By Adam Pellegrini
I recently returned to an essay we read by D.N. Perkins and Gavriel Salomon during spring 2013 staff development called “The Science and Art of Transfer.” It’s a really interesting article, definitely worth a read or revisit . Two central terms entered my vocabulary from that reading and our discussion of it: bridging and hugging. I thought it could be useful to introduce these terms to our newer staff members.
Perkins and Salomon explain hugging, or “low-road transfer,” as transfer “based on a skill, mastered to near automaticity by continuous and repeated practice” (6). Grammar sessions often have great instances of hugging, in which I’ll model a revision for a student early on, and they’ll revise verbatim instances in the same way later in the paper. Performing this sort of transfer requires implicit memory and recognition of appropriate moments to apply, and is a really productive goal to strive for with students in session-long collaboration and session reports. Of course, this urge to revise automatically can get a writer into trouble when the writing concern is nuanced. Article revision, for instance, can be tricky to hug as the same word in a new context can easily take on a different grammatical value. The authors dub such errors negative transfer. Other instances of hugging include placing an argumentative thesis at the end of the introduction or a topic sentence at the start of a paragraph. These are writing choices that, once instilled from a professor or consultant, students often repeat routinely as a universal rule, and so we have to be careful to explain them as similarly nuanced decisions based on audience, discipline, genre, and instructor expectations.
On the other hand, Perkins and Salomon describe bridging, or “high-road transfer,” which “requires the mindful abstraction of a principle, the effortful search in one’s memory, the selection of the appropriate principle and, finally, its application to a new instance” (6). This is, of course, the sort of performance of understanding, we most value from our clients, and the level of thinking our report forms strive for when they ask for future applications. It’s one thing to memorize a rule and recognize identical instances where it should be followed, and certainly another thing to extract a larger principle from a revision and apply it flexibly (or anticipate applying it) in a possibly wholly new context. If we’re aiming to make our clients more independent writers, setting them up for the work of transfer so “they will begin spontaneously to look for the connections that earlier had to be provoked” is clearly a larger learning objective (Perkins and Salomon 9).
Published February 10, 2015
