Abstract
In this article, I examine conversation about information literacy (IL) in first-year writing (FYW) between librarianship and composition and rhetoric and locate the fields’ shared interdisciplinary goals and values by connecting the respective, recently published scholarship focused on threshold concepts. Following other researchers from each field, I argue that students’ reliance on writing prompts for their research strategies present faculty and researchers with a kairotic moment for building disciplinarity into this occluded genre. For this case study, I conducted relational content analysis on eight writing prompts from first-year writing (FYW) to explore how faculty construct situational and information gathering contexts in their prompts and how those contexts encourage engagement with The Framework for Information Literacy. Faculty in this sample construct situational context by using an aside consisting of key-actions. Key-actions are systematically drawn on to construct multifaceted information gathering contexts that make attempts to support student’s enactment of their research in key-actions. These attempts often fall short due to embedded expectations packed into key-actions. I demonstrate ways of using the intersection of complimentary frames from each fields’ threshold concepts as a conceptual framework for constructing contexts that can be used to designed to facilitate IL and writing transfer in this occluded genre.