Naming What We Know, Classroom Edition: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies

Linda Adler-Kassner is professor of writing studies and associate dean of undergraduate education at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching focus broadly on how literate agents and activities—such as writers, writing, writing studies—are defined in contexts inside the academy and in public discourse. She also examines the implications and consequences of those definitions and how writing faculty can participate in shaping them. She frequently works with faculty across disciplines on articulating threshold concepts and making them more accessible for students. She is author, coauthor, or coeditor of nine books, including Reframing Writing Assessment, Naming What We Know, and The Activist WPA. Elizabeth Wardleis the Howe Professor of English and director of the Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She served as chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida (UCF). She also served as director of writing programs at UCF and at the University of Dayton. Her administrative experiences fed her ongoing interest in how students learn and how they transfer what they learn in new settings. With Doug Downs, she is the coauthor of Writing about Writing, a textbook that represents a movement to reimagine first-year composition as a serious content course that teaches transferable research-based knowledge about writing. She speaks frequently around the country on writing program design, how to teach for transfer, and how to identify and engage students in the threshold concepts of various disciplines.