“The treatment of knowledge transfer in Agents of Integration is more comprehensive, nuanced, and informed than anything I have seen in our field to date. The transfer matrix it develops as well as the case studies it explores are rich and informative. The idea, as well, that agents of integration are both seers and sellers of connections has important implications for studying and teaching for transfer, revealing along the way the institutional context in which students are able to sell or not sell connections and suggesting that transfer is as much a rhetorical activity as it is a cognitive activity. This book will have significant and lasting implications for teachers and researchers working in various areas in Rhetoric and Composition studies.”—Anis Bawarshi, author of Genre and the Invention of the Writing: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition and, with Mary Jo Reiff, Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy
“Agents of Integration offers original, often exciting, insights on how students make connections across disciplines, how their personal identities and academic goals interfere with or enable the transfer process, and how teachers from different disciplines either facilitate or impede transfer in spite of their best intentions to be interdisciplinary.”—Terry Zawacki, director, Writing Across the Curriculum, George Mason University
“Helping students connect learning across settings and apply it in new contexts has never been more important. But it’s no easy task. What Nowacek brings to the challenge is a conviction that the dynamics of transfer just might reveal themselves more fully through a close look at her own classroom. Sure enough. The result is a richer, more promising model of how and under what conditions students can actually become, as the title of the volume puts it, agents of integration.”—Pat Hutchings, co-author with Mary Taylor Huber of The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons
“This book brings light to the dark forest of interdisciplinary learning and teaching. It treats students as the ones responsible for integrating their knowledge, and it dramatically shows how writing, in various genres, is a key tool for students struggling to knit together disparate learning into something meaningful for them. The book also provides key tools for teachers and administrators who want to help students do this hard and complex work.”—David R. Russell, author of Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History