we who use the Web have an oppor-tunity to wield the architecture of participation to defend our freedom to create and consume digital media according to our own agendas.

But the students are restless y'all. These upon whose shoulders our futures will be built are staring down an apocalypse—of government, of environment, of justice, and of common sense.

Your students have fought, your students have hidden from bullies, your students have been hungry, they have passed for straight, they have held their tongues, and they have been broken.

They are taking risks

The Student is the weak link in the academy, the wild horse that needs breaking, or the lazy scissorbill who must be taught discipline and integrity...and more recently, the privileged Millennial whose character can only be built through an unforgiving exposure to adversity.

Hate crime, domestic abuse, fears about the stability and reliability of health care, concerns about the environment—all the things that plague working adults with advanced degrees also plague students.

if people just do not like to write, we have an entirely different battle to wage.

It has been posited by some that the abilities to analyze, synthesize, and integrate knowledge transfer across genres, thus making it less important to teach the genres of the workplace in the academy.

pward of 70% of salaried employees have writing responsibilities. Indeed, 96–100% of the students and faculty at each school in our survey think writing will be somewhat important or very im-portant to their future success, and 93–100% believe they will write often or very often after graduation.

‘Accountability’ has turned to test-cramming and bean-counting, often limited to basic reading and math skills” (Dillon)

Applebee and Langer conclude that students are simply not writing enough to prepare them for the demands of postsecondary education. They highlight the fact that “some 40% of twelfth-grade students . . . report never or hardly ever being asked to write a paper of three pages or more”

Melzer’s research confirms our own results that college faculty provide little opportunity for exploratory writing or workplace-based genres. As we reflect on the types of writing being assigned we need to consider not only whether they promote deep learning but also whether the writing submitted by students evidences the deep learning intended as well as ways in which we may or may not be preparing students for life beyond the academy.3

We hypothesize that the setting of clear expectations specifically for writing does not occur that often across the curriculum, thus leading to the disparity between faculty and student rankings.

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Have Students Read/Respond to Other Students’ Work

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During their first year, students reported being assigned to do eighteen different kinds of writing

Explained in advance the grading criteria he or she would use

In particular we are referring to the Harvard Study of Writing (begun in 1997), the Stanford Study of Writing (begun in 2001) and the Longitudinal Study of Writing at the University of Denver (begun 2007).

quality of writing must be improved if students are to succeed in college and in life.

our research includes three high schools (one suburban public high school in a relatively affluent neighborhood [27% free/reduced lunch and 7% drop-out rate], one urban high school in a relatively poor neighborhood [63% free/reduced lunch and 26% drop-out rate], and one private, all-girls Catholic high school), as well as two community colleges, two four-year public institutions, one four-year private institution, one public MA-granting institution, and one doctorate-granting, flagship institution

That Murray presents the computer itself as a liminal object (99) further supports why students’ online research activities are sometimes viewed with suspicion: they are not quite real, at least in the context of the first-year composition classroom.

34PedagogyPurdy and WalkerLiminal Spaces and Research Identity35This goal can be achieved, however, without forcing students to abandon the useful knowledge and skills that form their existing research identities. Students need to be able to make their own investigations into these practices and to understand the complexities and contradictions in the ways that aca-demic research practices create knowledge. We need to assist students in this learning by sharing with them examples of academic research processes as messy, tentative, and even contested

ut presents initial research as “exploratory,” as aiding in the formulation of a research question

allowed—and encouraged

Applying such an approach to introductory composition will bring students, at the beginning of their academic experience, into the fluid and complex practices through which individuals and disciplines shape and create academic knowledge.

Positioning students as “unskilled” or “illiterate” researchers not only reflects outdated theoretical views and is inaccurate but also may actually damage students’ ability to create a “healthy” academic identity. When positioned as wholly ignorant, students are invited neither to critique the processes they are engaging in nor to situate their own practices within the model they are taught.

they can certainly be anxiety ridden as students are seen as polluting agents

Vincent A. Anfara (1998: 3) notes that a position of liminality in high school settings can be perceived as either a location where students try on adult identities or a space where authority figures attempt to control the transition from childhood to adulthood in ways that emphasize students’ lack of power, freedom, or even ability to make the choices that will be required of them in the adult world

the initiand’s lack of status can also serve, as Mark Dressman (1997: 309) contends, to “hold a mirror up to the social order,” and initiands can have the potential to “appropriate resources and make a space for themselves within society on their own terms.” A

The concept of knowledge making as an act engaged in by professionals through practices such as creating experiments, conducting ethnographies, or visiting archives is deemphasized, and the idea of students as engaged in such knowledge-making is even further deempha-sized. It is only later, when students enter their disciplines, that they may begin to use these activities of research to produce new knowledge.

But do not we have a different starting point in our acquired knowledge and capacity to handle it and are our obligations not quite different?Students, in other words, must necessarily lack “expertise and technique” (Trimbur 1989: 611) so that academia can impart it to them. They can have “life experiences,” but we as academics have “knowledge and intellectual skills”

and although it is through the introductory composition course that students are seen as entering this institutional space, they are nevertheless identified as arriving in this space with a lack of ability to participate from a position of equality—or even at all

one of the functions of the professions and the modern university has been to specialize and to remove knowledge from public discourse and decision-making, to reduce it to a matter of expertise and technique. . . . [W]e must acknowledge that . . . the prevailing configuration of knowledge and its institutions prevents the formation of consensus by shrinking the public sphere and excluding the majority of the population from the conversation.

Higher educa-tion claims that it engages in a different kind of knowledge making that is more rigorous, or at least more rooted in critical use of sources and source materials

Our analysis reveals that the idea of introductory university students as “knowledge makers” and active practitioners of research activities is mark-edly absent from almost all the websites and textbooks we investigated.

Stu-dents are instructed to brainstorm ideas before they do research and beforethey write their papers. The implications are that these processes can be easily distinguished and separated and that students finish deciding on their topic idea before doing research and need not revise or adapt this topic based upon what they fin

proclaiming writing processes as universal is ultimately inaccurate and sti-fling

However, the idea that researchers move through them once in this order oversimplifies and misrepresents research writing

“Move from an Assignment to a Topic. Do Exploratory Research and Formulate a Research Question. Assemble a Working Bibliog-raphy. Develop a Tentative Thesis. Do Focused Research. Take Notes. Fine-tune Your Thesis. Outline Your Paper. Draft Your Paper. Revise Your Paper. Prepare Your Final Draft”

Purdy and WalkerLiminal Spaces and Research Identity19We want to be clear that the academic library is a valuable resource

Instructional materials present research as a step-by-step con-trolled process, much like early stage models of writing.

cautions like Tensen’s are seemingly based on the underlying anxiety that the academic library may become less necessary or less relevant if reliable knowledge is accessible in other nonacademic forums

e do disagree, however, that these skill sets must be wholly separate from the skill sets students use in nonacademic research.

she admits that student researchers are very proficient at certain kinds of searching on the web but then goes on to explain that this proficiency does not make them good aca-demic researchers

The intimation here is that students cannot be “wise” to the ways of the World Wide Web without replacing their existing practices—even prac-tices used for previous school work

The results of Internet searches, how-ever, can sometimes provide an overwhelming flood of sources, many of them of questionable legitimacy” (207). Students are cautioned against continuing to rely on this space

When students conduct academic research, in other words, the skills and strategies they bring with them need to be retooled or abandoned for fear that they will pollute their academic work.

Such texts, we believe, substantiate our claim as they draw attention to the need to change how we as a discipline think about undergraduate students as researchers.

polluting outside influences. These influences are taken to be those practices and sources students bring with them from their work in nonacademic online spaces.

We therefore contend that academic research practices need to be connected to students’ existing practices rather than set up as wholly separate from (and better than) them.

“to cross the threshold,” that is, to literally or figuratively pass through a liminal space, “is to unite oneself with a new world” (20).Introductory composition classes serve as such a threshold into the “new world” of the academy.

prevailing approaches to research instruction in introductory composition courses, as represented in print and digital instruc-tional materials, reflect outdated theoretical views and may damage students’ researcher identity. Teaching research as a closed, linear, universal process prevents students from leaving the liminal space.

flexible researcher identities can be significantly damaged if our instructions, methods, and tools ignore, disregard, or even suppress the knowledge on which their existing identities are based

abandon their current practices and admit that they do not know how to do research.

new research identities constructed for students through these texts are often based on a linear, print-based model of research, in which a “good” student researcher is one who is efficient and follows only prescribed pathways—pathways that frequently denigrate or deny the experiences of using nonacademic and online research spaces that students bring to aca-demic writing tasks.

disciplines. Research instruction for introductory students, in particular, is usually the responsibility of first-year composition teachers. Introductory composition courses often include a research component in which the mental and physical activities of doing research are discussed and practiced.

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