16 Threshold Concepts
Threshold concepts are principles that run through all levels of composition at SLCC, and they help to develop a cohesive experience for students as they progress through their composition sequence. These concepts identify central truths about writing that we want students to wrestle with as they take their composition courses.
- Instructors are free to determine how explicitly or implicitly they want to address these concepts.
- These concepts will be referenced in the yearly composition assessment prompt as a way to measure student’s growth in the composition sequence.
The threshold concepts are:
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- Writing is a resource people use to do things, be things, and make things in the world.
- Rhetoric provides a method for studying the work that language and writing do.
- Writing is a form of action. Through writing people respond to problems and can create change in the world.
- Writing is a process of deliberation. It involves identifying and enacting choices, strategies, and moves.
- Meaningful writing is achieved through sustained engagement in literate practices (e.g., thinking, researching, reading, interpreting, conversing) and through revision.
- The meanings and the effects of writing are contingent on situation, on readers, and on a text’s purposes/uses.