By Meghan Hancock. I came to Threshold Conscripts: Rhetoric and Composition Teaching Assistantships—as I think many of us would—with vivid memories of my first semester teaching first-year writing. I felt some panic and anxiety, of course, at the very idea of a teaching role, but I was also struggling to reconcile the conflicting roles I carried. As Laura R. Micciche puts it in the Foreword to this collection, I was “not-quite teacher and not-quite student,” but was, nevertheless, asked to take on the important role of introducing students to college-level writing (xii). The anxieties and learning moments brought about by these intersecting identities make graduate student instructors of composition a rich and vital population to study, and yet as this collection consistently argues, the field of Writing Studies needs more scholarship examining their experiences. It is this gap that Threshold Conscripts, edited by William Macauley, Jr., Leslie R. Anglesey, Brady Edwards, Kathryn M. Lambrecht, and Phillip K. Lovas, addresses in its collective works that closely analyze the lived experiences of graduate RCTAs (rhetoric and composition teaching assistants) as they attempt to balance their multiple roles as teachers and students.

Marie Pruitt Lewis, Lynn C. Pivotal Strategies: Claiming Writing Studies as Discipline. Utah State University Press, 2024. Disciplinarity has long been a concern of writing studies scholars. In an attempt to solidify the boundaries and status of the discipline, scholars have defined keywords, outlined threshold concepts, identified foundational texts, conducted large-scale quantitative analyses of books, […]

In the pursuit of fostering vibrant and inclusive learning environments, this article explores how the practice of community-building can be a contemplative practice. Drawing upon personal experiences and pedagogical insights, Muir navigates the rewards of cultivating authentic connections among students while dismantling hierarchies within the classroom. Through reflective anecdotes and theoretical frameworks, this article underscores the significance of shared values, respecting diversity, and democratic engagement in shaping transformative learning communities. Emphasizing practices such as establishing common ground, engaging in creative expression, and co-constructing syllabi, the article advocates for a holistic approach to education that prioritizes empathy, agency, and reciprocity. By integrating the contemplative practice of community building into the fabric of academic discourse, Muir envisions a future where students and educators alike embrace interconnectedness, compassion, and collective growth.

While transfer remains the dominant yet controversial metaphor for describing how learning from one context affects learning in another, writing scholars propose numerous alternatives better aligned with current models of learning in consequential transitions , boundary crossing , and threshold concepts ; however, each shares a pervasive epistemic constraint: a systematic metaphor that frames transfer as transportation . Drawing on Lakoff and Johnsen, I identify four dimensions of spatiality as transfer’s experiential bases: physical, technological, social, and temporal. I argue that transfer entails metrics of distance biased towards unilateral transitions and traditional educational trajectories, and it objectifies learning, perpetuating outmoded theories of language, mind, and transfer. I support calls to replace transfer with a more generative metaphor, turning needed attention to pragmatic issues of uptake and circulation. However, contending that terminological change is not enough to mitigate its entailments, I propose conventionalizing mindfulness of the metaphor via existing processes and practices of disciplinary enculturation.

In a recent survey completed by 84 graduates of rhetoric and composition PhD programs at various phases of their career, a majority of respondents reported that their graduate programs provided excellent guidance when it came to teaching but insufficient guidance toward scholarly publication. An analysis of survey responses suggests that scholarly publication is troublesome because it marks the transition from student to scholar and because prior knowledge of “school genres” can impede learning of scholarly genres. Furthermore, the liminality novice scholars experience in transitioning from student to scholar evokes anxiety and feelings of impostor syndrome for many. This suggests that mentorship should help emerging scholars develop strategies for recontextualizing genre knowledge in response to diverse rhetorical situations in order to navigate the emotional strain that accompanies the recontextualization process in high-stakes situations.

This article presents the results of an IRB-approved study investigating what learners self-identify about their writing-transfer learning in 3,404 reflections on providing peer feedback. Drawing on writing-transfer theory, results are analyzed according to what learners self-identify about writing transfer in the following three areas: writing-knowledge transfer; near- and far-writing transfer; and dispositions toward transfer. This article proposes foregrounding writing transfer from providing peer feedback by making the following questions explicit for learners in peer-feedback experiences: How might you become a better writer by providing peer feedback? What might you learn about writing from providing peer feedback?

This article explores ways that the field of rhetoric and writing studies can benefit from intentional engagement with work-integrated learning (WIL) research and pedagogy in the context of transfer research. Specifically, the article discusses: (1) redesigning writing internship pedagogies to align with WIL learning and curriculum theories and practices; (2) revisiting threshold concepts of writing by accounting for knowledge, theories, and practices that are central to epistemological participation in a variety of professional writing careers; (3) reconsidering notions of vocation to emphasize the ways writers’ personal epistemologies and social trajectories interact with the purposes, aims, and values of academic and workplace contexts; and (4) reconceptualizing writing major curricula in relation to the conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and dispositions of expert writers in a range of professional contexts. In short, we argue that intentional engagement with WIL can enrich work on writing transfer and the field of rhetoric and writing studies as a whole. In addition to our theoretical discussion of the value of engaging with WIL frameworks in writing studies, we introduce our multi-institutional, transnational study of how WIL affects diverse populations of undergraduate students’ recursive transfer of writing knowledge and practices as an example of the kind of generative research on writing transfer and WIL that we are encouraging writing transfer researchers to take up.

This article proposes a model for collaboration between composition instructors and instructional librarians to promote visual literacy instruction in first-year writing courses. While the creation of visual content is essential to digital composing technologies, it often remains underutilized as a tool for writing development in first-year curricula. Drawing from complementary threshold concepts outlined in composition scholarship and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy , we demonstrate how librarians and writing instructors can engage in collaborative instruction to bridge gaps between theory and practice and leverage existing institutional expertise to support multimodal instruction in first-year writing.

This article seeks to answer two questions: what kinds of expertise are needed to lead an effective dissertation boot camp; and how can those outside the graduate student’s discipline support their writing? Drawing on four years of application data and post-camp interviews, I reveal how writing process knowledge—similar to that described in the scholarship on first-year composition—is a fundamental reason dissertators seek help from the boot camps. Ultimately, the article argues that the importance of writing as a dissertation-related threshold concept should be clearly stated and understood across all disciplines: doctoral researchers continue to learn and practice writing. As part of broadly accepting this threshold concept, it becomes clearer that those trained in writing pedagogy and its theories are best situated to lead the most helpful writing-process style boot camps.

This profile of the Writing at Moravian program discusses how an application of activity theory has facilitated a collaborative and context-responsive (re)development of the First-Year Writing, Writing Fellows, and Writing-Enriched Curriculum programs at our small liberal arts college. Activity theory is presented as a lens and flexible tool that allows us to identify and evaluate the myriad dynamic components of these interrelated programs in order to align the objectives of each program to work towards our programmatic mission built upon the fundamental ideas of transfer, reflective practice, and threshold concepts.

Writing transfer research often illuminates the writing abilities, attitudes, and assumptions college writers bring to a writing assignment, but faculty members across the disciplines may not have the tools for understanding what the students in their particular classes bring to their particular writing assignments. In this proposed model, students respond to a series of reflective prompts before, during, and after completion of a major upper-division writing assignment. Faculty members then reflect on how these responses might change the way they assign writing and teach course content. The disciplinary and course-based threshold concepts emerging from this process suggest a dynamic and situated approach that both facilitates faculty understanding of transfer and offers a method for responding to it.

In this article, we discuss what it means to learn troublesome “threshold concepts” about writing that cannot be adequately grappled with in a single course or assignment. Here, two faculty members and a graduate of a writing major reflect on elements of the writing curriculum, the writing center practicum, and the learning dispositions and experiences the student brought to the program in order to consider what ongoing, deep learning of writing threshold concepts can look like, as well as how programmatic and pedagogical elements may afford and constrain such learning.

In this Retrospective, we revisit our 2007 College Composition and Communication article in order to clarify our primary argument, address some questions and critiques that have arisen, and consider anew the value of composition courses that study writing. We review our core argument that engaging students with the research and ideas of writing studies, building declarative and procedural knowledge of writing, improves learning transfer. Now, using the example of Jan Meyer and Ray Land’s notion of threshold concepts, we argue for the field to better name its knowledge and conceptions and to decide what portion is suitable for first-year students. We clarify the distinction between this broad underlying goal and our personal approaches to accomplishing it, emphasizing the diversity of approaches that have come to embody the study of writing in first-year composition. While maintaining that writing studies lacks recognition of itself as a field and of the value of its specialized knowledge to writing instruction, we revise our original argument to show how writing instructors from other fields and with other expertise can build familiarity with writing studies research without extensive, specialized study. Ultimately, we continue to advocate teaching our field’s knowledge in first-year composition, while expanding our sense both of how to prepare instructors to do so and of the value of such teaching.

Using "threshold concepts" (Meyer and Land) as a lens, this article examines several issues related to learning within and across two general education courses—one in writing and one in history—in which students were concurrently enrolled. Analysis of data from students and instructors (of the history course) suggests threshold concepts that are shared among history and writing courses; however, the data also indicate that the extent to which these shared concepts are enacted through instruction is somewhat inconsistent. The article ultimately suggests that threshold concepts might prove a productive frame through which to consider questions related to writing and transfer, and also to general education more broadly.