Threshold Concepts

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.

In Kathleen Blake Yancey's (2015) introduction to Naming what we know (NWWK), edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle (2015), we are invited to think about what (TCs) can do for writing studies as a discipline and beyond:

"What do threshold concepts offer composition studies? At first glance, they may seem like a kind of canon, a list of the defining key terms of the discipline, with an explicit emphasis on definition and the implication of dogma. At a second glance ... they seem much more contingent--presented here not as canonical statement, but rather as articulation of shared beliefs providing multiple ways of helping us name what we know and how we can use what we know in the service of writing. That use value, as described in the chapters, takes various forms" (xix).

If I'm staying true to Yancey's (2015) claim about the use value of TCs, then what this portfolio as reflection-in-presentation (see Yancey's "On Reflection," 1998) can do is think back not to what the TCs mean in-themselves, but how I've developed a theory/theories of writing that account for these TCs, and how through my graduate career said TC-influenced theory/theories have influenced my approach to using writing in classes, in everyday life, and in my professional career (developing first-year curricula). Without further ado, I'll attempt to demonstrate how my interactions with TCs have influenced me as a user of writing. Below are links to the individual pages in which I explain how each TC relates to my graduate coursework.

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