DISPOSITIONS OF SHAME: THE CASE FOR TRANSFER PEDAGOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE’S GRADUATE STUDIES PROGRAMS

A small number of composition scholars have begun to call attention to graduate students’ writing needs and concerns. However, with a few exceptions, scholars have not yet extended a substantial critical gaze to graduate student writers, their writing, or graduate writing instruction. The gaps in scholarship thus indicate that composition scholars have not yet taken fully into account how graduate students transfer prior writing knowledge between contexts or how the dispositions of graduate students may interfere with writing knowledge transfer. In this study, I examine how the shame University of Tennessee graduate students feel about their writing is both intrinsically linked to the support and instruction they receive and how that shame impacts their ability to transfer prior writing knowledge to current writing tasks. More specifically, I ask how rethinking graduate support structures across the University of Tennessee through the lens of transfer theory might better equip graduate students for the highly-situated, genre-specific tasks required of graduate-level writing.