This article explores the sources of student dispositions toward rhetorical approaches to first-year writing instruction through a case study of Lora, a particularly motivated writing student. The study traces Lora’s performance and development of her identity through the imparting of personally meaningful objectives like “standing out” and “standing up for the right things” to particular activities across her primary, secondary, and university education. Lora’s attributing of these personal objectives to certain activities but not others is the construction and maintenance of her identity and correlates with her exhibition of generative dispositions. I argue that, in Lora’s case, dispositions are attitudinal and affective expressions of how and to what extent Lora has attributed personal meaning to a social activity in the process of identity formation. I then show how Lora identified my first-year composition (FYC) course with her personally meaningful goal of standing out as a student and, consequently, exhibited generative dispositions and productive learning practices to the challenges of developing a more rhetorical approach to writing. I conclude by suggesting that continued research on writing-related transfer must situate inquiry within the broader process of each individual’s repurposing of meaningful objectives across experience.

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 theorizes how students know when to activate knowledge acquired in FYC courses. Addressing knowledge activation as motivated by pursuing activity-specific objectives, the author calls for situating students’ encounter with and acquisition of rhetorical knowledge and practices of writing as knowledge of how to perform activities other than writing.

The publication of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy has led scholars and teachers of writing and information literacy to identify ways of connecting threshold concepts of both disciplines to help students more easily and effectively acquire the transformed perspectives on research and writing. We argue that the practice of addressing writer exigence connects the concepts of IL and WS under a single literate practice. As the motivating matter of discourse, the perception of a particular exigence leads writers to identify a useful audience to address that exigence. Noting that audiences have their own exigencies for reading as well, we explain that writers must construct their texts in ways that signal a text’s exigency for readers, an effort that includes selecting the performances of evidence and writer legitimacy through information literacy. By teaching writing and researching as the literate practice of resolving the writer’s exigence by constructing exigency for particular readers, instructors can effectively link the six Frames of the ACRL Framework and Writing Studies threshold concepts and explain why concepts of both are essential and inextricable.

Ethnography has consistently faced ethical questions since the earliest postmodern critiques of the ethnographer’s claims to objectivity in descriptive research. Concerns of how to represent ethically the ethnographic Other, to engage in activist research, and to foster collaboration among researchers and participants persist even in the age of critical ethnography and its strict attention to these issues. This article offers activity theory as a useful tool with which to address the ethical and practical difficulties that continue to plague critical ethnographers. I argue that by seeing the project of ethnographic research as an activity system as described by A. N. Leontiev and expanded upon in the work of David Russell and Yrjo Engeström, researchers can recognize the shifting locus of expertise between researcher and participant and thus design a research project that is more ethical and, ultimately, more useful for all involved. Ultimately, activity theory serves as a means of helping ethnographers recognize the actual nature of what they are doing when they conduct research so that they may confront ethical challenges in a more fully theorized fashion.