Abstract When teaching in neighboring fields such as creative writing and writing studies, instructors can draw on the explicit recommendations of professional organizations and an existing scholarly consensus about threshold concepts. However, the struggle to define what exactly it is we teach when we are teaching literary studies continues. Rather than advocating for transferable skills in deference to the neoliberal marketplace, we should spend more time explaining to ourselves and to our students the particular practices, habits, and concerns that distinguish literary studies as a valuable scholarly discipline. Metacognition is essential for students to learn, and this can be facilitated more effectively by instructors able to articulate how the methods and goals of a course are informed by disciplinary norms, especially the ubiquitous and yet continually contested practice of close reading. This article reviews both recent scholarship and pedagogical resources on close reading to identify the intertwined challenges of defining and teaching this disciplinary method, making recommendations for more effective classroom practices.

In many ways, the transformative character of developing critical consciousness reflects the dynamics of acquiring threshold concepts. Drawing from research into threshold concept acquisition, the author argues that critical first-year composition instruction can more effectively scaffold students into critical perspectives by linking critical pedagogy more closely with efforts to develop students’ rhetorical meta-awareness of writing.

This article argues that prevailing approaches to research instruction in introductory composition courses, as represented in print and digital instructional materials, reflect outdated theoretical views and may damage students’ researcher identity. Teaching research as a closed, linear, universal process prevents students from leaving the liminal space of the composition classroom.

Research Article| October 01 2007 Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic Gina Wisker Gina Wisker Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2007) 7 (3): 401–425. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gina Wisker; Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic. Pedagogy 1 October 2007; 7 (3): 401–425. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-007 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.