Troublesome Citations: Bridging Students into Our Community of Practice

Faculty can define “academic integrity” not as an absence or prevalence of cheating, but as “academic literacy” and create learning material that will help students to write within an academic community of practice. This paper explores the theory of students as adult learners who are negotiating with threshold concepts in terms of the genre of “research writing” that is the primary means of communication within the university as a community of practice. The paper offers solutions to implement across the curriculum and suggestions about how to help students to grow from the pre-liminal space that they occupy as academic writers. Finally, the paper discusses the faculty’s role in helping students move from pre-liminality toward liminality and progression toward mastery of the social practice of academic writing