Writing Across the Curriculum
Writing across the Curriculum
Basic Principles of WAC
As one response to students’ lack of writing practice throughout the curriculum, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs emerged in the 1980’s. The philosophies underlying these programs generally agree on certain basic principles:
- That writing is the responsibility of the entire academic community.
- That writing must be integrated across departmental boundaries
- That writing instruction must be continuous during all years of k-12 education
- That writing promotes learning and
- That only by practicing the conventions of an academic discipline will students begin to communicate effectively within that discipline.
What is Writing in the Disciplines?
The second category of WAC is often called Writing in the disciplines (WID). Writing assignments of this sort are designed to introduce or give students practice with the language conventions of a discipline as well as with specific formats typical of a given discipline. For example, the science lab reports includes much different information in a quite different format from the typical social studies research paper.
Why Include Writing in My Class?
In our professional careers, educators use writing every day for a variety of purposes:
- To communicate infromation (memos, textbook evaluations, letters of recommendation, e mail)
- To clarify thinking (when we work through an idea ofr problem on paper)
- To learn new concepts and information (taking notes on reading and research topics)
Students need practice to be able to use writing effectively to meet these same goals.
One or two classes, or incorporating writing in one or two subject areas just can’t provide enough daily practice.
What’s in it for students?
Like all language skills, writing skills atropy when they aren’t used. Yet some students often report that they do very little writing at all during a semester. Some upper grade students don’t even take notes during some classes. For students who take only multiple-choice exams, writing can be avoided almost completely for months at a time. Assigned writing in all courses helps students keep their writing skills sharp.
Moreover, faculty in all content areas have discovered that assigning writing in their classes helps students learn material and improve their thinking about ideas in the courses. Writing assigned across the curriculum also helps students prepare for the day-in and doy-out comuunicative tasks they’ll face on the job, no matter what the job is. Equallly important, students need to learn about how writing is used within a discipline, and many kinds of assignments give students practice with disciplinary forms and conventions.
So shy assign writing throughout the curriculum? Students will learn more and will leave your class better prepared to face communication challenges if they write consistently over the course of a k12 program. Specifically, students will learn more about the material in your courses if you assign writing for your courses.
What’s in it for Me?
Including writing in classes has both short and long –term benefits for teachers. In the short run, teachers are better able to guage how well students grasp information and where they need elaboration of key concepts. In the long run, as more teachers incorporate writing into more courses, students become more and more practiced at using writing as a communication and learning tool. Especially for more advanced or specialized work in the discipline, teachers reap the benefits of having students who are better grounded in the fundamentals and ready to engage in more sophisticated analysis of ideas.
Writing to Learn
Although how writing fosters critical thinking is not clear (Applebee), theoreticians and practitioners alike agree that writing promotes both critical thinking and learning (See Adams, Britton, Bruner, Emig, Herrington, Knoblauch and Brannon, Odell, Parker on the bibiliography.) As toby fulwiler and Art Young explain in their “Introduction” to Language Connections: Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum:
Writng to communicate – or what James Britton calls “transactional writing” – means writing to accomplish something, to inform, instruct, or persuade. Writing to learn is different. We write to ourselves ass well as talk with others to objectify our perceptions of reality: the primary function of this “epressive” language is not to communicate, but to order and represent experience to our own understanding. In this sense language provides us with a unique way of knowing and becomes a tool for discovering, for shaping meaning, and for reaching understanding. (p.x)
In “Writing to Learn Means Learning to Think,” syrene Forsman makes the same point, but she directs her attention not to a theoretical justification but a practical rationale for writing to learn:
As teachers we can choose between (a) sentencing studetns to thoughtless mechanical operations and (b) facilitating their ability to think. If students’ readiness for more involved thought processes is bypassed in favor of jamming more facts and figures into their heads, they will stagnate at the lower levels of thinking. But if students are encouraged to try a variety of thought processin classes, they can, regardless of their ages, develop considerable mental power. Writing is one of the most effecive ways to develop thinking. (p.162).
The consequences of Writing by Robert P. Parker and Vera Goodkin is an especially good resource on writing to learn. Following a detailed discussion of the theoretical links between language (especially writing) and learning, these authors outline projects that focus on writing in entomotly, clinical nursing, psychology, and mathematics, all with similar results: students learned key concepts and understood material more fully while also practicing some features of discourse for the specified discourse community. Thus, writing to learn can have additional positive effects in helping students mature as effective communicators even though the initial goal is to help students become better learners.
Alternatives for evaluating WTL Assignments
Because they are informal and often impromptu, wiring –to-learn activities usually aren’t marked for correctness. Rather, teachers or classmates quickly read the writing for a general sense of what students understand and don’t understand.
Most teachers cannot read through and comment on every WTL activity students complete. See the following suggestions for alternatives to reading and /or commenting on every writing response:
- Us an occasional WTL warm-up at the beginning of class as a “sort cycle assessment.” Pick up a single sheet of paper and comment briefly on students’ grasp of a reading assignment or key concepts.
- Pick up WTL material from five to ten students every day or every other day. Don’t read every word, but skim quickly to identify tasks students might need help with – a reading that bogged down in class discussion, a page that has very little written a page that has a lot written. This can also help to quickly identify misconceptions or misunderstandings.
- Use different colored pens or highlighters to note points in selected entries. One color means “good idea,” one means “consider pursuing this idea as a paper topic, another means “come back to this idea again and explore it in more detail,” and so on.
- While writing at the beginning and end of class, walk around the room and read over shoulders. This technique is especially easy if you have students writing on computers. Stop to talk to or jot a note on the writing of 3-4 students. If students don’t like having you read over shoulders, ask them to select a few recent WTL activities and put those one side for you to collect and read quickly.
- Ask students to select their best of most provocative WTL writing for you to review.
- Ask student to share WTL activities with one or two classmates.
- Ask students to send the WTL writing that contains questions about class material to you over e-mail
- Ask students to post provocative questions or summary/analysis of readings on an electronic bulletin board or Web forum for class comment.
From the University of Colorado at Boulder http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/index.cfm
Compiled on 1/31/06
