Connections & Conclusions

While in the MA English program, I've taken courses in many subdisciplines of English studies--literature, linguistics, creative writing, and rhetoric/composition--though my concentration is in the latter. I've entered different discourse communities with different knowledge practices and dispositions, and I've developed my theories of writing so they are robust and can account for the many situations which will come my way as a professional. After graduation, I plan on transitioning in my line of work away from automotive service and toward either education at the community college or middle/high school level, editing, marketing, law, or some other occupation that might best use my abilities. But at the crux of work, of home life, of civic life exists my theories of writing, which evolve and influence all my interactions in the world. These threshold concepts are not dogma; they do not purport absolute truth. As I mentioned in our introduction to the topic, I believe they exist as a set of debatable maxims as well as a set of questions, a heuristic, that gets us out in the world investigating our uses of writing in various activities. This is, I think, what Bazerman (2013) meant by forwarding a rhetoric of literate action.

As you will see if you access the drop-down menu above, still in-progress are my capstone project and my final exam. I've focused my work in the MA English program at TAMUCC on First-Year (FY) writing curricular design, with my intention to work at the community college level and implement a progressive FY writing curriculum that foregrounds creative thinking via writing activities and assignments that engage students with creative writing craft in ways that help students develop their own theories of writing to take beyond the classroom. Similarly, my exam focuses on how such a FY curriculum gets to the heart of the disciplinarity predicament in English studies, and how I might successfully implement such a curriculum while respecting the integrity of other subdisciplines and putting students and their learning first.

I hope you've enjoyed reading and journeying along with me as I took the Threshold Concepts in relation to several of my experiences in the MA English program, and I invite you to take a look at any part of my work via Google Drive to see other instances in which the TCs have influenced my work and my developing theories of writing. You can access my currently in-progress work here, or by accessing the drop-down menu above.