In creating each course, speech professors were mindful of shared learning objectives, drawing out themes that cross such diverse topics as intercultural communication and political humor, image repair work, and social protest.

Stephanie Boone, Sara Chaney, Josh Compton, Christiane Donahue, & Karen Gocsik

Dartmouth’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric (IWR) is a program in dynamic flux, with a long, strong history and an evolving vision for the future. We are collectively thinking about transforming our program design to intentionally foster writing knowledge transfer, operationalizing the available research about transfer while remaining open to the evolution of this research over time. This program profile is a collaborative attempt to identify the reasons for such a move and the shapes it might take, in hopes that other programs will find our process and thinking useful. The profile overviews our program, its current underpinnings, and the transfer research that might ground our program’s future shape. We offer a sketch of an ideal program that might foster opportunities for students to transfer writing and speech knowledge across their studies and beyond. Finally, we discuss what we have learned so far about our students and our program design, the curricular and faculty development initiatives with which we are experimenting, and what remains to be considered.

Boone, S., Chaney, S. B., Compton, J., Donahue, C., & Gocsik, K. (2015). Imagining a writing and rhetoric program based on principles of knowledge ‘transfer’: Dartmouth’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. In M. J. Reiff, A. Bawarshi, M. Ballif, & C. Weisser (Eds.), Ecologies of writing programs: Program profiles in context (pp. 163-194). Anderson, SC: Parlor.