Chapter 5: Transforming Transfer: Unruly Children, Contrary Texts, and the Persistence of the Pedagogical Order

Abstract

It is odd, very odd, to be writing about transfer, given that my imagination has been preoccupied of late by young schoolchildren like 6-year-old Denise, the author of the preceding text. Denise liked to play KMEL (the local hip hop radio station) and, along with her friend Vanessa, often displayed her sense of the rhythmic rhyming style of the current youth scene. She sometimes transferred this material from her unofficial school activities to her official ones, including her daily writing workshop entries. The text shown is an entry about an upcoming family move, and those familiar lines about family and sisters were quite deliberately taken from Whoopi Goldberg in the film Sister Act II (Steel, Rudin, & Duke, 1994).