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| July 13, 2006 Transference By Bob Connor - The Teagle Foundation podcast 
“Transference” is the technical term in higher-education-speak for the ability to apply patterns of thought from one topic to another. Sounds simple? No way! Some people I know think there’s no transference from one domain to another. Maybe, they say, you can transfer the thought patterns used in reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnet to, let’s say, a poem by Baudelaire, but that’s it. They don’t work outside the literary domain. Similarly for history, or the analysis of music and art, or any field for that matter. If they are right, so much for old fashioned ideas of liberal education, which depend to a large extent on the claim that the best undergraduate preparation for a doctor or a lawyer or a citizen is to study the liberal arts and sciences. So some other colleagues assume s that in some way the mental habits developed by studying mathematics or ancient Greek or Chinese history will nimbly leap from one area to another, and thereby help people in understanding things very far from these domains. Who’s right? And if we believe in transference, does it happen more or less automatically or does the teacher have to use special techniques to help it happen? Those questions made me especially interested in the third chapter of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition, a publication of the National Research Council (National Academy Press, Washington DC, 2000, also available online at www.nap.edu). It turns out that transference does take place, yes, even between quite distinct domains, provided there is real overlap between those domains. The overlap, however, doesn’t have to be in subject matter; it’s more important that it exist at a cognitive level. That is, knowledge in the two domains has to have similar cognitive elements. (This is an amateur’s summary of pp. 63 – 65 of How People Learn; don’t rely on my paraphrase; read the chapter and make sure your graduate students read it.) What’s more, to make transference really work both teacher and student have to see the similarity in those cognitive elements. The way knowledge is mapped or represented is extremely important, because transference doesn’t just happen. Students have to understand that it is a goal of their learning, and they often have to be helped to see that the underlying structure of one situation is similar to that of another. I especially liked the inset example on p. 64 of How People Learn. College students were asked to read a story about how a general conquered an enemy city. They were then asked to come up with a solution to a problem in radiation treatment of a tumor. Very few students were able to solve the problem. But when they were told, explicitly, to use the story about the general in order to solve the radiation problem, 90 percent of them saw the solution. The underlying cognitive structures were similar but the ability to see such similarities hadn’t as yet been developed, even among bright college students. Verbum sapienti satis. The word to the wise in this case is “Be Explicit.” One can’t assume that transference is going to take place, automatically, magically, just by studying a subject. If we make the wrong assumption, knowledge will remain sequestered in one domain, never enriching or enlightening other parts of one’s life or thought. So, if a goal of a course is developing students’ ability to see underlying similarities in ostensibly disparate material, then one needs to be explicit about it. Ditto for individual episodes or problems studied in the course. There’s more to it than that, of course, but you get the point: transference is at the core of liberal education; understanding how to achieve it is now within reach thanks to the new knowledge reported in How People Learn. That’s one more example of our increasing knowledge about how to teach more effectively, and one more variation of the recurring challenge: if we value knowledge, we have to use it. Email This Article | Subscribe to E-Updates |
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  transference Dear Bob, You've certainly put your finger on a crucial issue. If there is "transference," I would say that it derives (1) from highlighting the way we approach issues, that is, with tools appropriate to the case at hand; (2) from the ability to recognize both analogies and disanalogies with other situations, so that one has the means to distinguish mere resemblances from really shared characteristics; and (3) from a generally critical attitude toward social questions that takes account of their full complexity, and eschews simple answers. The last is as important as the first two, in my view. Principally, anyone studies the classics because they are (1) fun and (2) interesting in their own right. They are interesting because they invite understanding; and practice at explication is always good practice, and surely transferable. But there comes the exciting part: are situations really the same in antiquity and today (or whenever)? are the critical concepts useful for the one equally applicable to the other? and are the questions as simple as one might like to think? We live in an age of ideological certainties, and the classics are often invoked to support them. It's our job, among other things, to make it clear that issues were as complicated then as now. I doubt this is of much help, but it's what your question inspired. all best from Salamanca, David |
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| July 13, 2006 – David Konstan - Brown University |
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Transference is also at the basis of many assessment practices. The assumption is that what you learn in a discipline can be measured using non-disciplinary tools because the knowledge isn't supposed to be domain-specific. However, the authors of the NAS publication note for transference to take place, real understanding of material, and not just its recall, is necessary. The big question for assessment is how to measure this "understanding"--and I think it's a question that spans across the educational spectrum since those struggling with No Child Left Behind are facing it. A related question is "transference of what?" In order to teach for transference folks have to be consciously aware of what particular knowledge/skills can be transferred to which other situations. I think this consciousness can be difficult to achieve in some cases. |
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| July 13, 2006 – Rachelle Brooks - Northwestern University |
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transference Bob, intriguing post. Several points. 1. There's a ton of transference in any academic activity, transference our students benefit from in a thousand ways. They learn, e.g., when to take command from on high seriously, when they can safely skip the assignment, or miss a deadline, and how to flounder your way out of a tight spot efficiently with the minimum of effort. I am quite serious in saying that this is an important part of what students learn in college and they learn it quite well. 2. "Classics" is anything but a stable signifier. You don't have to read Chris Stray to have a sense of how different what we teach as Classics is from what students in UK universities learned a hundred years ago. That we still bundle a variety of subjects together is a result of several factors, some quasi-political (the belief that GREECE and ROME are special and privileged ancestors with deeper insight into the truth about human society than any others and therefore that it makes sense to learn about the two of them together as totalities), some pedagogically convenient (learning Greek and Latin is hard, so lumping a lot of the studies that require such knowledge together in one program is handy -- but philosophy mainly stays outside, and post-classical Greek and Latin are still mainly orphans -- that is to say, most of the Greek and Latin literature ever written is not looked after by Classics departments). 3. WIthin the collectivity, there are different ways transference can work. The study of poetic and artistic artifacts transfers by one pair of paths (learning how to read a poem, and learning to read poems which influence later poems we might happen to know or want to read); the study of history likewise (learning how to study history, and figuring out why Alexander the Great's early death led to the bombing of Beirut airport this morning); etc. 4. If you want *assessment* (and we provosts do), what you could ask is, is there any way to measure which major subjects of study generate more useful transferences in populations of future doctors, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, diplomats, and the like. I don't know how convincingly you could do that job. Jim O'Donnell |
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| July 13, 2006 – Jim O'Donnell - Georgetown U. |
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transference This is a fascinating and complex set of issues, and I am thoroughly uncertain of what I think about it. On the one hand, I do think that historians, like classicists, teach certain transferable skills--ways of reading and weighing evidence, for example--which should have real world applications. Former students now at work as lawyers, doctors and consultants have even reported, very occasionally, that they found one skil or another--usually expository ones--very valuable. On the other hand, I'm always struck when speaking with former students by the division between those in the academy and related fields, for whom the things we studied together often retain considerable freshness, and equally bright ones who have done other things, and look back with amazement at the scholarly passion and precision of their lost early selves. I'm quite certain, moreover, that we don't do nearly as good a jobas we should at getting students to transfer skills, while at college or in grad school, from one area of the humanities curriculum to another. I'd love to learn more, and to have more precise references about the scholarly literature. |
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| July 14, 2006 – tony grafton - princeton |
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Transference I find the notion that there is little ostensible overlap between classical material and modern situations a perfect expression of the limitations of the historicist imagination. That all classicists really believe this I have some doubt, but it's true of many. As for "Study our stuff and you will be good at other stuff, too." Only someone safe inside a citadel could every think this a compelling argument. (Unless you actually believe there is such a dependable concept as "classics" that you can work with and use as a persuasive instrument--for a discussion on this topic see JI Porter's introduction to his recent collection, "Classical Traditions"). Classicists are VERY good at studying their stuff--and correcting anyone who doesn't get it right-- but "you will be good at other stuff, too" is wishful thinking. No, not that: hopeful thinking--the kouphai elpides that Prometheus gives us so that we can continue to find our lives bearable. If Caroline Winterer's "Culture of Classicism" is a reliable guide, it would seem to me that you are trying to reclaim the lost ground in American education that classicists began happily yielding in the 19th century as they increasingly professionalized their discipline and themselves. Remember the ER Dodds mantra? You have to see how UNlike us the Greeks were? Boy, did we succeed in doing that. So now, mortar boards in hand, we want to come back and say that, Hey, we're like Caleb Bingham, Alpheus Crosby, William Sanders Scarborough or WEB Du Bois in "The Souls of Black Folk" after all. We really DO care about the souls of our students--and not the way Allan Bloom and all those awful Straussians do. But who is this "we" anyway? We're nearly all in college/university/administrative level work. The kind of impact that you want classicists to have on students does not seem to me to be all that achievable in colleges and universities, simply because they are already too far along in their formation for that kind of ground work in moral imagination to be possible. Samuel Alito's family and its ambitions had infinitely more to do with shaping him than any number of lecture halls at Princeton ever could. Or precepts. Especially precepts. If you want to have the kind of classics teaching that would do something for the future Alitos, Clintons, or Rummies, that has to come earlier than the stage at which most of your readership and audience seem to be engaged with. I watched a whole generation of Dartmouth Review students move through Latin, Greek, or our Humanities courses for first-year students, only to emerge unscathed by any of the potential challenges to the path they had already marked out for themselve. Paul Gigot, for example, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page writer. Alito, the Clintons, and Rummy must have been much the same in their day. I personally am not enthusiastic about the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's dramatic shift away from supporting graduate education to secondary education, but at least they have grasped that the real battle of the kind you want to fight against the forces of darkness has to be waged earlier, in secondary school, where, my students often inform me, students are made to work much harder than they are at the select finishing schools so many of your addressees work in. If any impact is made on the young, it's far likelier there than when they are 18 - 23 and getting ready to enter the work force. One more thought about "we." I think it's worth noting that the most trenchant comments you've gotten as you work your way through this vast and laudable project don't come from full-time academics and administrators, but from Dan Mendelssohn, a writer and thinker who has quite deliberately not departmenalized himself full-time, though he obviously could do so at the drop of a hat. What made his proposals about teaching Greek tragedy compelling? I'd say he has a broader perspective on what classics is and could do, precisely because he's not locked into the institutional and professional categories that most classicists perforce have to work in. What I would like to do now is run your ideas by some of my students. They at least have the advantage of being engaged in the kind of education we hope to change, for the better. I'll let you know what they say. |
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| July 15, 2006 – james tatum |
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Transference I would like to think that at a small liberal arts college, like the one where I am employed, what is being called "transference" in this discussion is what we really teach. We like to tell our students that a solid liberal arts education prepares them for the unexected in later life, that something like 40% of college graduates are working in fields that did not even exist when they were in college. So what we need is the intellectual flexibility to apply what we learn in different and unusal contexts, to "think outside the box" as we often say here at Monmouth. And Classicists, of course, do this particularly well since our discpline crosses so many areas of the liberal arts. On the other hand, this process is not an easy one, and I think it is very true that one needs to develop transferral skills early in life. That is why I am especially pleased with the "teaching across the curriculum" models that I hear so much about from my high school teacher colleagues. The more we can get our students at all levels to recognize the interconnectedness of disciplines (rather than their independence) the better we will succeed as teachers. |
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| July 19, 2006 – Tom Sienkewicz - Monmouth College |
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transference I have been an advocate of the liberal arts/transference concept since the early 1960s. I was influenced by J. Paul Getty in an Esquire magazine interview in which he admitted hiring new employees with liberal arts backgrounds because he believed that their ability to solve problems in his organization was enhanced by their exposure to the humanities curriculum. That was a motivating factor for my enrolling in Georgetown University College of Liberal Arts rather than Walsh School of Foreign Service back in 1969. Getty’s belief back then reinforces Tom Sienkewicz’s admonition “to tell our students that a solid liberal arts education prepares them for the unexpected in later life, that something like 40% of college graduates are working in fields that did not even exist when they were in college.” Furthermore, I am pleased to report to Tom that since 1993 - - teaching a predominately black student-convict population (70% v 30%) - - the classes I taught in the Humanities became prisoner favorites through word-of-mouth in spite of rigorous writing assignments. In anonymous course evaluations, they consistently reported their new found excitement in formal education because I encouraged them to "think outside the box.” I used transference to extrapolate Professor Li’s notion of parameter analysis. It was of particular interest to me because he advocated a methodology to instruct a population that found it difficult to verbalize - undergraduate engineering students. Li proposed a solution that sought to educate engineers through an interdisciplinary study approach and assessment through case study analysis. (See more findings referenced in study cited below) Unfortunately, in higher ed the traditional departmentalization of knowledge in the university, i.e., turf battles between Colleges/Schools of ad infinitum, does not help achieve recognition of the interconnectedness of disciplines. That is one of the many findings of the research I conducted in: Validation of Higher Education Economic Development Survey (HEEDS) Instrument with State University and Land Grant Institutions. ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 327 086. Finally, I agree wholeheartedly with the statement: “What’s more, to make transference really work both teacher and student have to see the similarity in those cognitive elements. The way knowledge is mapped or represented is extremely important, because transference doesn’t just happen. Students have to understand that it is a goal of their learning, and they often have to be helped to see that the underlying structure of one situation is similar to that of another.” Exactly, even in K-12 more is gained when everyone is “on the same page” in terms of content relevance, methodology, presentation, and assessment tools that measure student learning … and conversely faculty effectiveness. |
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| July 27, 2006 – Jim Hethcox - Retired faculty @ Ingram State Technical College - Alabama Department of Postsecondary Education - Incarcerated Education |
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transference Dear Bob, You have again raised a provocative question, and your commentators have responded thoughtfully. But I think that an important issue has been omitted, and the omission is telling. “Transference” as a cognitive concept originated with Freud in the 1890s. Although the Freudian resonances have faded in recent decades, the concept still retains strong emotional overtones. And yet when we talk about transference in higher education, the discussion—as always—shifts to the intellectual structures and methods with which we professors are comfortable: how to “present” or “teach” facts and knowledge, how to “structure” courses and curricula; etc., etc. What matters to us are the rational underpinnings of our enterprise. Thus we are not especially surprised that little transference occurs in college classrooms. As your commentators pointed out: we are constrained by our disciplinary fetters; college students are too set in their ways to make meaningful connections; etc. Sure, “we should teach students to think outside the box,” but how? I suggest we consider the emotional elements of transference, and of learning in general. This is a difficult issue, but if you are looking for evidence of the psychological dynamics of transference, I encourage you to read an article that came out this week in CHANGE entitled, “Reacting to Reacting,” by Amanda Houle, who graduated from Barnard College last June. (The article is available online at: http://www.barnard.edu/reacting/articles.htm). Ms. Houle examines her emotional response to a course entitled “Reacting to the Past,” in which students play elaborate games set in the past, their roles informed by classic texts. At one point, she wept. She explores her tears, and shows how this emotional activation was part of the process by which she incorporated classic texts into her own life. A “Reacting” class bears a resemblance to the simulations used by political scientists and some business schools, but it differs in that students do not engage in an exercise to “fix” some problem in the past, but to empathize with the intellectual currents of a time and place different from their own. When this happens—when the students empathize with their prescribed roles and ideas—they experience transference of a very powerful kind. This has been confirmed by some elegant psychological tests, based on before and after samples of “Reacting” students and those assigned to regular classes. But Ms. Houle explains it better than anyone else. Mark Carnes Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History Barnard College |
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| July 28, 2006 – Mark C. Carnes - Barnard College |
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