User:DThatcher99/Writing across the curriculum

WAC Structure and Implementation

WAC Workshops

WAC workshops are often designed and hosted by members of the English department. They are intended to teach faculty from across campuses how to incorporate writing as a mode of learning, and sometimes discovery, in any discipline. In the workshops, the use of writing is often taught to be used to inform future instruction, and to determine students' understanding of communication and rhetoric. Additionally, workshops also serve in the following ways:

• Encouraging community among faculty interested in WAC.
• Allowing WAC faculty (often, but not always from English or composition studies) to share knowledge about writing to learn, writing process, providing student feedback, and other composition scholarship. This helps to eliminate the stigma and reverse negative experiences that many individuals have had with composition instructors in the past.
• Providing a forum for open discussion about writing and teaching, allowing faculty to come to shared agreements about what standard writing should be held to in each discipline.
• As workshops help to develop discourse communities on campus, they give faculty an opportunity to experiment with different writing strategies including collaborative writing and peer-review and to experience something of how these strategies may feel for their students.

WAC in Upper-division Courses

Often, WAC programs layout a students college experience so that they take writing specific courses outside of the English department as part of their major requirements. In part, the aim of these upper-division courses is to teach students to separate themselves from what they are learning, and to treat the process of learning as a process of discovery. Upper-division courses teach students discipline specific writing so that they may enter their chosen field and find an audience who is willing to listen to them. In order to find their audience, one must have communication skills that allow them to be intensive, passionate, and stylistically appropriate within their discourse communities.

The rationale for discipline specific writing-intensive courses includes:

• Writing practice – as with any other skill, students' writing abilities will atrophy if they are left unpracticed; writing-intensive courses ensure that students continue to write after leaving first-year composition, this issue has been termed as freshman deterioration.
• Writing as a form of discovery through learning – WAC programs promote that incorporating active writing promotes student engagement which leads to a process of discovery, allowing for student learning to happen at the highest level possible.
• Professionalization – writing-intensive courses directed at upper-division major students provide an opportunity for students to learn the communication skills and jargon expected of the members of discourse communities surrounding one's chosen discipline.

WAC in First-year Composition

WAC programs are typically designed so that students take freshman level writing courses in the English department to gain basic understandings of writing conventions and then to take a discipline specific writing course within their respective department during their junior year. This fights deterioration of writing skills as it ensures they are continued to be practiced and evaluated as one’s college career advances. Studies showed that seniors in Harvard’s science department wrote at a lower level than their freshman counterparts, whereas seniors in the English department wrote at higher levels than their freshman counterparts. As opposed to upper-division courses that instruct students on how to best write within their chosen disciplines discourse community, freshman level composition courses (usually taken in the English department) aim to introduce students to the general practices of composition in an academic setting. A WAC program at The University of Texas had students take a freshman level writing course in the English department, and then built off of that learning during their junior and senior years, ultimately leading students to understanding both general composition practices and discipline specific standards.

Outcomes and Challenges Possible When Implementing a WAC Program

Outcomes Possible

Students

As students are introduced into various styles and approaches to writing across the disciplines, they are also being introduced to new ways of developing their skills, acquiring knowledge, and communicating. Also, WAC programs teach students to develop an understanding of the discourse expected of them in their chosen disciplines, and how to engage within those discourse communities using critical thinking skills. There is benefit from students learning to articulate through authentic and relevant writing. WAC programs also hold the ability to battle inequities within composition. Students can be assessed on more equal ground under WAC programs such as the ones Asao B. Inoue speaks of. Inoue urges for WAC programs to create composition cultures that invite differences in students' language in racial and cultural contexts. Through acts such as these, non-white students will no longer receive less than their white peers at the hands of biased grading and expectations.

Faculty

As faculty use the things they learn in the WAC workshops in their teaching, their idea of what makes writing “good” will be challenged and hopefully expanded. This shift in the atmosphere surrounding writing may not only be seen on an individual level, but across entire campuses. Not only can student writing be seen to improve as their college career progresses, but faculty also gain a renewed sense of confidence in their own writing skills and learned that they still have more to learn about teaching. Outside of the classrooms, faculty will also develop a newfound sense of community as they are able to come together and speak as members of a single discourse community, even as they discuss topics across all disciplines. Within discipline specific discourse communities, faculty come together and develop a consensus of what expectations need to be held within their department. Those expectations are held, in part, by creating a standard for the level and kind of critical thinking needed to succeed within their certain discipline.

Challenges

Susan McLeod said that WAC programs aim for "change in the entire educational process at the university level". Most major changes to an institution will not be met without negativity and resistance, and WAC programs are not an exception. In order for a WAC workshop to work properly, those in attendance must be willing to participate with an open mind. Unfortunately, many faculty members will not be inclined to approach workshops with any resemblance of enthusiasm. Faculty are quick to question the empirical evidence backing the idea that writing aids learning. This is especially true for those who belong to the English department and already have their own understanding of composition theory. Issues reside outside of the workshops as well, being seen inside classrooms as results of faculty's pedagogy. Many faculty believe that to teach writing in all departments means all departments become responsible for teaching grammar, and most faculty members outside of the English department hold no desire to teach writing mechanics at such a trivial level. Numbers become an overwhelmingly large obstacle for WAC programs. If a class has a large number of students, such as classes with enrollment in the 50's, 60's, or even higher, then writing assignments are not ideal as the faculty member cannot read, grade, and provide feedback on them all.Finally, there is the issue of faculty priorities. Many universities have such a focus on research that faculty members allow their teaching to take the back burner. These universities hang the promise of Tenure in front of their faculty members, but only if they can provide quality research--and thus it becomes their number one priority. As such, these faculty members do not have the time or care to implement writing assignments into their teaching practices.