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Reform efforts undertaken in the name of the college- and career-readiness agenda reflect a different understanding of a balance between liberal learning, professional training, and disciplinarity that has long existed in general education programs. This article examines the different interpretations of this balance in general education and contemporary reform efforts, considering the implications of these reforms by examining their possible effects on writing education. It concludes by positing that “remodeling” (not restructuring) general education through a framework that draws on the idea of “communities of practice” (Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998) might represent a strategy for rethinking the balance between liberal learning, professional training, and disciplinarity.

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

This symposium centers on the recently released Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project. In addition to the document itself, the symposium features an introduction to it by some of its drafters, as well as responses to it by veteran composition specialists.

Using "threshold concepts" (Meyer and Land) as a lens, this article examines several issues related to learning within and across two general education courses—one in writing and one in history—in which students were concurrently enrolled. Analysis of data from students and instructors (of the history course) suggests threshold concepts that are shared among history and writing courses; however, the data also indicate that the extent to which these shared concepts are enacted through instruction is somewhat inconsistent. The article ultimately suggests that threshold concepts might prove a productive frame through which to consider questions related to writing and transfer, and also to general education more broadly.

Questions the rhetoric of reproof and asserts the authors’ belief that the practice of scholarly critique is generally salutary. Hopes to stand as a testimony to the firm belief in the importance of critique in the ongoing scholarly conversation. Considers ethical problems with (and use of) the rhetoric of reproof, and ethical awareness and the scholarly conversation.

Editors’ Note: This article originally appeared in COLLEGE CYBERBRIEF, an electronic newsletter sent to members of the Colelge Section of TEACH2000. Reprinted with permission of the National Council of Teachers of English. The list of electronic resources appeared in Adler-Kassner’s CyberBrief; we’ve updated the list a bit and added some print materials.

[W]hen something becomes as “common sensical” as the idea that students should own their own writing has, we need to take a step back from examining how ownership is removed or restored and look at the idea itself since there is a possibility that it reflects those dominant beliefs and values, but not other (non-dominant) ones. This essay begins to do that by exploring how ownership was represented in two critical “moments” in the history of composition scholarship and pedagogy that continue to wield considerable influence, the progressivism of the early 1900s and expressivism of the 1960s and 1970s. (Adler-Kassner 208-9).

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