by Jonathan Hall,
Coordinator, WAC Program
English Department
Rutgers-Newark
An Assessment and Planning Document
September 2004
For printable (PDF) version of the full report, click here.
Writing Across the Curriculum at Rutgers-Newark: Launching the Next Phase: Table of Contents
Part One: A Unified Writing Curriculum 15
III. Writing Up and Down the Curriculum: Proposal for a Unified Writing Curriculum
IV. Proposed Revisions to the Freshman Composition Sequence
Part Two: An Active Culture of Writing Instruction and Practice
VI. The Transformative Potential of Writing Across the Curriculum at Rutgers-Newark
VII. WAC Program Structure and Standards: Assessment and Recommendations
VIII. WAC Assessment Procedures: Summary and Recommendations
IX. Support for Student Learning: Assessment and Recommendations
X. Faculty Support and Development: Assessment and Recommendations
XI. Conclusion: Funding the Revolution-WAC as a Regular Budget Item
XII. Appendices 103
Detailed Table of Contents 138
This report makes recommendations for the "Next Phase" of Writing Across the Curriculum at Rutgers-Newark. Building on what has already been accomplished in the first three years of the WAC initiative, we offer a specific plan for elevating our program toward a level of excellence comparable to state-of-the-art WAC programs nationwide, while keeping in mind the specific strengths and culture of this particular campus community. Throughout, we support a campus-wide team-based approach, centered on the two basic principles of a unified writing curriculum, and an active culture of writing instruction and practice. Our goal is to articulate a new vision of writing at Rutgers-Newark, and a framework for implementing it on the ground.
Part One A Unified Writing Curriculum
Basic Principle: Writing instruction must be linked and coordinated at every level from developmental writing courses to freshman composition to introductory, intermediate, and advanced writing intensive courses (Writing Up and Down the Curriculum) and in every department (Writing Across the Curriculum). We need a common approach, so that students feel that they have taken a coherent sequence of writing instruction by the time they graduate, not just several isolated courses that assign writing.
Specific Recommendations:
1. Establish and publicize a Unified Writing Curriculum. We propose a graduated scale of skills-based goals for all writing courses, linked in an unbroken sequence from developmental writing through freshman composition to introductory, intermediate, and advanced writing intensive courses. Clarification of objectives and outcomes will help instructors to improve course design and incorporate appropriate pedagogical strategies, and will enable better assessment of performance by students, teachers, and the program as a whole.
2. Initiate a "Sophomore Level Writing Requirement." Currently we require four writing courses: two freshman composition courses and two upper-level writing intensive courses. Many students currently get no writing instruction at all between freshman composition and WI courses taken during their senior or junior years. In order to fill this gap, this proposal would require that students complete a writing course during their sophomore year, and would increase the number of required writing courses from four to five. If students are required to take developmental writing before composition, then "Preparatory Writing" (Communication Skills 143) would count as one of the five, to be followed by English 101-102 and two writing intensive courses. For students who are not required to take developmental writing (the majority), the number of required writing intensive courses would increase from two to three, and at least one of them would have to be taken during sophomore year.
3. Re-organize the delivery of writing instruction services by
a) putting the Director of the Writing Program in charge of all levels of writing instruction, assisted by specialized Coordinators for developmental writing, freshman composition, and WAC;
b) integrating the Writing Center into this structure, and expanding its mandate to all levels of writing, with the Coordinators sharing tutor-training responsibility with the Writing Center Director; and
c) hiring a full-time administrative assistant to be shared by the Writing Program, the Writing Center, developmental writing, and the WAC program.
The goals of a unified writing curriculum would best be served by establishing a unified administrative structure for writing instruction, so that developmental writing, freshman composition, Writing Center tutoring support, and the WAC Coordinator are all under the same administrative roof, sharing clerical support, consulting frequently on curricular and pedagogical issues. Once we have established continuous goals-based descriptions of an unbroken sequence of writing courses up and down the curriculum, as well as across it, we need to make sure that our administrative structure is equally coherent.
Part Two An Active Culture of Writing Instruction and Practice
Basic Principle: It takes a university to nourish a mature writer, and we need to ensure that all writing instructors and all participating support personnel (tutors, librarians, administrators) are part of a team devoted to improving the teaching and the learning of writing on this campus. The WAC Program is the hub of this wheel, and it needs sufficient resources to fulfill this coordinating function.
Specific Recommendations:
1. Institutionalize WAC, and dedicate sufficient resources, on an ongoing basis, to support program activities. Define the Coordinator's role, rank, and responsibilities. Provide clerical/administrative support, office space, webmaster, computer equipment, etc. Faculty training and student support services will also require significant commitment of resources, semester after semester, year after year. After the initial round of grants, the WAC initiative went entirely unfunded. WAC needs to become part of the regular budget process every year, and adequate ongoing funding needs to be secured to implement all of these recommendations. Without adequate resources, the "next phase" is impossible.
2. Institute a revised Course Designation process. The goal should be to promote more consultation and exchange, earlier in the planning process, between department chairs, the WAC Coordinator, deans, instructors, and the WAC Committee. This will result in fewer administrative problems with regard to stop-points and staffing. A collegial, non-coercive dialogue between members of the committee and individual faculty will provide an impetus for improved course development and design. This course review process will also be a crucial program assessment tool, since it will involve collecting syllabi, assignments, course descriptions, and other materials from every writing intensive course taught on this campus.
3. Improve implementation of WAC in Rutgers Business School, through faculty training, more selective Writing Intensive designation, and enhancing existing courses. RBS needs to participate in a formal "Course Designation Process" for planning, developing, and reviewing writing intensive courses. Such processes are standard in nearly all WAC programs, and provide essential opportunities for collegial exchanges on pedagogical issues, for curriculum development, for administrative streamlining, and for program assessment purposes.
4. Provide resources to support student learning. This would include dedicated WAC tutors in the Writing Center, workshops for writing intensive courses by experienced writing instructors, and embedded curriculum-based peer tutors in particular writing intensive courses. We also should develop an internal guidebook for students, provide access to campus-wide print and online resources for basic writing issues (grammar, anti-plagiarism etc.), and further develop our website to help publicize and support the WAC program and writing intensive courses.
5. Offer WAC orientation workshops, ongoing pedagogical training, and professional development opportunities to instructors in writing intensive courses. Attach a modest "Professional Development Stipend" to every WAC Faculty member, which can only be redeemed by attending a certain number of professional development sessions. The basic principle is that faculty should be appropriately compensated for the time that they spend in sessions that might range from an hour-long workshop to a full day colloquium to a week-long summer seminar. Other forms of faculty support would include improved coordination with library research resources, a list of recommended texts to help students with discipline-specific reading and writing issues, and a website with annotated and selected links to the vast array of WAC resources available nationwide.
6. Explore ways of increasing attention to and respect for undergraduate teaching in general on this campus, and specifically for the teaching of writing. Faculty documents for tenure and promotion should be revised to include the teaching of writing intensive courses as an important contribution to the university's overall mission. An outstanding WAC faculty member should receive an annual award. Anything that gives undergraduate teaching a higher profile and importance will be part of WAC's mission.
7. Include ongoing assessment procedures in writing intensive courses. Institute an ongoing WAC student survey in all writing intensive courses. Investigate the feasibility of an online portfolio system for tracking student writing progress over the whole range of a student's undergraduate enrollment. Use a diagnostic essay in WI sections to gauge student writing achievement, as well as matching learning support services with those students who need them. Stay in contact with instructors through periodic surveys and an annual program colloquium. Use the annual Course Planning / Course Development / Course Review process as a key component of assessment.
In Fall 2001, Rutgers-Newark instituted a Writing Across the Curriculum requirement for graduation: all students must pass two "writing intensive" courses, including one in the department of their major. During the 2003-2004 academic year, the Associate Dean of Faculty appointed me as WAC Coordinator, and asked me to undertake an assessment of the program.
To carry out this assessment, we applied for and were awarded a "Grant to Enhance the Undergraduate Curriculum and Teaching" from the Office of the Rutgers Vice-president for Undergraduate Education. The title of our project is "Writing Across the Curriculum at Rutgers-Newark: Launching the Next Phase." Our two primary goals have been
internal program assessment to see what we have achieved since the program was inaugurated three years ago, and
long-range planning for developing the program in the future.
This report is thus part of a larger initiative. To assess the progress made by our Writing Across the Curriculum initiative over the past three years, and to chart a course for its future, we have solicited input from WAC Faculty, and the results of the faculty survey, and of formal and informal consultations with members of various departments, have been incorporated throughout what follows.
"Writing Across the Curriculum: Launching the Next Phase" was prepared by Jonathan Hall, the WAC Coordinator. Portions of earlier drafts were presented to the Rutgers-Newark WAC Advisory Committee for consultation, and revised based on their input. Other portions, especially those pertaining to the Unified Writing Curriculum, were presented to the English Curriculum Review Committee, discussed in that context, and some aspects were adopted. These issues and proposals were at the center of the agenda at the "WAC Colloquium," a day-long conference, conducted with the participation of key WAC faculty, on May 13 to discuss these proposals, seeking consensus on a direction for the program. (This was another function of our grant.)
This document is, and will for the foreseeable future remain, a work in progress. With the dual goals of assessing an ongoing program and planning for its future development, it could hardly be otherwise. On the one hand, I have attempted to provide as coherent a vision as I can of what a successful Writing Across the Curriculum Program should look like when it has been fully implemented. On the other hand, I am acutely aware that many ideal visions end up gathering dust on shelves, and my overriding priority has been to find ways to help actual students in actual classrooms improve their actual writing. We need to seek creative solutions, in times of fiscal limitations, to deliver the necessary services to faculty and students as efficiently as possible.
With many thanks, I would like to acknowledge the essential contributions of :
Annette Juliano, Associate Dean of Faculty
Malcolm Kiniry, Director, Writing Program
Patricia Bender, Director, Writing Center
Charles Russell, Chair, English Department
Lillian Robbins, Undergraduate Coordinator, Psychology Department
Alex Sannella, Accounting and Information Systems
The English Curriculum Review Committee:
Annette Juliano
Malcolm Kiniry
Patricia Bender
Mary Moya, PALS Program
Marne Benson, Writing Program
John Strauss, Writing Program
The Writing Program Assistant Instructors
My home base on campus. In several meetings throughout the year some of these proposals were discussed, and a number of people have offered individual suggestions more informally, especially Jennifer Arena, Marne Benson, and Lorraine Elias.
The WAC Advisory Committee
Many of the movers and shakers from the original WAC implementation committee are back to help out again. Many thanks for their input, and especially for their service in panel presentations at the WAC Colloquium.
Patricia Bender, Director of the Writing Center
Jo Grieder, Classical and Modern Languages
Lisa Hull, Political Science
Mill Jonakait, Biological Sciences
Mal Kiniry, Director of the Writing Program
Lillian Robbins, Psychology
Charles Russell, English
Alex Sannella, Accounting & Information Systems
Jim Schlegel, Chemistry
Paul Sternberger, Visual and Performing Arts
The WAC Fellows:
Experienced WAC faculty who have agreed to serve as resource persons in their departments in the next academic year.
Ann Cali, Biology
Alex Gates, Geology
Jim Goodman, History
Rachel Hadas, English
Wendell Holbrook, African-American Studies
Theresa Hunt, Women's Studies
Lisa Hull, Political Science
Jamie Lew, Education
Nela Navarro-LaPointe, Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures
John Randall, Mathematics
Lillian Robbins, Psychology
Alex Sannella, Accounting
Jim Schlegel, Chemistry
Paul Shane, Social Work
Robert Snyder, Visual and Performing Arts
Anna Stubblefield, Philosophy
Leo Troy, Economics
Myroslava Znayenko, Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures
The WAC Colloquium
A total of 35 faculty members, including nearly all of the WAC Fellows, along with students, tutors, and other interested faculty and administrators from many departments and from the Dana Library, gathered for a day-long WAC Colloquium on campus on May 13, 2004. During the morning session we discussed pedagogical themes arising out of the WAC requirement, and in the afternoon we focused on policy issues relating to the future development of the program. The stimulating discussions provided essential feedback on some of the proposals in this report, and gave a clear sense of what WAC faculty see as the current issues.
The WAC Survey Respondents
During Spring 2004, the WAC program sent out an extensive (109 questions!) survey to faculty who had taught in the program, requesting their feedback on their experiences, and also their assessment of the current state of student writing and their opinions about how the program should be developed in the future. Many thanks to the faculty who completed it for sharing their insights.
Honors College Research Assistant
Diana El-Neemany, a freshman in the FAS/N Honors College, was instrumental in getting the WAC Survey up and running, and then collating the results when they came in. She also helped with the research on WAC programs elsewhere, and I am very grateful for her contribution.
WAC Faculty:
All the teachers who have taught over 400 writing intensive courses since the inception of the program in Fall 2001: Jane Adas , Frieda Adler, Rose-Marie Aikas, Luis Alvarez-Mayo, Richard Anderson, Jennifer Arena, David Baker, Norma Basch, Patricia Bender, Jennie Bourne, Ann Cali, Karen Caplan, Susan Carruthers, Frank Casale, Young-Hye Cho, Douglas Coate, Ira Cohen, Marie Collins, Frank D'Astolfo, Kimberly Dacosta Holton, Fariborz Damanpour, Nina DaVinci-Nichols, Nancy G. Diaz, Ned C. Drew, Heyward Ehrlich, Lorraine Elias, Gary Farney, R. B. Ferguson, Alex Gates, Frank Gengaro, James Goodman, John Graham, Judith Greenberg, Josephine Grieder, Michele Grillo, Li Guo, Rachel Hadas, Jonathan Hall, Max Herman, Alex Hinton, Stuart Hirschberg, Wendell Holbrook, Nancy Holmstrom, Elizabeth Hotaling, Elizabeth Hull, Theresa Hunt, Mill Jonakait, Andy Kaspar, Lewis Kerman, Malcolm Kiniry, Eric Knox, Asela Laguna-Diaz, Stephen Laub, Jamie Lew, Jan E. Lewis, Jun Li, Laura Lomas, John Maiello, Ayesha Malhotra, Sandra Maxa, Donald McCabe, Candace McCoy, Alexander Motyl, Paul Nadler, Nela Navarro-LaPointe, Marissa Potchak, John Randall, Timothy Raphael, Michelle Rittenhouse, Diane Rizzo, Lillian Robbins, Michael Rohr, Tavy Ronen, Jay Rosenblatt, Charles Russell, Alan Sadovonik, Edward Saiff, Alex Sannella, Beryl Satter, James Schlegel, Barry Seiler, Paul Shane, Stephen J. Shearier, Harold Siegel, Janet Siskind, Robert Snyder, Terry Spencer, Angelo Spina, Paul Sternberger, Elizabeth Strom, Anna Stubblefield, Eileen Sullivan, Louise Taylor, Ioannis Tournas, Leo Troy, Catherine Vignale, Pheroze Wadia, John Wald, Leonard Wang, Danielle Warren, Ian Watson, W. Ray Williams, Allan Wolper, Myroslava Znayenko
The National WAC Conference in St. Louis-May 20-22, 2004
With a theme of "WAC From an International Perspective," the participants in the conference offered a comprehensive sense of where the movement stands at this time. The many workshops and panels addressed the common problems that we face in WAC programs around the world, and provided many glimpses of creative solutions. I would like to thank the many people who answered my questions, and stimulated me to think about things in a different way. Many of the proposals contained in this report have been influenced by these discussions. Travel to this conference was also supported by the grant.
Next: The task of implementing the next phase.
Jonathan Hall, Coordinator
Writing Across the Curriculum Program
June 2004
When a Writing Across the Curriculum requirement for graduation was instituted at Rutgers-Newark in Fall 2001, the purpose was to ensure that all students had opportunities to improve their writing within their upper-level courses, beyond the standard freshman composition requirement. Some 410 courses have been offered so far, which should give students sufficient choices so that they can fulfill the WAC requirement of two Writing Intensive courses, including one in their major. The original Writing Across the Curriculum implementation committee (aided by Dialogues Grants) laid a strong foundation, both in theory and in practice, for this initiative, and many excellent Writing Intensive courses have been developed and taught over the past three years. It is now time to take stock of what we have already accomplished in the first three years of WAC at Rutgers-Newark, and to offer a new vision of writing at Rutgers-Newark for the future.
In order to build on our successful beginning, and to take WAC at Rutgers-Newark to the next level, we need to recognize the contributions that have already been made by WAC faculty, and to solicit their continued commitment and input. The basic principle of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement has always been that the teaching of writing is not and cannot be solely the province of the English Department, and that writing instruction must not end once students have passed their freshman composition courses. Rather, every college teacher in every discipline is and must be a teacher of writing, in addition to the specific content of their own area. We need to recognize that a student who cannot write fluently about the ideas in a course is a student who does not really understand them in an active and sophisticated manner.
Good writing is good thinking, and improving students' writing skills involves much more than just tinkering with their knowledge of grammar and rhetoric, narrowly conceived; it involves a fundamental engagement with the student's whole process of comprehension, from basic critical thinking to academic research procedures to active discipline-specific reading skills. At absolute minimum, we need to articulate the standards and goals for students' skills at every level of writing instruction, from developmental writing courses (for those who need them), through freshman composition, and seamlessly on up to the most advanced Writing Intensive courses, the pinnacle of undergraduate writing at this institution. So the first part of this report will be devoted to describing a unified writing curriculum. This will involve some proposed changes in general graduation requirements and administrative structures having to do with writing instruction, as well as an effort to describe the relation between the various levels of undergraduate writing instruction, as they exist now and as they might evolve in the future.
But a successful Writing Across the Curriculum program needs to be more than just a collection of individual Writing Intensive courses, however well-taught. It needs to be a living, breathing community, in which teachers, students, tutors, and administrators both give and receive the support they need to fulfill their mission of promoting, assessing, and improving writing instruction in all academic disciplines on campus. The second part of this report will consider what changes and developments need to be made to the WAC Program itself to allow it to fulfill these responsibilities. It is not enough to impose a requirement, though that is the necessary first step. We need to nurture an active culture of writing instruction and practice at Rutgers-Newark. The guiding principle needs to be encouraging faculty to integrate writing into their course design as a fundamental tool of exploration and learning, not as a mere tacked-on adjunct. Once instructors can see for themselves that the judicious use of writing assignments is no mere make-work project, but rather a fundamental enhancement of the student's experience of the course, resulting in a deeper and less regimented engagement with the material, they generally overcome any initial resistance they may have had, and from then on will incorporate writing into their teaching practice voluntarily and enthusiastically.
Ultimately we can hope that the effects of this growing and developing interactive culture will be felt beyond those faculty directly involved in Writing Intensive courses. We can look forward to a day when not only those courses officially designated as "Writing Intensive" will have a significant writing component, but that nearly all courses will stress writing. The potential of Writing Across the Curriculum is to be no less than a transformative educational experience, for both students and faculty. If a comprehensive culture of writing is truly created and brought to life, it will change, for the better, the basic way that we do business with our students. We need to engage with our students at both a higher intellectual level and a more intensive level of individual attention to their writing development. This means that our classes must be smaller, and we must devote more of our resources, both material and mental, to improving our teaching. Our re-commitment, as individual faculty and as an institution, to the next phase of Writing Across the Curriculum is also our fundamental re-commitment to the importance of undergraduate teaching in general.
The "Across" in "Writing Across the Curriculum" does not merely signify that the doing of writing and the teaching of writing are going on everywhere, in every department-although that's part of it. The further implication is that writing instruction is linked and coordinated across the campus. We need a common approach, so that instructors in various departments and at various levels are on the same page in terms of expectations of student writing, pedagogical techniques, course structures, goals for student writing skills, and standards for evaluating them.
So WAC is concerned not only with the horizontal breadth of writing instruction (the fact that it's happening simultaneously in the social sciences, in the humanities, and in the laboratory sciences), but also with the vertical integration of writing instruction at various levels and at various times throughout the whole period of a student's undergraduate career. The second Writing Intensive course, that is, should build on the first; the first Writing Intensive course should build on freshman composition, which in turn should form a continuous instructional stream with developmental writing courses, for those students who need them.
We need to imagine the experience of a typical Rutgers student progressing, let's say, from an initial placement into a semester of developmental writing, through the freshman composition courses, on into a Writing Intensive course that also satisfies a general distribution requirement, and then to another Writing Intensive course that is also the Senior Seminar in the student's major. I will also propose below that we add an additional course to the sequence-the Sophomore-Level Writing Requirement-which would be a transitional course, either the end of the composition sequencee, for those who have begun with a developmental writing course, or else the first of what would be three Writing Intensive courses, under this new system.
That's at least five semesters of writing instruction at the college level. We can assume-or at least we can hope-the student will also be given extensive practice in writing in other academic courses along the way, but we need to make sure that the writing instruction in those five courses is coordinated: that it proceeds in a logically-organized progression in terms of expectations of students' writing, that it presents critical reading and writing skills in a manner that allows students to master them, and in a succession that allows for practice and internalization. In other words, we want the student to feel that he/she has taken an integrated sequence in writing, in which each course builds on what has come before, not just five random courses in which instructors assign writing.
This is the rationale for what has been called a Unified Writing Curriculum at Rutgers-Newark. (See Section V.D). Up until this point the concept has generally been applied primarily to the proposed merging of the Academic Foundations developmental writing courses with the Freshman Writing Program's composition sequence-a contentious issue which I will address on its own below--but I will argue that a Unified Writing Curriculum only makes sense if we integrate intermediate and upper-level Writing Intensive courses into the picture. In fact, the whole problem which outside consultants were called in to address-namely the disconnect between developmental and freshman writing in our practice up to this time-can only be resolved if we begin with a clear articulation of our goals for the overall arc of student writing development over the whole course of an undergraduate career.
In Part One of this report, I will examine the function of our WAC program in integrating the teaching of writing at all levels: the developmental writing sequence, the freshman composition sequence, the special needs of transfer students, introductory writing intensive courses fulfilling general education requirements, intermediate writing intensive courses, advanced writing intensive courses, and preparation for writing in graduate or professional school. Perhaps counter-intuitively for some, I will begin at the end of the process, with the highest level of undergraduate student writing achievement, and work backwards from there in describing the necessary preparatory steps that enable that achievement.
Part Two of this report will address, in as practical a way as possible, exactly what we need to do to encourage the development of an active culture of writing instruction and practice. Specifically, the following areas will be addressed:
Program Structure, Standards, and Procedures. How does our WAC program integrate administratively with others who have responsibility for aspects of writing instruction at various levels: the Writing Program, the Writing Center, the developmental writing sequence, ESL initiatives? Inside the program, is there a clear definition of the administrative role of the WAC Committee and other participants? Have reasonable standards for teaching load and class size been set and applied, and what kinds of resource issues do these raise, both overall and for particular departments? Do we need to revisit our criteria for Writing Intensive courses-for example, to make them more specific-or are people happy with them as they are? How can we structure the workings of the Writing Intensive Course Designation Process so that it will function in an efficient and timely manner, and result in a constructive dialogue between the WAC Committee and the proposing faculty member, and thus, we hope, in improved pedagogical design and enhanced writing instruction? What sorts of ongoing assessment and evaluation procedures need to be produced and incorporated for the WAC Program in the future?
Support for Student Learning: What do students need to be successful in Writing Intensive courses, beyond what can be provided by individual faculty members? How can we make students more aware of the WAC requirement and Writing Intensive courses, and engage their active (not grudging) participation in the goal of improving their writing? What kind of support can we provide, as an academic community, and how can we best structure its delivery? What varieties of tutoring (including traditional drop-in tutoring, curriculum-based peer tutoring attached to particular courses, e-tutoring, etc.), will provide the most effective supplement to the Writing Intensive teacher's in-class efforts? How can we empower students to access, in a timely and effective manner, online writing handbooks and other technological resources for help with grammar, ESL-related problems, and other basic writing issues? How can the program coordinate with the library to offer improved instruction in discipline-specific research skills for Writing Intensive courses? How can WAC pedagogical principles, in concert with technology and specific materials developed for the use of WAC faculty, help to reduce student plagiarism?
Faculty Support and Professional Development: How can we help faculty in Writing Intensive courses with the difficult task of incorporating writing instruction with traditional course content? What kinds of support would help faculty cope with the workload, and how can we deliver it to them most efficiently? What would be the most useful components to include on the new WAC Website as it develops further? How can we as an institution send the message to faculty that undergraduate teaching matters, and is valued, in tangible and intangible ways, on this campus?
We will proceed from the basic perception that faculty across the board are in need of support for the teaching of writing, and not just in the obvious cases of science departments which have traditionally emphasized quantitative methods rather than writing, but in the social sciences and humanities as well. Many faculty members can be excellent teachers, scholars, and writers themselves, without necessarily having developed the specialized pedagogical skills necessary to helping students improve their writing. A well-run WAC program can serve as an invaluable resource for improving writing instruction across the board, providing assistance in the form of forums and seminars for exchange of ideas, liaison and coordination with library services to help make research assignments both more meaningful and more manageable, and brief but intensive training opportunities for instructors, both at the beginning and at more advanced levels.
Since research points to the need for continued practice of writing in the disciplines other than English, successful writing across the curriculum programs build upon newly acquired competencies by requiring a writing intensive course in any discipline before the end of the sophomore year.
-University of Toledo WAC Program, Introduction
Let's begin with a very brief sketch of the parameters of the Rutgers-Newark Writing Across the Curriculum Program as it is currently on the institutional books. There are basically four official elements: 1) the WAC requirement for graduation in the catalog, 2) the stop-point limit on writing intensive courses (25), 3) the process of designating a course as writing intensive, and 4) the writing intensive criteria. I'll briefly summarize each of these in turn, offer commentary on the rationale for each element and how well it's working, and in some cases make a proposal for changes or additional measures.
Beginning in fall 2001, every student must successfully complete a two-term writing requirement beyond English 101 and 102 (or 121 and 122). Students may satisfy this requirement by taking any two courses designated "W" in the Schedule of Classes. Students must take at least one of these courses within the department of their major, and may choose to take the other as a course that satisfies general requirements, or as an elective.
[Note: For technical reasons, writing intensive courses have never been identified by a "W" in the schedule of classes, but as section 66, 67, etc. I will propose a new designation code below.]
Commentary: Rationale for an Additional Writing Course
Current writing requirements at Rutgers-Newark conceive writing instruction as composed of four courses: a two-course "English Composition" sequence at the freshman level, followed by two "Writing Intensive" courses at the upper level.
The relationship between these sequences has not been very explicitly addressed, however, nor have they even been consistently described as a four-course sequence. The very existence of a WAC requirement testifies that the faculty has been aware that two semesters of freshman composition are not a sufficient exposure to college-level writing instruction to prepare students to compete in the world after graduation, but we need to articulate much more clearly than we have exactly what we want the freshman writing sequence to accomplish, and how it is related to what we want WAC to do for our students.
One important problem with the current system has to do with a gap in many students' writing education between freshman composition and Writing Intensive courses. Because we have not articulated the interdependency of the various levels of our writing instruction, we have not required that students continuously study writing throughout their Rutgers career. Under the current set of standards, it is possible for a student to take English 101 and 102 during the first two semesters of the freshman year, and then take Writing Intensive courses during both semesters of the senior year, with no writing instruction whatever during the sophomore and junior years. Indeed, some departments have chosen to fulfill the WAC requirement by having students take a two-semester "Senior Project" or "Senior Seminar" sequence as a capstone to their career, with both semesters counting as Writing Intensive. Such "capstone" sequences seem to me to be in the best spirit of Writing Across the Curriculum, and I am far from discouraging them; indeed I would advocate that we set similar goals for all Rutgers students. But an unintended side effect of this laudable effort has been to encourage precisely the two-year gap in writing instruction that I have described.
Proposals: Sophomore Level Writing Requirement and Continuous Writing Registration
All students, I believe, require some mandated writing instruction after the freshman year and before the senior year. To address this gap, I propose that we institute a sophomore level writing requirement. Instead of the current four-course writing sequence, we need to envision a five-course sequence. The last two courses, as now, will be upper-level Writing Intensives; the first two will be freshman composition. The third course must be taken in the sophomore year.
If the student has been placed, as an entering freshman, in Communication Skills 143 Preparatory Writing, then the completion of the English 101/102 sequence will carry over into the sophomore year, satisfying the sophomore level writing requirement: the student's five writing courses will be 143, 101, 102, and two Writing Intensive courses.
If a student is initially placed in English 101, then the sequence would be 101, 102, and three Writing Intensive courses, one of which must be taken in the sophomore year.
If a student enters as a transfer student with two acceptable composition courses (B or better) from another institution, then the student would need either to take English 122 and two Writing Intensive courses, or just three Writing Intensive courses, depending on the result of a Writing Program placement examination.
In order for this new system to work, we need to enforce the requirement, which is already on the books but seldom rigorously observed, that freshman composition "must be taken as soon as the student is eligible according to established placement standards at the college. Students who do not fulfill this requirement may be compelled to carry a reduced credit load and to defer their probable date of graduation." (Catalog). We need, in fact, to enact and enforce a policy of continuous writing registration until the freshman writing requirement is satisfied. There are too many students currently who put off their freshman requirements, sometimes until the final semester of their senior year. Meanwhile they have taken (and passed, somehow) their literature requirements and other courses that theoretically carry prerequisites of English 102/122/104, but obviously have been lax in practical observance. We simply cannot afford to allow students to opt out of taking freshman composition in their freshman year. If first-year students are not registered for a writing course, we should get their attention by having them automatically de-registered from all their other courses, and publicize this requirement widely.
We should also enact a rule that students can only get credit for one writing course per semester. It completely defeats the purpose of enacting a writing instruction sequence if students take it out of order or try to double up. The effects of writing instruction are cumulative, and they require time and practice to sink in. Under this new system, all Rutgers students will have to take writing instruction in at least five out of their projected eight semesters of enrollment.
Another argument in favor of the sophomore level writing requirement is that it will provide, I believe, a comprehensive and even elegant solution to the whole political problem of transfer placement. If we require everyone to take 5 writing courses (at least two composition and at least two Writing Intensive), then that gives us the perfect answer in case students (or their institutions) complain that we're not exempting them from our writing courses based on their two composition courses taken elsewhere: quite simply, we require more than two. You may be forced to take English 122, but you'll fulfill your sophomore level writing requirement for graduation by doing so. We get students into the writing courses that we know they need, and they don't get the feeling that they're wasting their time.
Note that this proposal does NOT involve any change in the "one course within the department of their major" requirement; some departments are finding this difficult enough to meet, and this requirement will not result in an additional drain on their resources. But we have plenty of writing intensive courses offered at the introductory/general education level to satisfy the demand.
Commentary: Writing courses are labor intensive, and cannot be taught properly with large enrollments.
It is essential that writing intensive courses be limited in enrollment; this is only fair to the instructor, and it provides the student with more individualized attention. The current standard of 25 is pretty much at the upper limit of what is seen as optimal in terms of nationwide WAC standards.
Proposals: Enforce current stop-point standard strictly and address resource issues in particular departments.
Ideally, we would have a lower stop-point-say, 15. But I do not currently propose any change in this standard. I do, however, propose that we enforce the current standard strictly. Some departments-and indeed some larger academic units--have been running courses with much higher stop-points, and this is not sound pedagogy. Of course this is basically a resource issue, and needs to be addressed within the context of budgets and departmental priorities toward undergraduate education.
Initially, Writing Intensive courses were reviewed by the WAC Advisory Committee, but that committee was disbanded, and since then Writing intensive courses have been designated solely at the discretion of department chairs. Writing Intensive courses are currently indicated in the schedule by a section number of "66" (or 67, 68, 69 for multiple sections).
Commentary: A formal course designation process is a standard WAC procedure nationwide.
At most institutions with WAC programs there is a process of course review and development before a course is officially designated as writing intensive. This is useful for pedagogical improvement, for faculty professional development, and for program assessment purposes. The WAC Advisory Committee has now been re-formed by the FASN Associate Dean of Faculty, and is ready to re-institute course review.
Proposal: Re-institute Updated Course Designation Process
In April 2004, the WAC Advisory Committee approved a new "Course Designation" process, to be effective for Spring 2005 courses, that will involve a "Planning" process of consultation between department chairs, the WAC Coordinator, and the FASN Dean's office; a "Development" process involving a collegial exchange/workshop between the instructor and members of the WAC Advisory committee; and a "Review" process which involves the WAC Committee officially designating (or, in rare cases, not designating) a course as Writing intensive. This is not intended as interference in the prerogatives of instructors to control their own classrooms, but as a resource for faculty to become part of a larger writing instruction team across campus. (See end of this chapter for complete text.)
I will discuss this process in more detail in the second part of this report, when I turn to administrative matters. Here, the most important element is for curriculum development: if there is communication between instructors about what ought to be going on in writing intensive courses, then we can hope and expect that instructors will increasingly feel that they are part of a team, rather than operating in isolation. The course development process will be one of the key methods of distributing the standards and goals of the Unified Writing Curriculum to grassroots instructors teaching in the program.
Effective Spring 2005, the course designation symbol will most likely be changed from 66 to "Q." This will allow us to use Q1-Q9 and also QA-QZ, and will solve a problem that has arisen when certain departments offer multiple sections (as many as 12) of the same writing intensive course. A "Q" designation will require the approval of the WAC Advisory Committee.
Here are the current criteria for Writing Intensive courses, based on the original proposal authorizing the Writing Across the Curriculum requirement:
Courses designated Writing Intensive must meet the following criteria:
They call for substantial writing.
They offer multiple writing assignments.
They expect revision of work.
They provide students with learning opportunities through critical feedback.
Commentary: Coordinator's gloss on Writing Intensive criteria.
The criteria for writing intensive courses were deliberately left flexible by the original Writing Across the Curriculum committee, to provide maximum freedom for innovation and experiment by individual faculty members teaching Writing Intensive courses. Note, for example, that there is no fixed page count: the exact definition of "substantial writing" depends on the instructor and the conventions of the particular discipline.
The requirement of "multiple assignments" is meant to preclude the type of course where a "term paper" is tacked on to the end; a writing intensive course should integrate writing into the heart of the course. Writing across the curriculum means that "writing to learn" is just as important as "learning to write": the purpose of writing assignments is not just to give students practice at writing, although that's very important; well-designed writing assignments can help students to master the course material at a more detailed and dynamic level.
The requirement for "revision of work" is meant to ensure that instructors pay attention to the students' process of writing, not just a final product. There is a broad consensus among researchers and teachers of writing that the most effective writing instruction finds ways of intervening in the incremental stages of students' writing. The requirement for "critical feedback" is related both to this objective of improving the students' writing process, and to the objective of using writing as a tool for mastering the course material. The instructor needs to complete a feedback loop with the student several times during the semester.
Proposals: Adopt gloss (above) as part of criteria; supplement criteria with outcomes-based goals and professional development opportunities
I do not propose any major changes to these criteria, though I do suggest that we adopt the "commentary" gloss as an official part of the requirements, and also that we supplement them with outcomes-based goals for all writing intensive courses at various levels (see section III).
Based on discussions in the WAC Advisory Committee and at the WAC Colloquium, and on the results of the WAC Faculty Survey, there seems to be a generally high level of satisfaction with these criteria, and not much of an urgent desire to revisit them. Some institutions with similar programs specify a specific page count and/or a minimum number of writing assignments, but, as noted in the commentary, the omission of these was not accidental on the part of the original WAC committee, which recognized that both the forms of writing and the length of writing customarily done can be very different from discipline to discipline, which is the whole point of WAC. WAC directors nationwide generally regard the page count as a relatively unimportant criterion,(1) and our faculty seems to concur. A solid 70% majority of the WAC Survey respondents agreed with the statement that "I am familiar with the standards for Writing Intensive courses and feel that they give me a good sense of the program goals and sufficient guidance for how to approach them." Respondents were slightly more ambivalent on whether they wanted more specific guidance on page counts, etc. "I think they are fine," wrote one respondent, "but those in disciplines which do not use writing as a customary means of evaluation - e.g. science and math - probably find them vague." Several respondents expressed a desire for more of a communal process: "Occasional opportunities to meet with colleagues and writing professionals on how to teach our students to be better writers would be valuable," suggested one instructor, while another expressed a wish that "I could have attended a meeting prior to the teaching of the course to make sure that my syllabus adhered 100% to the objectives of the course or I would have benefitted from other peers' experiences in handling the writing assignments."
Overall, then, the criteria seem to be regarded favorably, though there is a lingering sense that instructors could use more contact with each other regarding standards and practices. Probably this desire will best be met not by changing the criteria themselves, but by providing more opportunities for interchange-for example, by sharing syllabi and assignments in online "banks" in the secure WAC faculty area-and by introducing faculty training and professional development opportunities, as will be discussed in the second part of this report.
[This should take place prior to the submission of construction sheets for each semester.]
A. Coordinator calculates rough numerical goals for Writing Intensive offerings, and, queries department chairs about their planned offerings for the next semester.
B. Department chairs consult with WAC Coordinator and FASN Dean's office regarding levels of Writing Intensive offerings in their department, including a discussion of any difficulties they foresee in meeting these responsibilities.
Once a department chair has declared the intention of designating a particular section of a particular course with a particular instructor as Writing Intensive for a particular semester:
A. The Coordinator contacts that instructor, enclosing an "Orientation Package" of materials concerning WAC standards, resources for teachers, sample syllabi, etc.
B. When ready, the faculty member submits supporting materials (course description, syllabus, sample assignments, etc.) in electronic form to the online WAC Faculty area.
C. Once materials have been submitted, the Coordinator passes them on (electronically) to a subcommittee of two or more WAC Advisory Committee members, who then review the materials, discuss them among themselves, and communicate suggestions to the instructor regarding the Writing Intensive elements.
A. The subcommittee of reviewers makes a recommendation to the overall committee, which can then designate the course as "Writing Intensive" (or not, in rare cases).
B. The Coordinator makes sure that the course is properly listed in the Schedule of Classes, and on the WAC website.
Timetable: It is anticipated that the full designation process as described above, including Course Planning, the Course Development Workshop, and formal Course Review by the WAC Advisory Committee, will be in place for courses to be taught in Spring 2005. For Fall 2004 courses, which have already been planned, there will be an interim, more informal procedure, where instructors will be asked to submit syllabi or other information, and the committee will offer comments and suggestions.
[Approved by WAC Advisory Committee 4/19/04]
I do see improvement in student writing over the course of a semester. But because the level of preparation varies widely in a large class, it can be difficult to teach at a level that helps everyone, and it can be hard to work effectively with every student. Occasional meetings for constructive sharing of ideas among colleagues would help. Stronger preparation in the English Composition 101 and 102 sequence would help, also. Too often, we are trying to teach skills and habits of mind that students should have gained years ago.
-FASN faculty member, from the faculty survey
By its nature, a program that depends on Writing in the Disciplines, taught by faculty attached to every academic department in the university, will be somewhat decentralized. It is neither possible nor desirable to impose a rigid, centrally-controlled template on the far-flung diversity of courses offered in so many different subjects in such varied modes by so many idiosyncratic instructors. Our tradition at Rutgers-Newark has always been that there are many roads by which a good teacher can guide students to the same destination.
We do need, however, to define that destination as specifically as we can, so that both students and instructors at every level will be aware of the expectations and goals in a given course in terms of student writing, reading, research, and critical thinking skills. I will offer a preliminary draft of such a roadmap in this section, in which I will describe, in a preliminary way, my proposal for a "Unified Writing Curriculum." In this section and in those that follow in Part One of this Report, I will attempt to answer the following key questions:
a) Should all Writing Intensive courses be taught on essentially the same level, or can we identify a hierarchy of expectations regarding student skills in critical thinking, reading, writing, and research?
b) How does our WAC program integrate with the teaching of writing at other levels: the freshman composition sequence, the developmental writing sequence, and ESL initiatives? Can we construct a continuous scale of goals for student skills that describes a seamless progression from the lower levels of developmental writing all the way through to the most advanced Writing Intensive courses?
The following represents an attempt at such a scale, a brief outline of a proposed "Unified Writing Curriculum." In the sections that follow, I will endeavor to fill in the details of the skills expected at each level, and thus the goals of the course.
Level 1 Developmental Writing
0.5 PALS Program Basic Writing for ESL students
1.0 Communication Skills 142 Basic Writing: Comprehension and Expression
1.5 Communication Skills 143 Preparatory Writing: Exposition and Logical Presentation
Level 1 Final Standard: Rutgers Incoming Freshman Writing Proficiency, equivalent to a well-prepared high school graduate
Level 2 Freshman Writing I: Basic Rhetorical Structures of College-Level Writing
2.0 English 101 English Composition I: Analysis and Argument
Level 2 Final Standard: Rutgers Basic College-Level Writing Proficiency
Level 3 Freshman Writing II: Writing From Complex and Multiple Sources
3.0 English 102 English Composition II: Interpretation and Synthesis
3.5 English 122 Expository Writing: Introduction to College Research
Level 3 Final Standard: Rutgers Sophomore-Level Writing Proficiency
Level 4 Discipline-Specific Writing: Introductory Level
4.0 WAC Workshops (see Section X.B.4)
4.5 Introductory Writing Intensive Course in a Discipline (All depts. 200-299, and some 300-399 courses with minimal prerequisites and many non-majors registered)
Level 4 Final Standard: Ability to produce appropriate analytical prose which demonstrates a nuanced understanding of fundamental terms and concepts of an academic discipline.
Level 5 Discipline-Specific Writing: Intermediate Level
5.0 Intermediate Writing Intensive Course (All depts. 300-399 and some 400-499 intended principally for majors)
Level 5 Final Standard: Ability to produce appropriate analytical prose which demonstrates an active and critical understanding of specialized knowledge within an academic discipline.
Level 6 Discipline-Specific Writing: Advanced Level
6.0 Capstone Writing Intensive Course (All departments 400-499 Senior Seminar/Project)
Level 6 Final Standard: Ability to propose, carry out, and appropriately document an independent investigation within the chosen field, representing an attempt to join in the ongoing process of making knowledge.
Our WAC approach at Rutgers-Newark is really a hybrid of two important models for program structure. This is partly an accident. The original plan was to require two courses for each student within the department of the major, which would have been a pure version of a "Writing in the Disciplines" program, whereas the final version, which envisions that many students will get their second writing intensive course from a general education requirement or from an elective outside their major, invokes elements of a classic "Writing Across the Curriculum" approach. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably or linked acronymically (WAC/WID), but Jonathan Monroe argues that they're really quite different animals: "While WAC emphasizes the commonality, portability, and communicability of writing practices, WID emphasizes disciplinary differences, diversity, and heterogeneity."(2) WAC, that is, believes that it is teaching transferable writing skills, and aims for a general academic analytical language, while WID suggests that there is no such thing as a single scholarly language, only the various specific languages indigenous to particular disciplinary communities.
However serendipitous in its origins, the WAC/WID hybrid that we have created seems to me to mimic, in a positive way, the typical student's experience of a Rutgers undergraduate education. Writing instruction begins, of course, in freshman composition for most people, although some students-and an increasing number, I suspect-will begin with one or two semesters of a developmental writing course before that. In any case, by the end of the English 101-102 sequence (or English 103-104 for Honors College students or English 122 for transfer students), the quest for the basic conventions of academic analytical writing is well under way. Students then take a variety of general education requirements before concentrating their attention on a major.
Our current criteria make no distinctions between levels of WI courses-they're all just "writing intensive"-but instructors need to be thinking about where they are on the spectrum of WAC/WID. WAC would conceive itself as an extension of freshman composition, carrying on its approach to that generalized analytical language, but flavoring it more extensively with the content and terminology of a particular academic discipline. This is what I will describe below as the "introductory writing intensive course," and in fact the majority of the writing intensive courses that are offered now are probably of this type. All courses offer a process of initiation into a particular disciplinary community, but for many students in these introductory WI courses, they're only going to be visitors, not permanent members of that community. In keeping with the "general education" philosophy of Rutgers and of American academia in general, the purpose of courses like this is to give students a taste of what a field is like, so that they can come back for a full meal if they're interested.
Before going to specific descriptions of these various levels, let me offer examples of the difference between an introductory, an intermediate, and an advanced Writing Intensive course. The first thing to be said is that I think that there actually are these distinctions, that they already exist in our practice, though they are not currently recognized or distinguished in our writing intensive criteria. I'll give examples from my own department, English:
Level 4: Introductory. I regularly teach Survey of American Literature as a Writing Intensive course, though there are also non-WI sections. Most of the students are taking this to fulfill their general education literature requirements. This is the next direct step from English 102, and we're trying to get them to transfer the skills that they've supposedly developed in that course over to this new context. One of the things we really need to emphasize is that there is supposed to be a continuity between composition and WAC. That is, in a Writing Intensive course, particularly at the introductory level, we ought to be able to assume a certain level of competence, yes, and a certain level of familiarity with analytical style and making an interpretive argument. But we also need to remember that writing is like learning to play golf: yes, you're way better off after your first few lessons. You know the rules, and you have some general tips about how to develop good habits. But you're a long way from being a real golfer, much less a good golfer. It's the same with writing. The Writing Intensive teacher has to be willing to go back to composition-level skills, on occasion, for review.
Level 5: Intermediate. The English Department has a course called "Foundations of Literary Study" which is required of all English majors, and it's taught as a Writing Intensive course. But students are supposed to take it relatively early in their college career. That is, it provides a fairly systematic introduction to the basic concepts and tools that they're going to need as English majors, and which wouldn't necessarily be appropriate for a course that included a lot of non-majors. A lot of departments have similar courses, some of which may be writing intensive.
Level 6: Advanced. The next and final level of undergraduate writing would be the advanced or so-called "Capstone" course. In the English department, there is now a new requirement called "Advanced Method and Theory," which is supposed to be taken near the end of the student's undergraduate career, and which probably will be designated as writing intensive. The point of these course goals is that this is not just a matter of the content of the courses being different, but that part of what we're teaching is the way that English majors, in this case, write, in the Foundations course. In the Advanced course, we're not so much talking about how English majors write so much as how graduate students and professors of English write, so that the upper-level undergraduate majors are on the way to writing the way that professionals in the field do it.
I think that this is something that a lot of us can offer to our students, and not just at the advanced level, though most obviously there: we can show ourselves as writers. We can talk about what we're working on, we can share our challenges as we're trying to revise something, maybe we can even share a draft of something or a part of a draft with our students. Whatever else an advanced course in any field may be, it's got to be a writing workshop, because, if we're honest about it, that's what professionals in most fields do most of the time: they write. Scientists may think, when they begin their training, that they're going to be working in the lab; they may even go into it for that reason. But if they're successful at it, they're going to find that what they mostly do is write grant proposals and articles and various other texts.
One aspect of the WAC Requirement for graduation is that at least one of the two Writing Intensive courses must be in the student's major. A number of departments have approached this requirement by designating their "capstone" course-often a majors-only advanced "Senior Seminar" or an individualized "Senior Project"-as "Writing Intensive." If this is done correctly-that is, if there is real writing instruction going on in these capstone courses-this seems to me entirely appropriate. Such advanced courses, in which all the students have significant background in the discipline and familiarity with each other and with the instructor, can provide opportunities for critical reading and writing at the highest level reasonably required of undergraduates. Different departments structure these courses in different ways, but I think that we can safely say that most such courses incorporate-or at least should incorporate-some variation on the principles that are articulated under "Level 6" below.
That's our standard, where we want our students to be able to go. Indeed, if we could make such a high-level Writing Intensive course a standard practice across the campus, we could speak of a "writing capstone course" as the highest level of WAC instruction-and of undergraduate student writing achievement. I am not proposing that we literally mandate such a procedure; individual departments need to make such decisions internally, and the designation of final expectations for graduating majors is very near the heart of a department's undergraduate curriculum and even its professional identity. But since every department is already required to offer at least one Writing Intensive course to its majors, we can certainly suggest a model which has the advantage of offering clear guidelines for instructors in terms of goals for writing, critical thinking, and understanding, and which calls upon all departments to expect and to demand an ambitious-but attainable-level of writing proficiency from their graduating majors.
Once we know where we're going, everything in our undergraduate writing curriculum can be calibrated backward from there. Even if it is not universally adopted, this description of an undergraduate "writing capstone" course in the major discipline can be used as a model for describing the goals and expectations of all courses that involve writing instruction across the curriculum, at all levels. If we are able to define what we want our students to be able to do by their last undergraduate semester at Rutgers, then we can construct a better paradigm for all earlier writing courses. The basic goals of everything from developmental writing through freshman composition and earlier levels of Writing Intensive courses can be described as variations on these final goals, a set of graduated steps designed to allow students to progress incrementally toward where they need to be. Therefore, perhaps counter-intuitively for some, I will start with our ultimate goal-the capstone writing intensive course-and then work my way backward through the student's career, through intermediate and introductory writing intensive courses, then freshman composition, then developmental and ESL courses.
Level 6 (Writing Intensive Capstone Course)-Any Department's Highest-Level Undergraduate Writing Course: Senior Seminars, Honors Seminars, Senior Projects, Advanced Independent Study or Internships
Critical Thinking-Level 6: Actively Contributing to the Process of Making Knowledge. Students should strive to interact with their sources and their instructor in a way that demonstrates provisional membership in the disciplinary community, and an attempt to contribute, at however minimal a level, something valuable to current debates and issues within the field.
Reading-Level 6: Advanced discipline-specific critical reading skills. Students must be able to read, analyze, understand, and respond in writing to complex, professional-level documents in their chosen field of study. At this level the instructor should feel free to assign, for example, current articles from specialized peer-reviewed journals, in the expectation that, with the aid of the instructor's guidance in class and in office hours, these graduating seniors will be able to gain a reasonable comfort with and understanding of this level of discourse.
Writing-Level 6: Ability to produce near-professional quality documents in discipline-specific genres using appropriate specialized language and formats. It is, of course, only the very rare undergraduate senior thesis that is readily "publishable" as is, but that is the ideal toward which we should strive. At minimum, a graduating senior should be familiar with the types of writing customarily produced by professionals in the field, and be able to produce something that at least approximates the diction, the conventions, the structures, and the ways of thinking that are endemic to the discipline.
Research-Level 6: Ability to conceive, propose, carry-out, and write a specific self-defined research project within the context of the course and the standards and procedures of the particular disciplinary field. Students are encouraged to pursue their own intellectual interests, within the purview of the particular course. The canned "writing assignment" that might be necessary at earlier levels should be avoided here. Students are now assumed to be "self-starters," having internalized the ways of thinking and codes of behavior expected of professionals in the field, and within the limits of available time (one semester, or sometimes two), they propose a topic or set of experiments or method of inquiry, which is then approved by the instructor, and carried out by the student under the instructor's supervision.
Level 5 (Discipline-Specific Writing: Intermediate Level)-All Departments 300-399 (those courses intended primarily for majors), and also many 400-499 courses (not "capstone"): Intermediate Writing Intensive Course
Critical Thinking-Level 5: Awareness of the Making of Knowledge. Ability to make specialized distinctions within key concepts, and to identify ongoing issues/areas of tension within the discipline.
Reading-Level 5: Intermediate Discipline-Specific Critical Reading Skills. Students should be able to read scholarly review articles describing the state of knowledge in the field, as well as articles distilling specialized knowledge for a general audience.
Writing-Level 5: Ability to produce non-technical but discipline-informed mixed-mode documents. Ability to make an informed argument about current issues in the field using appropriate analytical language which incorporates some specialized terminology along with the student's own voice.
Research-Level 5: Becoming familiar with the current state of knowledge on a particular topic. With the guidance of the instructor and the librarian, students should be able to describe what is known, what is not known, and what is in dispute about a particular assigned topic.
Level 4 (Discipline-Specific Writing: Introductory Level)-All Departments 200-299 and Some 300-399 Courses (those with minimal prerequisites and many non-majors registered): Introductory Writing Intensive Course in a Discipline
Critical Thinking -Level 4: Absorbing Knowledge and Making It One's Own. Students need to actively master the material of the course, and be able to put it together in different formats, not just reciting memorized facts on exams.
Reading-Level 4: Elementary Discipline-Specific Critical Reading Skills. Students must demonstrate ability to understand key basic concepts of a field, and manipulate them in different intellectual contexts.
Writing-Level 4: Ability to express and explore key basic concepts of field. Students must use their own words, appropriate analytical language, and carefully-defined technical terms to write about their understanding of course material.
Research-Level 4: Tracing Knowledge Back to Original Sources. Students should get beyond the textbook presentation of the field and demonstrate a familiarity with some of the key historical sources upon which modern distillations of specialized knowledge are based.
Level 3 (Freshman Writing II)-English 102 English Composition II: Interpretation and Synthesis
Critical Thinking-Level 3: Accommodating complexity and ambiguity. Students need to develop the ability to hold complex or ambiguous ideas in the mind long enough to explore their ramifications in a nuanced way, without prematurely oversimplifying them.
Reading-Level 3: Intermediate "Culturally-Aware Citizen" Lifetime Critical Reading Skills. Students can demonstrate through close textual readings an awareness of ambiguous levels of meaning in language; can articulate a critique of a current movie or book more sophisticated than "liked it"/"hated it"; can profitably read literary fiction and complex essays.
Writing-Level 3: Ability to produce essays that analyze complex texts, and defend a student's own interpretation of ambiguous layers of meaning.Students should develop the ability to articulate how various sources disagree with, partially agree with, build upon, take off from, re-apply the insights from other sources, and to do the same in their own writing. ,Students may be writing about fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, or challenging expository essays, but they will always be supporting their own interpretive points with appropriate evidence from the text, carefully analyzed and tied to their thesis,
Research-Level 3: Synthesizing Multiple Voices: Students should be able to find and apply appropriate sources to supplement their assigned readings, and to gain a deeper understanding of their assigned subject matter using the insights of various disciplinary communities. Students must consider and interact with alternate interpretations of their chosen texts, or with sources that provide historical or other context.
Level 2 (Freshman Writing I)-English 101-English Composition I: Analysis and Argument
Critical Thinking-Level 2: Analysis and Argument. Students must be able to recognize strategies of persuasion, in their own texts and those of others, and learn how to address the underlying assumptions and values which are at stake in order to construct a coherent and convincing argument.
Reading-Level 2: General "Educated Citizen" Lifetime Critical Reading Skills: Students can recognize an author's argument in an essay of intermediate complexity, and identify its principal underlying assumptions, appeals to audience's values, and rhetorical strategies; can participate intelligently in ongoing political and cultural debates; can profitably read such publications as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, etc.
Writing-Level 2: Ability to produce essays that observe the basic rhetorical conventions of academic writing. Students must demonstrate the ability to make a continuous argument, with proper transitions between points, and a thesis announced and defended in introductions and conclusions. They must use appropriate supporting evidence, usually in the form of direct quotations or paraphrases from the text, to support their points. Their essays must be analytical rather than employing merely narrative or summary.
Research-Level 2: Acknowledging the Work of Others. Students must demonstrate the ability to fairly represent the work of others, through summary, paraphrase and quotation; to carefully separate the ideas of others from the students' own contributions; to give formal credit by using MLA documentation style correctly.
Level 1.5 (Developmental Writing)-Communication Skills 143-Preparatory Writing: Exposition and Logical Presentation--
Critical Thinking-Level 1.5: Ability to Explain Abstract Ideas Fluently, and Combine Them Creatively. Students need to have an active grasp of the ideas that are being presented in class and in their readings, and be able to put their own spin on them.
Reading-Level 1.5: Basic "High School Graduate" Lifetime Critical Reading. Students must be able to identify the main idea of an essay of basic to moderate complexity, and to recognize the types of materials from which the author has constructed the essay.
Writing-Level 1.5: "High School to College" Transitional Writing. Students must demonstrate the ability to sustain a consistent argument about a subject of general interest, making fair use of appropriate assigned sources as a springboard for their own responses. They must work on avoiding logical fallacies and gaps in reasoning, on organizing paragraphs around a single topic, and on employing appropriate sentence structures. They must use correct standard English in all writing assignments, and should set a goal of extinguishing most grammatical error patterns from their writing, reviewing basic concepts as necessary.
Research-Level 1.5: Presenting information in students' own words, while acknowledging sources and quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing correctly. Students must achieve a separation from their source while using multiple modes to give a nuanced account of the content of an assigned reading.
Level 1.0 (Developmental Writing) Communication Skills 142 Basic Writing: Comprehension and Expression-
Critical Thinking-Level 1.0: Comprehending Abstract Ideas from Readings and Discussions. Students should show the ability to go beyond just repeating the words; they need to be able to extract underlying assumptions and generalizations.
Reading-Level 1.0: Approaching Basic "High School Graduate" Lifetime Critical Reading Skills. Students must work on improving reading comprehension through assigned short readings, and demonstrate the ability to extract and manipulate information from their sources.
Writing-Level 1.0: Expression Students will work extensively, both independently and under instructor's guidance, on reviewing basic grammatical concepts and moving toward extinguishing errors. Students must learn to use writing as a means of understanding difficult concepts, and of exploring and expressing complex thoughts and emotions.
Research-Level 1.0: Presenting information in students' own words, while acknowledging sources and summarizing correctly. Students must achieve a separation from their source while giving an accurate account of the content of an assigned reading.
Level 0.5 (Developmental Writing)-Basic Writing for ESL Students-
Critical Thinking-Level 0.5: Thinking and Writing in Standard English: Students must be able to think at an abstract level in English, without translating first from their first language.
Reading-Level 0.5: Intensive English Language Reading Skills for ESL Students. Students must work on improving reading comprehension through assigned short readings, and demonstrate the ability to extract and manipulate information from their sources. They should learn to avoid translating readings into their first language in order to concentrate on improving their reading in English.
Writing-Level 0.5: Correctness and Smooth Flow in Standard English. Students will work extensively, both independently and under instructor's guidance, on reviewing basic grammatical concepts and moving toward extinguishing errors, with special attention to the types of errors frequently made by non-native writers. They will work on improving their personal self-expression in both written and spoken English.
Research-Level 0.5: Basic Expectations of U.S. Academic Institutions. ESL students frequently experience conflicts between the conventions of writing and general intellectual traditions of their original cultures, and the new ones they must adapt to in their chosen American institution. Instructors will pay particular attention to issues of authority/individuality, intellectual property, etc., and help students adjust to new norms as quickly as possible.
Under a unified writing curriculum, WAC and the freshman composition sequence-and before that, for those students who need them, the developmental writing courses-are intimately intertwined. WAC proponents are constantly and justifiably re-asserting the inarguable principle that writing instruction is not only the responsibility of the writing program or the English department. It is essential that faculty in all disciplines let go of that displacement of responsibility, and take up full ownership of their charge as writing intensive instructors (and, indeed, in their non-WI courses as well): yes, teaching writing is your job, too.
Salutary as that reminder of shared responsibility may be to the overall purposes of WAC, it remains equally inarguable that the composition sequence forms the indispensable foundation for a student's success in upper-level writing courses. Therefore I will offer an analysis of the current freshman composition curriculum, its relation to WAC, and then, in the next section, address the need for adjusting the administrative structure governing both.
Students come into the freshman composition sequence with a great spectrum of abilities and preparation. These are notoriously difficult variables to measure, and even if we make a correct initial placement, there is no guarantee that the student will progress in improving writing skills at the pace that we would expect, or for which our courses have been designed.
The Writing Program currently addresses this variability in several ways. First of all, some students are placed in English 101, but with an additional required workshop, English 100, which gives them extra work on basic writing skills and generally makes 101 into a more intensive experience in writing instruction. A second track for some students who require extra attention is to sign up for weekly peer tutoring at the Writing Center; instructors in 101 (and 102) often recommend this path to students early in the semester, after an initial diagnostic essay reveals weaknesses in basic writing skills. Both of these seem to me to be excellent alternatives for many students, and they have a track record of being helpful to many of them.
.
The controversial exit exams also identify a subset of students making variable progress through the composition sequence, and thus may be far more useful as placement instruments than they are in determining passing or failing in a particular course. They identify a population--those who have been doing at least borderline work in the course but who failed the final exam--who could benefit from further attention to their writing process before-or, better, as-they move on to the next level. Currently, if students fail the first re-take exam, they then enter a system of "T-grade workshops" (so named because most of these students are carrying TD's or TF's on their transcripts at this time), or else intensive tutoring, especially for students with continuing ESL problems, both held in the semester following the one in which they failed to pass the exam. The students in these workshops receive attention to their test-taking skills and to their writing in general in non-credit workshops that meet once a week, taught by faculty similar to those who teach the freshman composition courses (PTLs and Assistant Instructors). Students who attend workshops or tutoring regularly are eligible for two further re-take attempts during the semester. If they pass, then they exit the workshop and receive credit for the course; if they fail, then they must take the course again.
This, it seems to me, is far from an ideal situation, but it is about the best that can be done within the limits of the current two-course composition requirement. The only power that the Writing Program has to insist upon its proficiency standards for student writing is to withhold the passing grade of C or better in the required freshman composition course. But the effect of the workshops is to put undue emphasis upon the exam as exam; students are filled with anxiety that they will have wasted an entire semester's work, for which they will receive no academic credit unless they pass the exam, and an entire second semester in which they faithfully attended workshops but still failed the re-take examinations. So the focus of the workshops inevitably becomes the short-term goal of passing this exam rather than the long-term goal of improving the student's writing for future upper-level courses and lifetime writing responsibilities.
These students would be better served, I believe, by a system that accepts that the exam results are a rather blunt instrument: they tell us that the student needs more work in the skills associated with a particular course. Rather than facing the prospect of getting no academic credit after all the hard work of writing papers and coming to class all semester, these students would be better off if their final exam were treated not as affecting the grade that they are going to get in the course that they have just completed, but rather as an indication of what they will be required to take next. In other words, rather than an exit exam, as under the present system, I propose that the final exams in English 121, 101, and 102 be treated as a Placement Adjustment exam.
Under this proposal, the current T-grade workshops and all re-take exams would be eliminated. Instead, students who get a 2 on the final exam but are otherwise passing the course will enroll in the next course, and enroll concurrently in a separate workshop that will concentrate on reviewing/developing skills appropriate to the previous course, the one where the final exam was failed. Satisfactory classroom performance in the 1-credit workshop course will result in a TD in the previous course being changed to a passing grade.
| Course | Final Exam 4 | Final Exam 3 | Final Exam 2 | Final Exam 1 |
| Basic Writing | Pass BW. Enroll in Preparatory Writing | Pass BW. Enroll in Preparatory Writing + possible tutoring (instructor's recommendation) | Enroll in Preparatory Writing + tutoring | D in BW. Repeat
Basic
Writing |
| Preparatory Writing | Pass PW. Enroll
in
English 101 |
Pass PW. Enroll in English 101 + possible 110 workshop (instructor's recommendation) | TD in PW. Enroll in English 101 + required 110 workshop | D in PW. Repeat Preparatory Writing |
| English 101 | Pass 101. Enroll in English 102 | Pass 101. Enroll in English 102 + possible 111 workshop (instructor's recommendation) | TD in 101.
Enroll in 102 + required 111 workshop |
D in 101. Repeat 101. |
| English 102 | Complete comp. requirement | Complete comp. requirement | TD in 102. Enroll in required WAC workshop + introductory Writing Intensive course | D in 102. Repeat 102 or enroll in English 122 |
This is the way it is supposed to work: A student fails the English 101 exam with a 2. The next semester, the student keeps her place in English 102 on condition that she must enroll in the English 110 workshop. The 110 focus on in-class writing skills and close analysis of sentence-level features, including grammatical review, will be equivalent to an extra half-semester of 101, and will indirectly benefit the student's current 102 work. If the student wants direct help with 102 issues, we should make drop-in tutoring resources available.
I've proposed that we replace these non-credit T-grade workshops, which delay the student's progress by a full semester even if they eventually pass a re-take exam, with a 1 N-credit full-semester workshop course that would be taken concurrently with the next course. These workshops would not lead to a re-take exam, but would be a self-contained course in themselves, focusing on specific skills that are tied to the course where the exam was failed.
What would these workshops themselves look like? They would build on our current 101 attached workshops and also on our T-grade workshops (both of which they would replace), but would differ in several important ways:
First, unlike the 101 workshops, they would not be tied to a particular section; instructors would be pursuing an independent syllabus in these once-a-week workshops, so students could enroll in any available workshop section with the appropriate number, as shown in the table above.
Second, also unlike the 101 workshops, they would not be directly supporting the course in which students are currently enrolled, though obviously there would be benefits as students improve their skills; instead, the workshops will be reviewing and developing skills appropriate to the previous course, since the reason students are here is that they need more work on those skills.
Third, like the T-grade workshops, these new workshops will serve many students who have failed final exams, and will stress in-class writing, but unlike the T-grade workshops, they will not be teaching directly toward an imminent re-take, though obviously this approach will help students prepare for the midterm and final exam in the co-enroll course. This should allow instructors to focus on development of basic student writing skills in a more general way, rather than "teaching to the test."
Probably the best way to think about these workshops would be as an extra half-semester of the previous course, in terms of their goals in critical thinking, reading, and writing. The obvious difference is that students will not be assigned major essays or research projects; they will be concurrently enrolled in another course that will be doing that, and we don't want the workshops to get in the way. Rather, instructors will be encouraged to take advantage of the small class size-limited to 10 students-and lack of exam pressure to focus on helping students to develop more sophisticated sentence-level strategies, both for writing and for critical reading. This is the kind of detailed and personalized work which instructors in larger classes and with a different agenda often just do not have the time to do.
These workshops will be designed to stand on their own, rather than duplicating the work of the 101/102 instructor. They will not be directly focused on helping students get organized with current assignments in the co-enrolled course-this is a useful function that Writing Center tutors often engage in with students-but rather are focused on long-term skill development.
| Workshop | Taken by students co-registered in | Stressing skills appropriate to | Population |
| [3rd weekly meeting of Basic Writing ] | Basic Writing | [Pre-Basic Writing] | All Basic Writing students |
| [3rd weekly meeting of Preparatory Writing] | Preparatory Writing | Basic Writing | All Preparatory Writing Students |
| English 110 Composition Workshop I | English 101 | Preparatory Writing | Incoming placement group 4 and most students from Preparatory Writing |
| English 111 Composition Workshop II | English 102 or English 122 | English 101 | TD students from English 101 and transfer placement group T4 |
| Arts and Sciences 200 WAC Workshop | A literature course, or Level 4 Writing Intensive course | English 102 and English 122 | TD students from English 102 and English 122 |
Once we have established continuous goals-based descriptions of an unbroken sequence of writing courses up and down the curriculum, as well as across it, we need to make sure that our administrative structure is equally coherent. The goals of a unified writing curriculum would best be served by establishing a unified administrative structure for writing instruction, so that developmental writing, freshman composition, Writing Center tutoring support, and the WAC Coordinator are all under the same administrative roof, sharing clerical support, consulting frequently on curricular and pedagogical issues.
My proposals for re-organizing the administrative structure surrounding writing are very simple. They all follow from a single premise: put all the writing instruction administration under one structure. Specifically:
Make the Director of the Writing Program truly the director of the Writing Program, not just the freshman composition sequence. Put him or her at the top of the administrative structure, reporting to the Associate Dean for Instruction of FASN, and to the Chair of the English Department.
The Director of the Writing Program would be assisted by four second-level administrators-the Writing Center Director, and three specialized Coordinators, all of whom would also be teaching either in the Writing Program or in another department, with some degree of release time for their administrative duties.
The Director of the Writing Center would now report to the Director of the Writing Program, with the Writing Center itself incorporated into this expanded Writing Program structure. The Writing Center director would be responsible for recruiting, training, and supervising the work of all the peer tutors and faculty tutors supporting courses in developmental writing, freshman composition, and writing across the curriculum, with the assistance of the specialized coordinator in each of those areas.
The Coordinator of Developmental Writing would also be the Assistant Director of the Writing Center, and, in addition to supervising the workings of the developmental writing courses (CS 142 and 143), would assist in tutor training, especially of tutors for developmental courses.
The Coordinator of Freshman Composition would have primary responsibility for focusing on English 101, 102, 121, and 122. This would be similar to the current Assistant Director of the Writing Program position, except that, with the Director of the Writing Program now responsible for a wider portfolio, the Coordinator would be more fully in charge of the day-to-day operation of freshman composition courses. The Coordinator would also work with the Writing Center Director on tutor training for composition courses.
The Coordinator of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program would oversee the designation of writing intensive courses, and would be responsible for faculty training and professional development, tutoring and workshops for students in writing intensive courses, and other support services relating to WAC. The Coordinator would work closely with the Writing Center Director on WAC tutor training.
Together, these five people would form the Writing Council: between them they should have a handle on everything that is being done in the name of writing instruction all across the campus, and, working together, can take the necessary steps to implement the Unified Writing Curriculum.
We should also hire for the Writing Program:
A full-time administrative assistant who would assist the Director of the Writing Program, the Director of the Writing Center, and the Coordinators of Developmental Writing, Freshman Composition, and Writing Across the Curriculum.
If we are going to provide adequate support services for such a wide array of courses, a full time administrative assistant is a must. I would propose eliminating the current Writing Program part time secretary position and replacing it with this full time position with multiple shared responsibilities.
Writing Across the Curriculum involves examining and supporting undergraduate teaching as a serious and high-priority enterprise, which is something that goes against the grain of contemporary academic culture. We spend a lot of time teaching. We spend a lot of time complaining about how much time it takes to grade student papers. We spend a lot of time thinking about it by ourselves. But we don't often focus on teaching as a team-based activity across the campus, involving not only other instructors but also support staff of various kinds. That's what WAC asks us to do.
Specifically, WAC demands that we think hard about the teaching of writing, and even more specifically about the teaching of writing at the sophomore level and higher. Officially our WAC requirement at Rutgers-Newark is nothing more than two "Writing Intensive" courses that every student must take to graduate, one of which must be in the major. But that's just the surface.
I think that something significant and even potentially profound happened at this institution about three years ago when the WAC requirement was approved. I think that the faculty of Rutgers-Newark decided that action needed to be taken. Our undergraduate students were not getting enough writing instruction. It was not that the Writing Program was doing a bad job; it was, rather, that no freshman composition program can be a sufficient location for a student to learn everything that he or she needs to learn about such a fundamental skill as writing. It's something that needs to be practiced continuously. It's something that needs to be part of a sequence. It's something whose importance needs to be reenforced in every course that a student takes. And I think that WAC was a wake-up call to every department saying: we need to teach writing, and we need to teach it not only intensively but extensively. Because writing is thinking, and we owe it to our students to take their thought-processes on paper seriously. We need to affirm the centrality of writing-not just grammar and form, but in an extended sense involving critical thinking, discipline-specific reading, and college-level research--to the educational experience, for ourselves, for our colleagues, for this institution, and most of all for our students. This is the basic premise of Writing Across the Curriculum, and it applies not only to those courses officially designated as "writing intensive," but to the entire instructional enterprise across campus.
So that's my hope, in fact: it's that WAC will spread. The danger, of course, is always that the teaching of writing will remain confined to freshman composition and the scattered writing intensive course. I suppose that's better than not having any upper-level writing instruction at all, but I think that the potential of WAC is much bigger than that. I think that it can be a transformative experience, both for our students and for us, in relation to them. By putting the teaching of writing at the center of our undergraduate educational program here, we as a faculty and as an institution are, in fact, making a fundamental recommitment to undergraduate teaching.
The reward structure for faculty, of course, does not currently encourage this emphasis on teaching, but perhaps even that will change, with time. What we are offering is a new vision of writing at Rutgers. We need to work toward a time when not only Writing Intensive courses but nearly every course we teach will have a significant writing component, because that leads to much more dynamic and satisfactory learning for the student
Hillary Clinton popularized an African saying a few years ago: "It takes a village to raise a child." Well, my version is: it takes a university to nourish a mature writer. The central interface in writing instruction, of course, is between individual teacher and individual student, in the classroom, in conferences, in formal and informal feedback on student writing. But teaching and learning do not take place in a vacuum, and the broader context of the university as a whole must support and encourage that crucial interaction. We need a supportive culture of writing that gives both the student and the teacher what they need.
It is the central purpose of this report to talk about how to do that, in a very down to earth and practical way. When I began to research this document, my first job was to do an "assessment" of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at Rutgers-Newark, an evaluative look at something that had been in existence for two academic years at the time I began this process, three academic years now as I complete it. But what I quickly realized is that, quite frankly, there has not been much of a program until recently. There have been, to be sure, over 400 courses taught with a "Writing Intensive" designation, and the first cohort of students who must fulfill the WAC requirement for graduation are rapidly approaching the end of their Rutgers career. But those students-and the faculty who teach them-have been operating in relative isolation from each other. We have many excellent teachers on our faculty, and a good number of them have applied their general pedagogical skills to the problem of teaching Writing Intensive courses, and have come up, on their own, with sound models of course design. They have pulled us-and their students-through.
But a mature Writing Across the Curriculum program involves more than individual faculty doing good work on their own. It involves more, even, than the direct interaction between those faculty and their students. It involves a recognition that the teaching of writing is a team effort. It is not only the task of the freshman writing program-though of course the composition courses must lay the indispensable foundation-but of every department, and every faculty member, on the campus. It involves a sense that we are all in this together-and "we" in this case includes faculty, students, administrators, tutors, librarians, and other support personnel. We have not offered training programs for teachers whose expertise is not in the teaching of writing, we have not developed a proper orientation procedure, and we have not provided enough professional development opportunities for faculty. We also have not designed or implemented adequate support services for student learning, especially tutoring and workshops.
The first step, which I have already addressed in Part One, involves setting our goals and standards for writing intensive courses, and fine-tuning our writing curriculum so that it is unified from developmental writing all the way to the most advanced writing intensive course. The second part involves WAC proper, and in the sections that follow I will be mainly concentrating on the practical details of building a WAC program that fits this particular campus. But first I want to briefly indicate some of the fundamental principles of any WAC program, and to suggest how I think that they apply to Rutgers-Newark.
The Writing Across the Curriculum movement, in one form or another, has been around since the 1970s, and so its principles are by now fairly well understood, and have been implemented in many varied and creative ways by numerous institutions across the country-and indeed internationally as well. As relative latecomers to this approach-our WAC requirement dates only from Fall 2001-we have some catching up to do, but we also have the benefit of the extensive experience of other programs.
The Writing Across the Curriculum movement has been influencing American education, at all levels, for over thirty years now. WAC has survived and flourished where so many fashionable trends in education have come and gone, because WAC was never simply a product of its particular historical moment and political environment. Rather, it represents a serious and systematic response to some of the most persistent problems in modern American society in general and academic culture in particular: the dumbing down of America, the de-emphasis on critical thinking, the assembly-line approach to learning. More positively, it stresses the development of core competencies-not just writing per se, but also advanced discipline-specific reading skills, college-level research skills, and critical thinking-whose centrality to the mission of any serious educational institution is obvious and undisputed.
A practical assessment and planning document like this is not the place for an extended history of WAC, or for a thorough theoretical treatment. Nevertheless, it is necessary to place our experience on this campus in a wider context in order to understand what we have accomplished, and what still remains to be done.
First of all, WAC has always been a pedagogical movement. This emphasis on improving undergraduate education, in itself, places it in a sometimes oppositional, even contentious relationship with the current academic environment, whose reward structure for faculty tends to de-prioritize good teaching, and where fiscal pressures increasingly lead universities to favor models of education that are less labor intensive. With its central principles of assigning more writing and paying more attention to the specific writing processes of individual students, WAC is inherently more labor intensive. Smaller class sizes are a must for true WAC implementation, as our own Rutgers-Newark standard of 25 students per writing intensive section recognizes.
If efficiency is what you're looking for, then the information-transmission model of the modern lecture hall-also known as stuff, test, and forget-leads to getting more students "taught" with fewer expensive teacher hours involved. Of course, this assumes that efficiency is determined by getting through the textbook; the lecturing professor feels that the job is done if all the material gets "covered" and the scantron sheets are filled in. But WAC has always been opposed to the informationalization of American culture. At many institutions, teachers in upper-level writing intensive courses-in the sciences, especially-repeatedly report the experience of encountering students who have managed straight A's in their introductory courses, but basically do not have any usable knowledge. They may be able to spout some facts about biology-or at least they were able to do so on the final exam date-but they have not fundamentally learned how to think like a biologist, and still less how to write like one. WAC has argued persuasively for several decades that such "learning" is worthless, and that students who have a dynamic understanding of the course material--and especially those who have a keen sense of how to understand something in the field--will be better off than those who have superficially "covered the material" in a given course. WAC is about process rather than information; it is about finding out how to fish, rather than about being induced to swallow a huge fish dinner that you cannot possibly digest.
More specifically, WAC pedagogy is often described along a continuum of "writing to learn" vs. "learning to write." "Learning to write" is an ambiguous term, and is used in several different, sometimes conflicting ways. Often it serves as an abbreviation for "learning to write in the disciplines" (see "Program Structure" below), but there are at least two other meanings.
The most immediate sense of "learning to write" is the one that often persuades reluctant faculty and administrators to go along with a WAC program in the first place. Often the initiative is fueled by a perception that students in upper-level courses require more writing instruction than they have been getting, that their basic academic "writing skills" are poor. If Johnny still can't write after several very expensive years of college, that is certainly a cause for alarm, and often provides the impetus for action on WAC. This crisis-based model of "learning to write" played a role in the initial conception of the program here at Rutgers-Newark. There was a general concern that students were graduating who still had serious writing deficiencies, and that transfer students were being excused from freshman composition who still needed extensive writing help, and part of the rationale for WAC was to address this problem. Our WAC faculty are still very worried about students' preparedness: in our 2004 survey, a whopping 80% of instructors agreed that a significant number of their upper-level students lack even basic writing skills.
Simply by offering more opportunities to write, and by providing significant feedback on student writing, WAC will, in fact, lead to an improvement in "writing skills," especially if there is provision for adequate student support services such as tutoring or workshops. A central tenet of WAC initiatives is that writing cannot be left just to the English department, or to the freshman writing program. But this conception of WAC as basically an extension of freshman composition, perhaps even as a remedial program for those who managed to get through that first year writing program without really being able to produce serviceable analytical prose, is a rather limited one, in relation to WAC's overall transformative potential for undergraduate education as a whole, and it is generally not the aspect that is emphasized by WAC practitioners. It is perhaps the most attractive aspect of WAC to those on the outside, but it suffers from the assumption, which most WAC advocates would vigorously contest, that writing is a separable set of "skills" that may be ultimately mastered, rather than a way of life, a continuously evolving way of thinking and being and discovering that is intimately bound up with critical thinking and reading in specific fields.
Perhaps most often "learning to write" is paired with "writing to learn" in describing the two key polarities of WAC pedagogy. "Writing to learn" exercises and assignments emphasize the use of writing, often in an informal or improvisatory way, to aid students in the understanding of course material, while "learning to write," in this context, is more focused on the final product, though it also will incorporate numerous revisions in the process. This version of "learning to write" is sometimes also called "writing to communicate," because it emphasizes the public nature of discourse and the necessity of addressing a defined audience.
Structurally, the Rutgers-Newark WAC program has been influenced by two very prevalent models. In its original conception, the WAC Advisory Committee settled on a "Writing in the Disciplines" model, in which every department would need to offer "Writing Intensive courses" designed to help students learn the conventions associated with a particular academic disciplinary community, and thus gain provisional membership within it. The first proposal was that every student would need to take two Writing Intensive courses in his or her major in order to graduate, but this was eventually cut back to at least one course in the major and one possibly outside, at the behest of several departments who saw the other model as too burdensome on their teaching resources. The second course might also be in the major, and departments retain the option of requiring this, but in many cases students will satisfy the second Writing Intensive course as they fulfill their general education requirements.
So our program is a hybrid: the requirement of a course in the major fits with the "Writing in the Disciplines" model, while the introductory writing intensive courses associated with general education requirements evokes the classic "Writing Across the Curriculum" program that seeks to expand writing instruction out beyond the bounds of freshman composition. One of the purposes of the "Unified Writing Curriculum" that I offered in the first part of this report was to articulate the differences, in approach and course goals, between an introductory writing intensive course, which would include a number of non-majors, and an intermediate or advanced writing intensive course which would, to varying degrees, assume a certain background in the subject and commitment to more permanent membership in the disciplinary community. The types of writing assignments that would be given in these three types of courses are quite different, and so it is important that instructors have a clear idea of which kind of course they are teaching so that they can design it appropriately.
I don't think that the hybrid structure of our program is a problem. If anything, it's a strength, because it lays the groundwork for an expansion of the use of writing to learn far beyond the bounds of official "writing intensive" courses.
What I intend to offer, in this second part of the report, is a model of where I think the program needs to go in the next few years. I will evaluate where we are in relation to what are considered "best practices" in the national WAC/WID community, and attempt to craft a plan that fits with the specific culture, needs, and circumstances of Rutgers-Newark. In doing so, my general goal will be to present a vision of what such a program should look like in a few years if we are doing things the right way.
Let me begin by articulating some basic characteristics of successful, state-of-the-art programs operating on the Writing Intensive model, and offering a capsule evaluation of where we are at Rutgers-Newark in relation to them.(3)
1. Strong philosophical and fiscal support from institutional administrators, coupled with their willingness to avoid micromanagement. Both top-down and bottom-up support are necessary.
This gets to the crux of our problem at Rutgers-Newark: WAC has not been institutionalized. There has been "philosophical" support, in a general sense, for the principles of WAC, but not regular funding. The WAC Colloquium expressed a strong consensus that this is the most important factor that they see as missing from the program: regular budgetary support for the WAC Program.
2. Strong faculty ownership of the WI system: faculty development precedes curricular change.
What the WAC Colloquium revealed is that there is a large degree of faculty ownership of WAC-a perhaps surprising degree, given that there has not been a lot of institutional support. There have been no faculty workshops, at least since the end of the first round of WAC grants, and no way of orienting new faculty to basic WAC pedagogical principles or procedures. The faculty who have been teaching it seem to understand what is required, but they have been operating without support. I will discuss faculty training and professional development more specifically later in this report. Developing faculty support and professional development opportunities is one of the major priorities for AY 2004-2005.
3. Support systems for students as well as for faculty are necessary.
We are only now putting into place, in Fall 2004, a pilot program to offer WAC support, in the form of tutoring and workshops, for students. I will discuss this further in its own section. This is another high-priority item for AY 2004-2005 and beyond.
4. A reward structure that values teaching.
In common with many universities with a research mission, Rutgers-Newark does not tend to emphasize excellence in undergraduate teaching as a primary consideration in tenure or promotion decisions. Elevating the undergraduate teaching mission to a position of equality and partnership with the research mission would require a long-term cultural change, and WAC can be an important element in that evolution; however, there are things that can be done-some with very low or no cost-to give faculty the feeling that their service in WI teaching is appreciated by the institution, and I will discuss some of these proposals in the section on faculty.
5. A program needs a program director: knowledgeable, diplomatic WAC personnel.
During its inception period, WAC was guided by a WAC Committee; when that committee was disbanded, it was in danger of becoming a collection of unsupported courses. We now have a WAC Coordinator, but that position needs to be defined more specifically and formally integrated into the administrative structure; I will discuss this more specifically in the next section. The WAC Committee has been re-formed, but we should keep in mind the observation of a "savvy dean" quoted by Townsend: "WAC programs and WI courses don't run by committee; they need somebody who knows what's going on and who worries about them all day every day."
6. Program assessment provides a feedback loop for improvement. Regular internal assessment procedures combined with periodic external program review.
We've conducted a faculty survey, and discussed currrent issues in the WAC Advisory Committee and at the WAC Colloquium.We are preparing to institute a new course review procedure, which will include course planning by department administrators consulting with the WAC Coordinator and the Dean's office, course development between instructors and WAC Committee members, and course review by the WAC Committee. We also need to formalize student input, through surveys, focus groups, study of student papers, or by other means.
7. A low student-to-WI-instructor ratio, along with TA help if necessary.
Our Writing Intensive courses are supposed to be capped at 25 students, which is on the high end of the spectrum of acceptable stop-points, but we can live with this if it is actually enforced. I'll discuss this further below.
8. Integration of WI assignments with course goals and instructor's pedagogical methods.
I have addressed in Part One the need for a Unified Writing Curriculum that will clearly articulate course writing goals in tandem with goals for critical thinking, reading, and research.
9. Flexible but sound WI criteria.
I have already discussed this in Part One: our faculty seem fairly well satisfied with our critieria, but I have proposed some additions/clarifications.
10. Symbiosis with other institutional programs/missions.
We need to work closely with the Writing Program (see part One), with the Writing Center (see Student Support Chapter), with the library, including the new "Information Literacy" requirement (see Student Support Chapter), and with the various departments.
In summary, I think that the underlying points about our program here are very much in keeping with the strong consensus expressed by the faculty who attended the WAC Colloquium in May 2004. Basically, the feeling at that day-long gathering of WI instructors was that the big mistake that was made the first time around with WAC was that it was not institutionalized. The WAC Committee did some good things under the grants that they got, but when the grants ran out, there was no hard money to follow. There was no WAC Coordinator, there was no administrative or clerical support, there was no teacher training, there was no tutoring specifically dedicated to WAC. And there was not enough specific attention to the problems that the WI requirement might cause for particular departments, or resources to help overcome those constraints. There were a number of references made to the idea that promises of resources had been made during the early discussions, which were then not forthcoming. It was clear that there was a certain degree of bitterness left from the experience of the past, but also a commitment to try to make this work in the future. Several participants described it as a crossroads moment for WAC: it's a time for the proper resources to be put into the program, so that it will be truly a program, and not just a scattered collection of individual courses.
Despite these ongoing problems, one very basic and significant piece of good news is that the program has functioned perhaps surprisingly well despite its lack of institutionalization. Sufficient numbers of Writing Intensive courses, at least on paper, have been offered so that students' graduation plans are not being impeded by the requirement. Departments, by and large, have behaved responsibly, and many talented instructors h