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.

Reviewed are: Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, eds. Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities Jay Jordan First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground Jessica Restaino

At three different institutions, public and private, in varying roles, I have found the very particular problem of how to inform micro-level classroom practices with macro-level disciplinary knowledge to be centrally important to our field’s development and our students’ learning—and singularly difficult to overcome. In this program profile, I outline how we have worked (and are still working) to overcome this problem at the University of Central Florida and describe some of our successes in reducing reliance on contingent labor and gaining support and resources for the elements of a vertical writing education (writing center, WAC program, minor, and certificate) beyond first-year composition.

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.

In this introduction to the special “transfer” issue of Composition Forum, I offer some preliminary thinking about ways to expand our consideration of this phenomenon, which I will describe from here on out as creative repurposing for expansive learning, or “repurposing” in brief (Prior and Shipka; Roozen). I argue for understanding repurposing as the result of particular dispositions that are embodied not only by individuals but also by what Pierre Bourdieu calls “fields,” and the interactions between the two. In doing so, I focus primarily (but not exclusively) on the dispositions of educational systems. In sketching out my initial thoughts on dispositions, I draw on Bourdieu’s discussions of “habitus” and “doxa.” I suggest that to move forward in our consideration of repurposing and expansive learning, we might look beyond one task, one setting, or one individual to consider the habitus of the educational systems that encourage particular dispositions in individuals. I will suggest that creative repurposing is one consequence of what I will call “problem-exploring dispositions,” while “answer-getting dispositions” discourage such repurposing. I end by suggesting that the steady movement toward standardized testing and tight control of educational activities by legislators is producing and reproducing answer-getting dispositions in educational systems and individuals, and that this movement is more than a dislike for the messiness of deep learning; rather, it can be understood as an attempt to limit the kind of thinking that students and citizens have the tools to do. In this view, conducting and enacting research on repurposing (“transfer”), including the scholarship in this special issue, is a high-stakes enterprise.

The goal of teaching students to write for the university assumes that in first-year composition students can be taught ways of writing (genre and genre knowledge) that they can then transfer to the writing they do in other courses across the university. This goal and its underlying assumption are problematic for a number of reasons illustrated here through a study of a large midwestern composition program. The study validates theoretical critiques of general skills writing courses made by genre and activity theorists over the past decade. The difficulties of teaching varied academic genres in only one context suggest we might better serve first-year students by reframing the goals of FYC, such that the course does not promise to teach students to write in the university but rather teaches students about writing in the university.

In this article we propose, theorize, demonstrate, and report early results from a course that approaches first-year composition as introduction to Writing Studies. This pedagogy explicitly recognizes the impossibility of teaching a universal academic discourse and rejects that as a goal for first-year composition. It seeks instead to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and that encourages more realistic conceptions of writing.

Instructors in multi-major professional communication courses are asked to teach students a variety of workplace genres. However, teaching genres apart from their contexts may not result in transfer of knowledge from school to workplace settings. We propose teaching students to research genre use via activity theory as a way of encouraging transfer. We outline theory and research relevant to teaching genre and provide results from a study using activity theory to teach genre in two different professional communication courses.