Situated in the literature on threshold concepts and transfer of prior knowledge in WAC/WID and composition studies, with particular emphasis on the scholarship of writing across difference, our article explores the possibility of re-envisioning the role of the composition classroom within the broader literacy ecology of colleges and universities largely comprised of students from socioeconomically and ethno- linguistically underrepresented communities. We recount the pilot of a composi- tion course prompting students to examine their own prior and other literacy values and practices, then transfer that growing meta-awareness to the critical acquisition of academic discourse. Our analysis of students’ self-assessment memos reveals that students apply certain threshold concepts to acquire critical agency as academic writ- ers, and in a manner consistent with Guerra’s concept of transcultural repositioning. We further consider the role collective rubric development plays as a critical incident facilitating transcultural repositioning.

Ensuring that students graduate from post-secondary institutions with good writing skills presents two related challenges: assessment of writing and the teaching of writing. In this essay I want to address a commonly-used solu-tion to these twin challenges: the administration of an institution-wide compe-tence test to place students in WAC courses. I will begin with some of the reasons that this combination of a writing competence test and mandatory WAC courses is an attractive, and therefore commonly used, solution to this challenge of both certifying writing skills and educating those who do not earn certification. In the remainder of the essay, however, I will use a case study of the University of Calgary, and to a lesser extent Laurentian University, to illustrate some serious dangers of this relationship. I don’t want to suggest that competence testing and WAC can never exist in harmony. Like all WAC stories, the stories of the University of Calgary and of Laurentian are enmeshed in local politics that could well be different elsewhere. There may be ways to avoid the pitfalls I describe. But I will be quite candid: my experience has led me to become soured on the idea of combining institution-wide competence testing and WAC. I believe that their seemingly complementary approaches to what appears to be the same problem mask some deeply divided pedagogical assumptions that threaten to undermine the benefits of a WAC program, leading me finally to advise those who would contemplate such a potentially Faustian bargain to use extreme caution or avoid it altogether. I will end with a brief look at an alternative way of gaining traction on the difficult problem of ensuring students graduate with adequate writing pro-ficiency—first year seminars. In first-year seminars students learn and practice academic writing in a content-specific environment, and instructors are less apt to feel burdened by low-performing writers than in a course that links in-struction to universal testing. Why Combining Testing and WAC Looks Attractive Let us set to one side for a moment all the pedagogical and theoretical arguments for and against institution-wide writing competence testing (though I will come back to these arguments briefly later in this essay), and assume for

If the tale we are about to tell sounds familiar, the reason lies in a familiar pattern. An awareness of the status quo arises from emerging dissatisfaction with an increasing number of features of that situation. A certain floundering around ensues, during which various factions propose various solutions. Finally, a new plan emerges and is put into place. Over time, that new plan becomes a new status quo; and the cycle continues. Robert Connors describes that cycle within the field of Rhetoric and Composition, but the pattern itself is hardly new. Thomas Carlyle described it in his 1831 essay “Characteristics. ” Thomas S. Kuhn documented similar cycles throughout the history of science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a work that reads across disciplines to chart revolutionary shifts in accepted intellectual paradigms. Our story of WAC’s evolution at Carleton College chronicles two of these cycles, and what justifies the telling is the way the story parallels WAC’s evolution from a faculty development movement to a multi-disciplinary initiative, and finally into an era when demands for outcomes-based accountability extend what we believe are unprecedented opportunities for WAC programs, which are a nexus where several important dimensions of student learning come together. Our tale, then, chronicles an alliance between WAC and assessment, an alliance that we believe represents WAC’s third evolutionary stage. On the other hand, if the tale we are about to tell sounds new, the reason stems from that very alliance, from the fact that what we are chronicling is WAC on a new frontier. For a variety of reasons, the growing accountability movement has focused on Writing Across the Curriculum. Of course, WAC in its writing-in-the-disciplines mode brings together

You write what you, what you understand, what you know, right? About the topic or about the concepts...--Lata, a community college nursing student in a writing-intensive course Still in the relatively early stages of our college’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative, we have begun a study to assess its impact. As members of the WAC committee, full-time instructors in two of the college’s career programs (human services and early childhood respec-tively), and qualitative researchers, we were charged with the task of de-veloping and implementing the study. In our urban community college we often conduct interdisciplinary work, and both the WAC program and committee reflect that. The WAC committee has enlisted support for WAC from the variety of career programs and liberal arts departments. Our role as assessors is to look at and learn from the way instructors are imple-menting WAC. Walvoord & Anderson (1998) state that assessors are not external imposers of something brand new but in-vestigators, ethnographers, and facilitators. The assessor’s approach is not to get people to do assessment, but to examine how people teach and assess critical thinking, and to help them improve. (pp.150-

Writing teachers despise grading. They delay it. They avoid it. They strive to minimize its impact and importance, speaking to their students as if it didn’t matter (when, of course it does). But in the end they are faced with it and do it, usually alone, with trepi-dation and a lot of second guessing. Last semester, we decided not to grade our stu-dents ’ portfolios. We opted out of the whole dilemma and in the process, found a way to provide students with a more valid assessment of their work. What grew out of a simple frustration with our roles as evaluators, eventually revealed hidden complexities and subjectivities inherent in grading. We had long been aware of evaluation of writing as a process riddled with doubt. “Is this really an A, or am I too aware of the fact that this is her sixteenth draft, am I too sympathetic to her struggle? ” or conversely, “Is this really a D paper, or am I only reacting to his snide posturing, his bragging to class-mates about how quickly he can ‘slap something together ’ before class? ” No matter how objective we try to be, these uncertainties remain. Some writing teachers embrace this subjectivity.