This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move conceptualizations of student agency as primarily housed within student exercise of choice toward more robust understandings and facilitation of student agency via placement. Extending recent calls to reconsider methodological traditions like directed self-placement to more explicitly account for educational equity issues, our two pilot assessments illustrate how we might reposition student agency within writing placement as emergent from situational interactions with faculty and the institutions they represent, rather than merely authorized by them.

Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education.