Article Review 3

Pope-Ruark, Rebecca. “Know Thy Audience: Helping Students Engage a Threshold Concept

            Using Audience-Based Pedagogy.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching

            and Learning 5.1 (2011): 1-17. Education Research Complete. Web. 20 Sept. 2016.

            Pope-Ruark explicitly sets forth her argument at the outset: “Audience . . . is a crucial threshold concept not only in Rhetoric and Composition, but in any discipline that values communication skills.” She supports this argument first by briefly examining audience analysis as taught by Aristotle, Cicero, and St. Augustine (1). Pope-Ruark then extends her argument to include the idea that students typically only encounter, and thus learn to adapt to, but one audience: the instructor. Even though expectations and assignments vary from one instructor to another, Pope-Ruark asserts, “Our students are experts when it comes to us . . . because they’ve spent their entire educational careers learning how to read us . . . and how to get what they want from us, usually specific grades” (1).

            In support of her argument and in an attempt to move her students toward a genuine understanding of audience, Pope-Ruark designed a semester-long, client-based project which called upon her upper level professional writing and rhetoric students to create a series of informative videos describing services provided by their clients: the librarians of Elon University’s Belk Library. In one example of their initial, liminal state regarding audience, students took advantage of only one of multiple opportunities to consult with their clients, and that one consultation was right at the beginning of the project (6). Students assumed that as consumers of library services, they were the experts, the real audience per se, and there was no need for them to further consult the librarians (7).

            These assumptions led the students to misstep so significantly that Pope-Ruark came to call the day on which they presented their work to the librarians “Reconciliation Day” (10). While the librarians responded with surprise, confusion, and disappointment at the students’ products, the students responded with surprise, frustration, and upset at the librarians’ feedback (8-12). After processing their “Reconciliation Day” emotions via journaling and  discussions with Pope-Ruark, students were able to begin crossing the threshold to a meaningful understanding of audience: “They consciously attempted to improve their knowledge by initiating more give-and-take client and student audience interactions during the final phase of the video project” (12).

            This article deepened my understanding of threshold concepts overall via Pope-Ruark’s  detailed exploration of audience. Pope-Ruark’s careful description of the project through which she guided her students not only helped me comprehend threshold concepts, but also gave me valuable ideas for reworking the authentic audience assignments I have tried with my own students. Additionally, I appreciated that Pope-Ruark spelled out the learning goals for her course (5); this allowed me to see how threshold concepts and learning outcomes differ from one another yet function together. For these reasons, I would recommend this article to my peers and scholars in the field.