Readiness to Learn: Variations in How Students Engage with the Teaching for Transfer Curriculum

While research in rhetoric and composition has long addressed the teaching of writing, much of that attention has focused on pedagogy-the strategies teachers employ to help students learn to write. Just as important is the curriculum, which articulates what it is that we want students to know and do, though fewer studies have taken up questions around how students engage with a specific curriculum. The study presented here does exactly that, asking how students engage with the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curriculum. More specifically, the study asks, how do students on eight very different kinds of campuses-three community colleges and five four-year schools; rural, urban, and suburban; open-admissions, comprehensives, and flagships; affluent and working class; majority white, majority