participate. But once on the team, Lora found the commitment rowing required more than she was willing to make. She notes, “Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t have minded spending that much time in a sport if it was track, just because I love track. But rowing, I didn’t love it and it was so hard [laughs]. Rowing is so hard. Yeah, so, I don’t do that anymore.” Sports, specifically track, was a site in which she stood out as a leader in high school. But the changed conditions of college—the higher performance required to be part of the track team and the commitment required for rowing, a sport in which she was not particularly interested—mean that standing out in organized sports is no longer an option for her, or at least one she is not interested in pursuing in the new conditions of college.

The conditions of college appear to have undermined other ways in which Lora would “stand out and stand up for the right things” in high school. In addition to no longer participating in sports, Lora is no longer part of student government, the band, or even any student clubs. She admits that she is politically inactive and does not even keep up with current events or campus news. She appears to have made use of the affordances of college to continue her interest in health and sports through her choice of Exercise Science (ES) as a major. But even though she succeeds in ES courses, she notes that her grades in these courses are not exceptional: “They’re like B plusses or whatever,” a description reflecting an uncharacteristic nonchalance about her academic performance.

The higher performance and increased commitment required for activities in college seems to limit Lora’s abilities to pursue personal meaning through the social objectives and associated activities through which she pursued personal meaning in high school.{2} The result is what Beach calls a “consequential transition” in which a change in or across activities is “consciously reflected on, struggled with, and shifts the individual’s sense of self or social position” (Beach, Consequential Transitions: A Developmental 42). The transition from high school to college becomes a consequential transition for Lora because her pursuit of personal meaning is disrupted by the new conditions she faces. In these new conditions she can retain some aspects of how she pursued personal meaning in high school but some must be left behind. Others can be retained but only by significantly repurposing or generalizing them. This process involves finding new sites and practices through which to pursue personal meaning to maintain the continuity of her identity and makes those sites that do remain part of her personal meaning all the more important.

Lora herself notes how college is “just a lot different than high school for me.” She explains further, precisely in terms of the new conditions of college and the challenges these present for how she pursued personally meaningful objectives in high school:

You know [in high school] I was obviously top of the food chain. Like, it was easy to have, like, an impact on everyone. And, I guess the difference between high school and college is, like in high school, you know, I knew everyone. I was like, popular in a way, in that sense. But, um, it was easy to be a leader. . . . that was my thing in high school. I was like, being, like, I don’t know, involved in everything and like standing up for everything and it made me stand out. . . . And in college it’s kind of like, it’s been so weird. Like I’m just average here. So, it’s like I haven’t had, like, the same fire for it, I guess.

The material and social conditions of college, in particular the greater specialization involved in college activities compared to high school, require more effort from Lora to stand out in any one of the areas or activities through which Lora distinguished herself in high school. As a result, Lora must choose among her various ways of standing out. In other words, the new conditions of college mean she has had to redefine what standing out and standing up for the right things means through her relationship with the leading activity of college. This is, in fact, precisely how individual development occurs, according to Leont’ev (The Development of Mind 415).

This process of development necessarily involves finding new sites and practices through which to pursue personal meaning, an adjustment necessary for maintaining a sense of continuity in her identity. In these new conditions, more familiar sites of meaning can take on greater importance or become freighted with a greater range of personally meaningful objectives. For instance, when asked if she had ever done anything similar to coordinating the student walkout in high school, Lora interestingly describes her experience in an FYC course she took at a local “junior college.” She explains:

My writing professor from [the local college] was very, very, like, extreme Trump supporter, white supremacist. Like one day in class . . . he was making comments about how if somebody were to walk into his home he would blow their brains out with a gun. . . . One day he said raise your hand if you disagree with this or whatever. So, like, I raised my hand and was like yeah I disagree with that and he explicitly said to the entire class… he’s like ok so like he was saying to the class, now we need to like wor—, how are we going to change her mind? How are we going to make her see that she’s wrong? And that just pissed me off.

After another encounter in which the professor made homophobic statements Lora decided to respond. She describes her approach saying, “I didn’t argue with him. But my final paper, I wrote a very detailed, like, 12-page paper on intersex and like how, you know, just very scientific and like really to spite him. So, ‘cause he had to read it. And I got a good grade. I got a 100% on it. So, I, like, I just, that was my way of spi—, just to irk him a little bit.”

Another student—even a student holding politically leftist beliefs—who understood the course as simply a site in which to meet a requirement might have chosen to avoid conflict with the instructor to better accomplish that objective. But Lora’s response signals that she interpreted the course as a site that at least affords her the opportunity to pursue her personally meaningful objective of “standing out and standing up for the right things.” Not surprisingly, Lora’s response to this situation reflects the same measured response characterizing her approach to politically charged arguments that she learned from her mother. She avoids direct conflict and attempts to “irk” the professor not in indignant anger but through a reasoned, carefully-researched argument. These repurposings of her learned behavior according to her construction of FYC as personally meaningful helps explain why students engage in semiotic remediation as scholars like Paul Prior, Prior and Julie A. Hengst, Kevin Roozen, and Roozen and Joe Erickson have identified it in the act of identity formation. And by adapting these practices for her college writing course, Lora generalizes her practices of “standing out and standing up for the right things” and, to some extent, redefines these goals and, thus, her identity.

But as important, this development of Lora’s personal meaning both in high school and college reveals insights into the source of Lora’s dispositions and their relation to particular contexts. While Lora is motivated, resourceful, and perseverant, as well as a growth-minded problem-solver, she is not universally so. Those activities onto which she has written personally meaningful goals of standing out (i.e., classes involving traditional writing assignments in high school) or standing up for the right things (i.e., her role as President of Student Council) are activities in which she appears to exhibit generative dispositions. In the way she seeks feedback on writing assignments or in her response to her junior college FYC professor, Lora demonstrates avoidance of ease, self-efficacy, perseverance, a growth mindset, and regulation of emotions. In contrast, her responses to math courses and the rowing team are not marked by these generative performances. In other words, Lora’s dispositions are not inherent or universal. Lora does not demonstrate a growth mindset or self-efficacy in math nor persevere in rowing, two activities to which she ultimately did not attribute her personally meaningful objectives.

Personal meaning helps account for the contextual character of dispositions (Driscoll and Wells par. 24). This stands to reason since dispositions reflect the construction of a particular type of context as much as, or even more than, they represent expressions of individual character. A student who perseveres in a given context is one who has necessarily interpreted the challenges of that context as possible to overcome through effort. Describing oneself as “terrible at math” or rowing as “so hard” is a construction of these activities as involving obstacles that Lora simply cannot overcome.{3} Generative dispositional performances like perseverance, self-efficacy, or ownership of the task make little sense in a context so constructed. In Lora’s case, then, dispositions represent the performative component of the identity established by the mutual construction of self and context through personal meaning. And in a reciprocal dynamic, particular dispositional responses help naturalize a particular construction of a given activity (e.g., as involving obstacles impossible to overcome or as involving obstacles that can be overcome through effort) that likewise naturalizes the identity simultaneously constructed. In Lora’s case, dispositions, as constructions of both self and context, are reflections of the construction of self and context through personal meaning.

The mutual construction of self and context through personal meaning and the generative dispositions associated with sites constructed as personally meaningful lead individuals to develop knowledge and practices that accomplish the personally meaningful goals imparted to the social activity. Lora’s practice of using feedback to write “great” papers reflects such a learned behavior developed due to her personal meaning and the associated dispositional performances. But as the conditions of activity change, these learned behaviors may no longer effectively accomplish personal meaning. Individuals may then experience a consequential transition in which they either must re-identify themselves as a novice and acquire new knowledge and practices or change the sites to which they attribute personal meaning and, consequently, change their identity. Sites of high personal meaning would seem more likely to foster a re-identification of oneself as a novice rather than a re-attribution of personal meaning.

Lora’s dispositions as expressed in various activities in college reflect this changing sense of the constitutive relation of self and context. Still identifying herself as a top athlete, she attempts to construct the rowing team as a personally meaningful site but the new conditions of college require a level of performance she cannot accomplish in track and field and which she is unwilling or unable to accomplish on the rowing team. The consequential transition that results is reflected in her initial perseverance in sports by joining the rowing team but then her construction of rowing as too difficult and the resulting negative dispositional performances. Though her dispositions in relation to activities such as math and rowing are disruptive of her success in these activities, they are not necessarily disruptive for Lora and her successful performance of her identity in the new conditions of college. Conversely, FYC becomes an important site of personal meaning for Lora partly because of the similarity between FYC and her prior high school experience and the resulting effectiveness of her existing practices of standing out through writing assignments and standing up for the right things through measured activist responses. Having constructed FYC as personally meaningful, she necessarily exhibits the generative dispositions that reflect that meaning and through which she is able to accomplish her objectives.

Writing Rhetorically to Be a “Good, Good Student”

This understanding of dispositions helps us understand Lora’s generative behaviors and dispositions in my FYC course. Explaining why she was so invested in the course, Lora is explicit about her goals. She explains, “In high school I was always like a top student. And so, in college, I came in and I was like, I want to be a top student. And I didn’t want my professors to just think that I was one of those kids who, you know, sat on their phone in class, or like fell asleep in class or whatever.” Asked to elaborate on why being a top student in FYC was so important Lora continues, “So, [succeeding] was more like proving myself to you and like other professors, especially in Ethics. I don’t want to be considered an average student or like a good—[pauses] I want to be considered a hard-working, good, good student.” Lora’s initial response is phrased in terms of a social objective of the leading activity of college—being a “top student” and a “hardworking, good, good student.”

As we have seen, Lora’s desire to be a good student reaches back at least to her secondary schooling where she came to emphasize writing assignments as a means of standing out academically. Her actions in my FYC course suggest the adaptation of personally meaningful objectives to the class. As I have noted, Lora exhibited a number of behaviors in my class that reflect her process of standing out in writing assignments. She completed every draft assigned for every project and in doing so sought out my feedback on her writing on several occasions, both during class and outside of class. She says she also asked some of her friends to read her writing and collected feedback from them. Other actions such as her perfect attendance and her active participation in discussions and class activities align with widely recognized behaviors of being a “good student.”

But my FYC course in which Lora was a student focused on developing students’ rhetorical meta-awareness of writing. The course readings, activities, and major assignments were focused on helping students develop rhetorical understandings and positioned assignments as real-world scenarios in which the requirements were linked directly to the rhetorical needs of the situation. Because of this highly rhetorical approach some of the skills and practices Lora deployed in the course supported her success, but others did not.

Lora’s performance on the first major assignment in the course offers a telling example of the connection between the personally meaningful goals she attributed to the course and her generative dispositions in the class. The assignment asked students to write a review of a movie, streaming series, or video game. The purpose of this assignment was to begin fostering students’ rhetorical awareness by asking them to write for a real-world situation in a (hopefully) familiar genre. I began the unit with collective efforts to describe the rhetorical situation of the review that included the initiating exigencies and a careful articulation both of the intended audience and the kind of writer expected by review readers. I used this to scaffold students into a discussion of the genre conventions of reviews that would address such a situation, followed by collective analysis of example reviews to confirm these conventions and what these looked like in practice. We identified a number of conventions such as descriptions of how production choices make films successful or unsuccessful, references to similar or relevant films, witty phrasing, the use of film jargon, and an overarching but nuanced assessment of the film.

Like many students, Lora initially seemed to understand the assignment in terms of a personal response essay that students often write in high school. Her initial draft focused on a traditional thesis statement that expressed this personal response:

This movie [Moana] is a breakthrough, as it is the most progressive film produced by Disney, a film that will leave you smiling, warm hearted, and singing for days.

Lora’s thesis reflects a sense of the purpose of the text to inform the reader of the merits or demerits of the film, Moana. But her assessment of the film is articulated primarily in terms of the response the film will evoke without much emphasis on how the film accomplishes this outcome. The argument is primarily an assertion of her personal opinion of the film disconnected from the role that the progressive politics plays in fostering this impression. The rest of her initial review draft followed suit, being primarily a summary of the main plot points of the film that she particularly enjoyed.

Such an approach may have been effective for standing out as a “good, good student” in prior writing assignments but was ineffective for achieving that personal goal in the conditions of my FYC course, focused as heavily as it was on rhetorical composing. As a result, Lora received a grade much lower than she expected for the assignment. As she explains:

I remember like getting one of the papers and you, like, wrote, like, D+ on it [laughs]. I was like, ‘oh no!’ . . . And that, when I got feedback like that, saying that, like, it needed a lot of work. It was like, oh gosh, like, I know that I can do that. Like, I know that I can articulate my thoughts in a good way and, like, I knew that that wasn’t my best work, but I just wanted to prove to you and, like my other professors that, like, I have a smart brain, I guess.

Because she had infused being a “good, good student” in the course with personal meaning, the unfavorable outcome on her writing projects put her identity based on an ability to stand out through writing assignments in doubt.{4} The result was another consequential transition in which Lora reflected consciously on her performance in ways that shifted her sense of self.

This consequential transition required her to assess what aspects of her writing practice she could retain, which ones she would have to abandon, and which she would have to adapt to retain her identity. Intent as she was on accomplishing her goals (exacerbated perhaps by other sites of identity being no longer available), Lora appears to have been willing to re-identify herself in relation to formal writing assignments as “a novice in a new world, one that demands more of . . . her writing than was asked in high school, and a stance fraught (admittedly) with uncertainty and ambiguity” (Yancey et al. 19). And because of this novice stance she is open to adapting her prior writing knowledge, retaining certain effective practices for being a good student but also being open to abandoning or adapting others while regulating her affective responses.

But her construction of the course as personally meaningful also meant that Lora took a generative approach to this challenge. Not only did she demonstrate a number of generative dispositions in her response to the course, above we can see her engaging in the metacognition defined by Driscoll and Zhang as “both an awareness (knowledge) of the influence of Person characteristics and the actions (regulation) taken to leverage generative Person characteristics and/or lessen disruptive Person characteristics” (par. 22). Having defined the social objectives of FYC in terms of standing out as a good student, Lora calls on practices, attitudes, and behaviors she has used to achieve this goal in the past. While she must adapt these specific practices to the new context, her construction of the course as personally meaningful means she continues to interpret the context of the FYC course in generative terms and, thus, retains her view of herself as a good writing student.

Her revisions, carried out in response to feedback and through active engagement with in-class revision activities reflects this assessment. Her revised draft retained a thesis statement positioned traditionally at the end of the first paragraph, but it was one that greatly altered its focus to align with the rhetorically-informed conventions of the review:

This movie is a breakthrough, as it is the most progressive film produced by Disney delivering a subtle but clear theme of female leadership, along with good humor, and catchy songs. Moana is a film that will leave you smiling, warm hearted, and singing for days.

This passage still works as a thesis statement, but it focuses much more on explaining how the film creates the impression it makes in a more objective way, a convention of the review we identified as central to the genre in our class discussions and analyses of examples.

Similarly, key points structuring her revised draft of the review reflect an increased attention on production choices and how these created particular effects in the film where before there had been only plot summary. The first major point Lora makes in the review reads:

Veteran creative directors Ron Clements and John Musker (Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Hercules) built a lead character that expertly portrays the mind and body of a normal teenage girl, with caramel skin, a strong figure, a bold personality and a growth mindset that can’t be stopped, contradicting Disney’s bad habit of creating princesses that resemble stick figures, failing to recognize that women [come] in all shapes and sizes.

Specific conventions discussed in class appear in the review. She addresses character design, references other relevant films, and describes the distinguishing, positive characteristics of Moana in relation to other Disney movies as well as relevant social conversations. These conventions can be seen again in a second major point she makes in the review, writing:

Part of understanding the true beauty of this movie is to recognize and appreciate the efforts and success of Disney creators of creating a movie that embodies Polynesian culture. Going so far as to hire Pacific researchers to aid in the creation to make an accurate depiction of the island culture that is seamless, respectful, and enjoyable for all viewers.

Here again her writing reflects the rhetorically-informed conventions discussed in class, specifically an emphasis on how progressive production methods result in a positive experience for viewers as proof of her overall assessment of the film.

The final drafts of Lora’s subsequent papers were also rhetorically developed and successful. This success still required multiple drafts and revisions and involved her performance of “generative dispositions” she typically exhibits toward these kinds of writing assignments. But her initial efforts on these later projects were more rhetorically sophisticated and aligned more with insights developed in class discussions and activities than had her first draft of the review. This behavior does not reflect a general disposition toward all her classes. Nor can it even be said to reflect her general attitude toward “writing.” These dispositions reflect the personally meaningful goal of being a “good, good student” that she imparted to the objectives of the FYC course and that appears to have made the writing experience meaningful to her (Eodice et al.). Lora’s construction of the context in this way was reflected performatively through the generative dispositions she exhibited in the class.

Conclusion

The generative dispositions Lora exhibited in FYC were deeply embedded in layers of personal meaning as these played out across a lifelong process leading up to, encompassing, and undoubtedly extending beyond the FYC course. Importantly, Lora’s dispositions in FYC are not necessarily dispositions toward writing as a distinct act but rather writing in a specific activity she closely associates with her personally meaningful objectives of “standing out and standing up for the right things.” Her generative dispositions in the course and elsewhere appear to reflect the extent to which she had imparted personal meaning to the social objectives of particular activities, an imparting that was also an affirmation of her developing identity.

The results of this case study are not, of course, generalizable but Lora’s case suggests potentially productive insights for understanding student dispositions in relation to writing learning and transfer. Lora’s experience suggests a need to explore dispositions less as personal characteristics and more as emerging out of mutual constructions of self and context. Personal meaning affirms that contexts are not objective realities to which individuals bring character traits but are the result of adapting and transforming learned and emergent practices of identity formation to organize experience. In other words, the very recognition of particular contexts and assertions of self—and consequently, the dispositions these involve—are themselves mutually supporting acts of transfer. If we are to build “theories of transfer that fully account for individual dispositions in contexts” (Driscoll and Wells par. 44), we must understand contexts themselves as resulting from the transfer of learning and identity, and dispositions less as individual characteristics and more as reflections of the context this transfer has constructed.

Notes

1. Ringer and Morey note the need for transfer scholars to attend more fully to widely-recognized theories and concepts relating to the construction of contexts—in particular through genre and discourse—when researching and theorizing writing-related transfer (290). (Return to text.)

2. Perhaps tellingly Lora now runs half-marathons and triathlons as leisure activities. In other words, Lora seems to have shifted the social site through which she performs her identity of a “naturally athletic” person, a shift reflecting her change of identity (now a hobby athlete). It seems self-evident that Lora must exhibit perseverance, self-efficacy, help-seeking, a growth mindset, and a problem-solving attitude to compete in marathons and triathlons. (Return to text.)

3. Dylan Medina’s discussion of the “boundary work” that students continuously do in relation to particular contexts may be important for understanding how personal meaning and associated dispositional performances are shaped by experiences. Lora’s negative experience with her pre-algebra teacher seems in some ways to parallel Medina’s description of research subject “Michael’s” experience becoming a “boundary-guarder.” (Return to text.)

4. Lora actually received a “C” on this initial draft. Her memory of a harsher grade may very well speak to the personal meaning she attributed to successful performance in the class. (Return to text.)

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