Postcolonial Critique: A Threshold Concept in Organizational Communication Studies

In 2014, I attended the Backwards By Design professional development retreat as a way to enhance my writing instruction in the field of communication studies. The retreat workshops provided an opportunity for me to create and transform one of my courses by envisioning where I wanted to end up and working backwards on how to get there. By giving attention to design, enactment, and result, I was able to re-consider the overall learning goals of the course, with particular attention to the core concepts that potentially hold the power to transform student perception of communication studies. Below, I provide a description of the specific course I selected to workshop during the retreat, the threshold concept (Cousin, 2006) I chose to guide my re-design of the course, and the implications (i.e., assessment, impact) of the concept for my students’ writing both during and following the implementation of the new course design