Elbow, Peter. "Nondisciplinary Courses and the Two Roots of Real Learning." Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching.

Not too much of this pertains to crossing over between creative writing and composition, but I like it, so I'm gonna include some of the key quotes here:

"It can often seem that noncurricular and nonacademic activity trend to produce more 'real learning' than textbooks, lectures, and classes: personal, social, and political situations, jobs, getting intro trouble, quitting or getting kicked out of school -- all these seem to teach better, if (perhaps) less, than our classes. When students really learen in class, it often seems because their class at that moment was an instance of a social and affective situation -- fighting or joining others about felt ideas" (8).

"To see why a disciplinary curriculum is not enough and should be supplemented with nondisciplinary courses, it is necessary to explore more fully what is meant by real learning.

Learning is getting categories. Even changing them would mean getting new ones. But of course the most trivial leaerning consists of getting categories: Pavlov taught a category to his dog. And all too similarly, when teachers teach stuents to write comprehensible essays feeding back undigested ideas from lectures and reading, this too constitutes imparting concepts. True enough, it requires important and sophisticated skills to take in concepts well enough to reformulate them on an essay or exam; and it's hard enough, God knows, for a teacher to make even that happen.

But real learning, in contrast, is the phenomenon of so abundantly "understanding" the concept in the book or lectre that it becomes paret of us and dcetermines the way we see, feel, and act -- the way we process the widest range of data. If all we can do is answer academic essay questions about it, that means it will only process data roughly similar to the data in which it came: a fairly narrow range of words and types of sentences. It won't process many of the words and types of sentences we come across outside of class, and even fewer of the nonverbal stimuli we bump into.

We can say now that there are two ingredients in real learning. The first is the ability to apply already-learned concepts to the widest range of data; or to recognize the widest range of potential instances of the concept" (13-14).