Review of William Macauley, Jr., Leslie R. Anglesey, Brady Edwards, Kathryn M. Lambrecht, and Phillip K. Lovas’s Threshold Conscripts: Rhetoric and Composition Teaching Assistantships

Composition Forum Oct 2025 RSS

Review of William Macauley, Jr., Leslie R. Anglesey, Brady Edwards, Kathryn M. Lambrecht, and Phillip K. Lovas’s Threshold Conscripts: Rhetoric and Composition Teaching Assistantships

Abstract

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.

Journal: Composition Forum
Published: 2025-10-11
Topics: first-year composition graduate education multilingual writers

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