International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Volume 5, Number 1, January 2011
Return to current issues pageResearch Article
Excerpt
Know Thy Audience: Helping Students Engage a Threshold Concept Using Audience-Based Pedagogy
Students are experts at sizing up instructors, but many do not extend this analysis to non-instructor audiences, which can reduce their effectiveness in new communication situations. Audience, therefore, is a crucial threshold concept not only in Rhetoric and Composition, but in any discipline that values communication skills. How can instructors help students develop a deeper understanding of audience in the disciplines and begin to cross the threshold? In this article, I describe how a group...
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Full ArticleBio
Rebecca Pope-RuarkElon University
Elon, North Carolina, USA
rruark@elon.edu
I am an assistant professor of English in the Professional Writing and Rhetoric concentration at Elon University and hold a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Professional Communication from Iowa State University. At Elon, I teach courses in professional communication theory, classical and modern rhetoric, publishing, project management, and research methods. I also coordinate our Center for Undergraduate Publishing and Information Design (CUPID) though which students take on writing, research, and design projects for departments across campus and for community partners. My research interests include genre and community building in marketing communications agencies, cross-disciplinary threshold concepts related to writing and communication, project-based learning, and transfer of rhetorical strategies between the classroom and the workplace.