Standing at the Threshold: Working through Liminality in the Composition and Rhetoric TAship

Standing at the Threshold articulates identity and role dissonances experienced by composition and rhetoric teaching assistants and reimagines the TAship within a larger professional development process. Current researchers and scholars have not fully explored the liminality of the profession’s traditional path to credentialing. This collection reconsiders these positions and their contributions to academic careers.
 
These authors enrich the TA experience by supporting agency and self-efficacy, encouraging TAs to take active roles in understanding their positions and making the most of that experience. Many chapters are written by current or former TAs who are writing as a means of preparing, informing, and guiding new rhet/comp TAs, encouraging them to make choices about how they want to think through and participate in their teaching work.
 
The first work on the market to delve deeply into the TAship itself and what it means for the larger discipline, Standing at the Threshold provides a rich new theorizing based in the real experiences and liminalities of teaching assistants in composition and rhetoric, approached from a productive array of perspectives.
 
Contributors: Lew Caccia, Lillian Campbell, Rachel Donegan, Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannady, Jennifer K. Johnson, Ronda Leathers Dively, Faith Matzker, Jessica Restaino, Elizabeth Saur, Megan Schoettler, Kylee Thacker Maurer
 

William J. Macauley Jr. is professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. His work has been published by several presses, including Utah State University Press, Heinemann Boynton/Cook, and Hampton Press, and in a number of journals including The Writing Lab Newsletter, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, The International Journal of Engineering Education, and The American Biology Teacher. Macauley and Nicholas Mauriello won the 2007 IWCA Outstanding Book Award for their collection Marginal Words, Marginal Work? Tutoring the Academy in the Work of Writing Centers.

Leslie R. Anglesey is assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Sam Houston State University. Her research interests include embodied approaches to composition theory and pedagogy, feminist rhetorics, and disability rhetorics.
 
Brady Edwards holds master of arts degrees in English and American studies from the University of Nevada, Reno and Utah State University. He has published essays and reviews in The Peer Review, Southern Discourse in the Center, and The Journal of Popular Culture.
 
Kathryn M. Lambrecht is assistant professor of technical communication at Arizona State University. Her work on interdisciplinary communication and education has been published in The Journal of Business and Technical Communication, The Journal of General Education, and The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
 
Phillip Lovas is an instructor in the Merritt Writing Program at the University of California, Merced. His research interests include professional and technical communication, workplace writing and genres, and discourse community theories.