Site Map

The next question you're likely to ask is "Where do I go next, and if I go there, what will I see and why?" Below, I'll briefly outline the remaining components of the site/portfolio in my intended order, what you'll see there, and why I think you'll find this procedural design helpful in achieving our shared purpose: to investigate and illustrate my learning during my time as a graduate student here at TAMUCC. All of these pages/subpages can be accessed on the tabs located above in the drop-down menu.

1. Overview

Surveying and constructing the terrain

Coursework Overview

Here, I've provided a link to a chart in which I list the learning outcomes, course descriptions, and select writing samples from all courses throughout my graduate career. I also provide a brief statement about my professional goals, and how I understand these courses as interlinked and helpful in achieving these goals.

Learning Milestones

A more explicit attempt at meaningfully connecting courses and the learning I've achieved during my time in them, here I use writing to group courses together that I think coalesce around similar themes or uses. Along with this document, I reflect on the reasons for my chosen arrangement.

2. Threshold Concepts

What are they? How are they useful?

For me, threshold concepts (TCs) are important in that they enable dialogic, generative interactions with composed knowledge that are immediately connected to the exigencies of activity. In turn, TCs help provide an opportunity for learners to develop theories of writing through practice of writing activities themselves. This open-ended and widely (ubiquitously, dare I say) applicable set of maxims is, in staying true to its own claims, also tentative, and it never pretends to make rigid claims of certainty or universality. Because of my own professional purposes, I mostly use TCs to theorize writing and learning and best practices, from the standpoint of (graduate/invoked) student, teacher, administrator, or (better named) learner/user of writing...

Metaconcept: Writing Is an Activity and a Subject of Study

Concept 1: Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity

Concept 2: Writing Speaks to Situations through Recognizable Forms

Concept 3: Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies

Concept 4: All Writers Have More to Learn

Concept 5: Writing Is (Also Always) a Cognitive Activity

Connections & Conclusions

So what? What can I do with all this?

3. In progress

Really, none of the aforementioned uses of writing are "finished" products. However, this section is meant to indicate projects that are increasingly in need of development to achieve a purpose. For me, that is primarily my Final Exam materials, available here.

Capstone Project

My capstone project, accessible here, is really an attempt to apply my learning to develop a first-year writing curriculum that emphasizes creative thinking in classroom activities. Whereas the Coursework Overview and Learning Milestones show ways in which I've met learning outcomes and made connections in courses I've taken, the capstone project illustrates how I'm reflecting about my own experiences as a graduate student in given activities/curricula and identified with first-year students' experiences that might occur.

A continued reflection is available on this page (link), and a more in-depth demonstration of how my coursework and learning in writing studies translates to better-informed curricular design is evident in the above section "Threshold Concepts."

Final Exam

Developing a question follows the questioning I began upon entering the MA English program. Available here is my Annotated Bibliography and Rationale, which shows my use of writing to begin to situate myself in relation to the existing conversations in the field of writing studies, particularly in the subfield of curricular design for first-year writing.