A successful Writing Across the Curriculum program will not be an out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all paradigm imposed from without, but rather an organic evolution that builds on the particular strengths of a given faculty and benefits from the intellectual culture of a particular institution. Now that I have briefly articulated some of the fundamental principles of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement, I will turn to some of the practical questions that have arisen here at Rutgers-Newark with regard to implementing these principles in a functioning instructional system. Every institution is different, of course, in its educational philosophy and its administrative structure, but there are certain fundamental issues about WAC that need to be raised in every case.

For this purpose I will adopt as a template, with a few modifications to suit Rutgers-Newark, a very simple document which was originally designed for use in the University of Hawaii system, which has one of the most extensive, best articulated, and most respected mature WAC Programs in the country. (The original form is reproduced in the Appendix.) In its original context, the form serves as a basis for an annual report by the WAC Director on each of several decentralized campuses about the administrative structure and basic functioning of the WAC Program. Such an annual report seems like a good idea in general, and as the WAC Coordinator at Rutgers-Newark, I intend the following to serve, in part, a similar function: an evaluation of where we are in our implementation of WAC at the present time. But I will also use the template as an opportunity to articulate what I take to be the core WAC values implied in the very good questions that the Hawaii document poses, and to make recommendations for bringing our practice more fully in line with those WAC values.

VII.A Is there a clear definition of the administrative role of the WAC Committee, the WAC Coordinator, and other participants? Do all of these entities have the support that they need?

VII.A.1 (Hawaii I.1) Is the program directed by a person who has been appropriately appointed and given appropriate released time to supervise the program?

Until this academic year, there was no WAC Coordinator at Rutgers-Newark. During the extensive planning process and throughout the first year of implementation (AY 2001-2002), the WAC Committee co-chaired by Mill Jonakait of Biology and Mal Kiniry of the Writing Program, oversaw the initial phase of the program. In 2002-2003, the Committee was disbanded and the Writing Program Director informally continued to be the face of WAC, but he was given no additional released time from his extensive duties overseeing freshman composition courses and teaching in the English department undergraduate and graduate programs.

By the summer of 2003, it was clear that WAC needed additional attention. After conversations between Dr. Kiniry, English Department Chair Charles Russell (a long-time advocate of WAC on this campus), and Associate Dean of FASN Annette Juliano, the decision was made to appoint Dr. Jonathan Hall, an Assistant Instructor in the English Department who had served as a teacher, a tutor, and a seminar speaker in the WAC Program, and who had volunteered to help out, to coordinate the program. He was given a one-course release each semester from his four-course Assistant Instructor teaching load.

VII.A.1.a) Released Time

The Hawaii evaluation document appends a gloss to its own question:

Note: For the last few years, the Committee has interpreted "appropriate released time" as "support that is appropriate for the program's current size and state of development."

This seems a reasonable standard, though obviously one that may be difficult to interpret precisely in practice. At other institutions, the amount of released time has varied widely, with some Directors being full-time administrators, and others carrying a full teaching load, or nearly so, depending on the responsibilities and the structure of the program.

My recommendation on released time is that the position of Coordinator at Rutgers-Newark, at its present level of development, is one that requires fairly intense activity; the more time available, the more will be built and accomplished. I would recommend a half-time release. [Note: As of Fall 2004, this has now been done.]

VII.B (Hawaii I.2). Who assists the director in supervising the program? (Faculty Board, Student Assistant, Other)

It is extremely important to involve a broad base of faculty and administrators from across the campus in the process of WAC governance, and not attempt to dictate everything from a centralized executive. Most institutions have some form of faculty committee or "board" to

assist the WAC Director in overseeing the program and making policy decisions.

In Spring 2004, the Associate Dean of FASN appointed a "WAC Advisory Committee" with ten faculty members drawn from departments across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Committee will play a key role in long-term planning and policy for the WAC Program, and will also participate semester-by-semester in the Course Development process: providing feedback to faculty on proposed Writing Intensive courses, and assisting in ensuring that designation criteria and guidelines for Writing Intensive courses are being adhered to in all departments.

The WAC Coordinator reports regularly to the Associate Dean of FASN, and also consults frequently with others who have responsibilities for writing instruction, such as the Writing Center Director and the Director of the Writing Program. The Coordinator also has periodic discussions and/or correspondence with department chairs who have questions about program requirements or issues.

At the WAC Colloquium in May and during AY 2004-2005, the "WAC Fellows Program" will involve long-term WAC classroom faculty in discussions about developing the program, and in mentoring new WAC faculty in their own or adjacent fields.

During the Spring 2004 semester the Coordinator was also being assisted by an Honors College Research Assistant, a freshman student who helped to publish the faculty survey to the web and to correlate the results, with research on WAC programs across the country, and with logistical tasks associated with the WAC Colloquium. This appointment may possibly be renewed for next year.

For the most part the necessary structures are either already in place or are in the process of being put in place. The key administrative development that is necessary are getting department administrators involved earlier in the process of Course Designation, so that there is a process of joint planning between the individual department chairs, the WAC Coordinator, and the FASN Associate Dean, as to the appropriate level of Writing Intensive offerings in each department each semester, including the resolution of either short-term or long-term resource issues.

VII.B.1 (Hawaii I.3). Do the director and board members have adequate professional / secretarial / clerical assistance to support their work and maintain records necessary for articulation of Writing Intensive courses?

VII.B.1.a) Office Space Requirements

The most pressing need is for the WAC Program to have a modest office of its own. This not only would let the Coordinator function more efficiently, but it would also provide a separate address for all concerned parties to be aware of as the place to go with WAC concerns.

VII.B.1.b) Clerical Help

Currently the only direct clerical assistance the Coordinator has is the Honors Research Assistant, a freshman student employed for 5-7 hours per week. For certain specific functions, such as setting up meetings or administering grant money, the Coordinator has been assisted by administrative assistants in the FASN Dean's Office and the English Department, but obviously they have other responsibilities and work for other people and such assistance is necessarily limited. It would be useful to have some ongoing clerical resources dedicated to WAC. As WAC grows, especially as it begins offering more workshops and other support services, the need for such assistance will only grow.

In the last chapter of Part One, I discussed a possible re-organization of the Writing Program that would involve, among other things, a full-time administrative assistant who would be shared by the Writing Program, the Writing Center, the Developmental Writing Coordinator, and the WAC Program. Whether or not the Writing Program is re-organized as I described, the need for administrative and clerical assistance is very real.

VII.B.1.c) Computer and Website Needs

As much as possible, the Coordinator's work, and that of the WAC Program in general, will be carried on online, ranging from routine communication to assessment instruments to the entire course development process. It is important that the Program have reasonably up-to-date computer equipment, including a printer and a scanner.

Currently we have a webmaster, Housen Maratouk, who was paid out of a former "Dialogues" grant to design the WAC website, and who now maintains and updates the site on an informal basis. Since he is also the campus administrator for the Blackboard course system, he has been able to help us use this existing technology to quickly and efficiently set up two private, password-protected online areas, one for the WAC Advisory Committee and for WAC Faculty in general. But this webmaster also has another full-time job, and in fact he's only been able to help us get up the rudiments of a website. We are going to need someone to help us with this on an ongoing basis, perhaps a work-study student.

VII.C 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?

VII.C.1 (Hawaii I.5) Are classes designated as Writing Intensive limited to [25] students so that effective interaction between instructor and student can occur?

VII.C.1.a) Current stop-point of 25

Our current standard stop-point for Writing Intensive courses is 25 students, which has been in effect since the program began in Fall 2001. This seems to be in line with our current standards for writing instruction at Rutgers-Newark, since freshman composition sections, which are the lead-in to Writing Intensive courses, are currently capped at 22. If courses are truly capped at 25, this seems to me to be an appropriate and workable number.

The key question of course, is whether, in fact, all of our Writing Intensive courses are running at 25 or fewer students. The short answer is No. In the early days of the WAC Program, enrollments in Writing Intensive sections were generally low, probably because students who were grandfathered out of the new requirement were avoiding taking sections that promised extra work. Now, however, almost all current students are required to take Writing Intensive courses in order to graduate, and this is bound to exert some pressure on enrollment, especially if our level of offerings declines, as it has somewhat in recent semesters.

There really is no substitute for a meaningful stop-point for a Writing-Intensive course. I personally have taught some Writing Intensive courses that were inadvertently not capped at 25, and while I did my best to pay attention to students' writing process, my ability to do so was definitely not what it would have been with a smaller enrollment. Stop points at other institutions range from 15 to 25, in my investigation, so we are on the upper edge of the nationwide standard.

I do not recommend any change in the official stop-point of 25. I think that it is reasonable, if it is real. What I do recommend is that we enforce it. I don't mean "enforce" in a punitive sense: as I've suggested, there often is a good reason for these stop-points, if only that departments don't have the funds or the faculty lines to staff their Writing Intensive courses at appropriate enrollment levels. But we cannot just pretend that these huge sections are really "Writing Intensive" when some of them clearly cannot be taught that way.

VII.C.1.b) Stop-point Problems with UC Courses, certain departments w/resource issues, RBS courses

A check of department scheduling construction sheets submitted for Spring 2004 and Fall 2004 has shown that while some-perhaps even most-Writing Intensive sections were capped at 25, the exceptions were conspicuous. Often this turned out to be just inadvertent on the part of department administrators-when they were contacted, many simply asked that the coding be changed.

Other times, however, the designation of higher-sometimes much higher-stop-points for courses officially designated as Writing Intensive reached a level that made it difficult to see how an instructor could possibly teach it in a truly "WAC" way, with multiple assignments, feedback, revision, etc. Either instructors would heroically attempt to deal with significant writing from 60 or 70 or 100 students, or-more likely-the Writing Intensive nature of the course would be severely compromised, to the extent that some sections may be Writing Intensive in name but not in substance.

These much-higher-than-25 stop-points for officially Writing Intensive courses were much more likely to occur under any of the following conditions:

a) the course was a University College course, taught at night or on weekends

b) the course was in a department that customarily teaches very large sections of most courses and has expressed serious concern about resource issues surrounding WAC

c) the course was in the Rutgers Business School.

Further investigation has sometimes revealed that departments have attempted to compensate for these large enrollments in various ways: by hiring graders separate from the faculty giving lectures or running laboratories, for example. But these are obviously not optimal solutions to this problem, which is clearly resource-driven, at base.

VII.C.1.c) Revised Course Planning Process

I would address these kinds of problems through the first part of the "Course Designation Process," which I'll call the "Course Planning Process," which is related to but logically different from the "Course Development Process." The latter, which I'll discuss in more detail later, is basically a teacher-to-teacher pedagogical workshop in which WAC Advisory Committee members give feedback to a classroom instructor on a proposed Writing Intensive course.

The "Course Planning Process" is an administrative one. Basically we will be asking all academic department chairs to consult with the Coordinator, as early as possible in the course-planning process, regarding short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals for Writing Intensive sections. The Coordinator should calculate rough numerical targets for each department's level of offerings, based on the number of students majoring in the department and on the department's previous offerings. In the great majority of cases, the Coordinator and the department chair will be on the same page from the outset with regard to the level of offerings and the stop-points of offered sections.

If, however, the department chair identifies a problem in meeting these goals for Writing Intensive offerings, then a more intensive consultation is called for. Sometimes simply shifting a few sections around may make all the difference, while sometimes more creative solutions are called for.

If there are resource issues involved, either short-term (need to hire another PTL for a non-WI course in order to free up full-time faculty for Writing Intensive sections), medium-term (several faculty members on leave next academic year) or long-term (chronic structural under-funding), then the Associate Dean of FASN needs to be brought into the picture, or some other appropriate administrator.

In most cases the Course Planning Process will be as simple as this:

1) Coordinator e-mails each department chair: What Writing Intensive courses are you planning to offer next semester? E-mail includes reminders: text of Writing Intensive criteria regarding stop-points, pre-requisites, program staffing preferences for Writing Intensive courses (i.e., non-PTLs), etc.

2) Department chair e-mails back with a list of projected courses and instructors.

3) Coordinator then contacts the instructors on the list to request course descriptions/syllabi for the WAC Committee to consider and comment upon.

VII.D (Hawaii I.6) Are teaching loads of instructors such that courses can be planned for and carried out in a way that is true to the spirit of the Writing Intensive guidelines and that does not add unreasonably to the overall workload of the instructor?

VII.D.1 Full-time faculty are the most appropriate Writing Intensive instructors, and the teaching load for them should be reasonable as long as courses are actually capped at 25 students.

Rutgers-Newark teaching loads for tenure-track and tenured faculty are not onerous; these faculty should be able to teach writing in their field to a classroom of 25 or fewer students without an undue call upon their time. These faculty are the preferred staffing solution for Writing Intensive sections. Full-time faculty at lower ranks, such as Assistant Instructor, have a harder time, but are accustomed to a higher load, and such courses, if properly capped, are not appreciably more work than, say, the freshman composition courses they might otherwise teach, so it is not inappropriate, in some cases, to staff Writing Intensive sections with Assistant Instructors, who are often experienced writing teachers and also well-integrated into the Rutgers-Newark way of doing things.

The WAC principle involved is that Writing Intensive courses are intended to be taught by faculty who are experts in their fields, and who have made a concerted effort to train themselves in state-of-the-art best practices of writing instruction. That usually means full-time faculty, at most institutions with WAC programs.

VII.D.2 Part-time adjunct faculty should generally not be teaching Writing Intensive courses

What should be avoided, if at all possible, is staffing Writing Intensive sections with part-time lecturers or other adjunct faculty, especially in departments where the teaching of writing has not been a customary practice or a high priority. It simply isn't fair to ask such part-time faculty to do not only the extra work involved in grading papers, etc., but also the additional professional development required to be effective teachers of writing as well as expert lecturers in their subject.

Some PTL's, perhaps, may be sufficiently well-prepared to take on this responsibility, or else some departments may simply have no other options. In these cases, I would recommend an additional stipend, over what PTL's would make for a non-Writing Intensive course. This would compensate them for their additional time and effort, and it would also send the message that we value the teaching of writing in all the disciplines, and we are willing to reward it appropriately.

VII.E What special administrative issues are raised by University College and Rutgers Business School?

VII.E.1 University College Issues

Issues concerning WAC in UC are just a subset of larger issues facing UC in general. Evening offerings in many departments have been cut back in recent years, some sections have been over-enrolled beyond their optimal size, and in some departments full-time faculty seldom teach at night.

The Coordinator, WAC Committee, and FASN Associate Dean need to carefully monitor the workings of the UC sections, to determine how much writing instruction is actually going on in each of them.

VII.E.1.a) Number of Writing Intensive Courses Offered

Writing intensive courses have been regularly offered in the evening since the inception of the program, and most departments are in compliance. But certain departments that have evening programs in UC are not offering sufficient Writing Intensive sections for their majors to complete their WAC requirement.

Departments should assess themselves using the numerical "Standard" for Writing Intensive courses offered in the section on "Program Procedures." The spreadsheet offers a separate breakdown for day and evening programs, and departments should make sure that they are meeting both of them. Individual departments are in a better position than outside administrators to know whether students are having difficulty getting the Writing Intensive courses that they need.

The Coordinator should also monitor the number of offerings being planned every semester, and communicate regularly with department chairs and with the FASN Associate Dean regarding levels of UC course offerings.

VII.E.1.b) Class Size

Some departments are offering evening sections, but are placing such a high stop-point on them that a true Writing Intensive course will be difficult or impossible to implement. Either instructors will be unfairly overburdened, if they attempt to give the kind of individual attention to student writing that the spirit of WAC envisions, or else they will compromise the serious writing component in the interest of maintaining a workable load of paper-grading and other feedback on student writing.

The WAC standard stop-point for Writing Intensive courses is 25, and this should be adhered to whenever possible. In fact, it's usually better to use this standard in almost all cases, and have instructors add any truly desperate students by means of special permission numbers when the semester begins, because this is an effective way of indicating how much pent-up demand exists for Writing Intensive courses in a given department. If enrollment patterns persistently indicate that there is more demand than current department resources can reasonably meet, then these long-term issues need to be addressed in consultation with the Dean of Faculty, or internally within the department, in terms of their allocation of resources between day and evening programs, or between teaching and research.

VII.E.1.c) Part Time Faculty

Some departments also make extensive use of PTLs or other adjunct faculty in their evening courses, whereas the WAC Standard strongly prefers full-time faculty members teaching these sections.

VII.E.2 WAC in the Rutgers Business School: Issues and Proposals

VII.E.2.a) WAC in the Business School: The Current Situation

There appear to be two fundamental challenges faced by WAC in RBS:

WAC Basics. It appears that there is not a great deal of understanding among business school faculty about either what Writing Across the Curriculum is in general, or what it means in terms of the requirement here in particular. We need a faculty training and professional development program to address this need, and this would best be developed by RBS faculty themselves, in consultation with the WAC Coordinator and others.

Resource Issues. The problems with WAC in RBS are not solely a function of philosophy or pedagogy; they also have to do with a lack of people with the correct training, and the dollars to pay for them. RBS courses, including many that are officially declared as Writing Intensive, are running with very high stop-points: 70-100 in some cases. Dean Kerman has indicated that his enrollment has rapidly escalated in recent years without a corresponding increase in faculty lines.

VII.E.2.b) Immediate Proposals

The following seems to me to be a sensible program for dealing with these problems:

1. Faculty Education and Training. To infuse RBS with an active culture of writing instruction and practice will obviously be a long-term process of education and dialogue. As a first step, at the invitation of Alex Sannella, I addressed the end-of-semester faculty meeting of RBS in May 2004 on WAC issues. It was clear from the reaction there that WAC has not been a frequent topic of discussion among business school faculty , to say the least. In July 2004 I met with Dean Kerman and discussed some of these issues. I invited RBS faculty to participate in our professional development opportunities, and, among other things, we agreed that RBS would look into setting up its own training and professional development program.

2. More Selective Course Designation. On paper, RBS is offering a very high number of offerings, more than sufficient for all its students to fulfill not only the required single course in their major, but the second as well. But given that many of these courses are less than optimal Writing Intensive models, this may be a situation in which less is more. That is, RBS should perhaps designate fewer courses as Writing Intensive, but try to put their resources into ensuring that the ones they do designate really fit the bill. It's built in to the system that students can fulfill one of their Writing Intensives through their general education requirements, which must be fulfilled before they begin the specific RBS curriculum. If RBS urges students to take a Writing Intensive literature course in their sophomore year, for example, then there will be less pressure on RBS to declare courses as Writing Intensive that don't really fit the criteria.

3. Improve existing courses. Some RBS offerings have the potential to be true Writing Intensive courses-even advanced ones-but they are not taught that way at present. For example, RBS currently declares their student internships as writing intensive courses. It is true that students in this course do have to write a paper describing their on-the-job experiences, but this paper is never worked on in conjunction with a faculty member, or revised in response to feedback. Instead, it is just turned in to the director of the Career Center, whose principal job is not to examine the writing but to determine that the student did enough work to receive credit. This is definitely not Writing Intensive-but it could be, with a little tweaking. The key would be to get a faculty member in the loop, and run it as a writing project, not just a work project. This would not necessarily be onerous in terms of the workload on the faculty member or the student: an exchange of e-mails, outlines, partial and complete drafts periodically, with comments and feedback, could give the student more of a sense that this is, in fact, a course and not only a job, and could improve the final written product-and the student's writing skills-as well.

4. Lecture/Recitation Model: Let's say that an RBS course customarily has an enrollment of 100, and we want to run it as a true Writing Intensive course. The RBS faculty member would give a lecture once a week, and students would meet in a "writing recitation" for the other weekly meeting. If WAC is truly functioning properly, the writing component will not be just an add-on, but rather will be integrated into the course. The assignments, that is, will be designed to help students learn course material. Some kinds of material are best delivered in the lecture format, while other kinds work better in "writing to learn" exercises. The faculty member in charge, in consultation with the T.A.s, would design all the writing assignments, and the recitation sections would be part of the course itself, not just an added-on "Workshop." Nor would the T.A.s just be "graders," though that would in fact be part of their job.They would be teaching partners in the course, working with the professor.

So let's say that on Monday there's the weekly lecture. All 100 students, and the T.A.s, attend the professor's lecture. On Wednesday, they meet in their recitation sections. For 100 students, there would be 3 T.A.s., so that there would be four recitations of 25 students each (the professor would also lead one of them personally). (In Saturday or once-a-week evening courses, the time could simply be divided between lecture and recitation.) These recitation sections would use writing to address course content-"writing to learn" exercises-and also offer discussions of the writing process and activities designed to help students improve their writing-"learning to write" exercises.

In addition, each T.A. would run a workshop. Not all students would be enrolled in this workshop, which would carry an additional 1 N-credit above the course itself. This would be a third meeting per week for selected students who need additional help with their writing, and would be limited to 10 students each. So under this scenario, up to 30% of the students in the course would be getting additional support for their writing, on a regular weekly basis, over and above the writing recitation.

So the workload for a T.A. would be:

1) lead a recitation of 25 students once per week.

2) grade 25 papers every time there's an assignment due (the professor is also responsible for 25 papers)

3) lead a workshop of 10 students once per week

4) attend the weekly lecture and meet with the professor as necessary

VIII. WAC Assessment Procedures: Summary and Recommendations

Changes in writing ability depend, we know, on a dizzying array of factors-among others, the student's readiness, openness, and willingness; the teacher's careful planning, theoretical and pedagogical knowledge, good timing, and even showmanship; and careful design of and timing in the curriculum. Even then...the effects may take years to manifest-at which point, they are hard to connect with any single class, teacher, or learning experience...And as difficult as the teaching of writing is, assessing writing involves yet another layer of difficulty. How much more complicated, then, is the enterprise of assessing writing across the curriculum?

-William Condon⁽⁴⁾

The mission of the Writing Across the Curriculum program is to promote, support, and assess the teaching of writing at Rutgers-Newark, in all academic departments. Most visibly, the Writing Across the Curriculum Program oversees the designation and offering of "Writing Intensive" courses in all academic departments. In the future, we'll be expanding our activities to include many kinds of training, tutoring, information resources, and other support for both student writers and their instructors at Rutgers-Newark.

Beginning in Fall 2003, the Associate Dean of Faculty asked the Coordinator to initiate a preliminary internal assessment of the impact of WAC on the Rutgers campus, gathering data and opinions from faculty, students, and administrators. The present report is one of the fruits of that ongoing effort. In this section I will report on our activities during academic year 2003-2004, indicate some priorities for assessment in the coming academic year 2004-2005, and also suggest what kinds of continuing assessment procedures will need to be part of our routine procedures in the future.

Assessment is often undertaken under the banner of "accountability" That is, there is a real or perceived necessity to justify the operation of a particular program to an outside audience, such as politicians who control overall funding, administrators who control priorities within the university, or entities such as the Middle States commission who control an institution's accreditation. And certainly such external motivations for assessment cannot be discounted.⁽⁵⁾

But we should also think of assessment as part of a wheel that rolls the program forward. One of the fundamental principles of WAC pedagogy is that there needs to be a feedback / revision loop between the instructor and the student writer. The most obvious version of this is that comments from the instructor on a paper are responded to in the next draft of that paper, or incorporated into the student's writing process as the next writing project is undertaken. But in a well-run classroom, of course, the feedback goes in the other direction, as well: the instructor uses the experience of grading and responding to student papers, as well as other types of measures of student achievement, to adjust the ongoing course to reflect what students are learning (and not learning).

The same is true, or should be true, of a WAC program as a whole: we need to set up a feedback/revision loop so that we know both what is going on in the actual classrooms across campus in courses designated as writing intensive, and how effective that instruction is. In order to do that, we need to gather data, opinions, and materials from administrators, faculty, and from students. Once we have gathered it, we analyze it and plow it back into the program again.

VIII.A An Overview of Assessment Activities: Completed, Projected, Ongoing

Here is a brief summary of WAC Program assessment activities that have already been completed, those which are underway, those which are scheduled for the next academic year or projected for some time in the future, and also those which will need to become a routine part of the program in the future. After this overview, I will discuss each of these phases in more detail.

VIII.A.1 Assessment Phase I (Fall 2003): Numbers Across the Curriculum.

Key Questions: How many Writing Intensive courses have been offered? Do some departments need to add more? Are there enough sections so that students can fulfill their WAC requirement for graduation?

Activities: Compiling lists of courses offered by department, calculating roughly how many courses each department should offer to satisfy the needs of their own majors, comparing this "standard" to actual courses offered, getting a picture of the overall level of offerings

Preliminary Conclusions: Most departments are in compliance. Only Physics has not offered any writing intensive courses as of yet, and all other departments have offered at least three. Some departments were offering courses that they considered to be writing intensive, but not getting them properly designated in the schedule of classes. Some departments are running them with stop-points in excess of the WAC standard of 25. Overall, sufficient courses are on the books so that students can get a course in their major, and a second one either in the major or in a general education course.

VIII.A.2 Assessment Phase II (Spring 2004): Soliciting Faculty Input

Key Questions: What do grassroots faculty in the writing intensive trenches think is important about WAC, both as it exists now, and as it might develop in the future? What can the program do to make WI teaching both less burdensome and more effective?

Activities: Faculty survey (see Appendix for results), WAC Advisory Committee meetings, WAC Fellows program, WAC Colloquium

Preliminary Conclusions: WAC Faculty have generally done a good job of applying writing intensive criteria even though they have not been specifically trained or supported by the program. They have pulled us through, but they need our support, both in terms of faculty training and professional development, and in terms of tutoring and other support services for student learning. There also need to be more incentives to participate in the program, and more recognition for the hard work that it takes to do so. Overall, faculty are committed to the program, but they are restless about the lack of resources to support WAC.

VIII.A.3 Assessment Phase III (first round Fall 2004-Spring 2005, then ongoing): Review and Analysis of All Writing Intensive Courses

Key Questions: What is happening in actual Writing Intensive classrooms? Are Writing Intensive criteria being understood and applied? What do individual departments need, in terms of resources and support services, to do a better job?

Activities: The Course Designation Process, approved by the WAC Committee, which will include:

Course Planning: dialogue between Coordinator, department chairs, and other administrators to head off problems before they appear;

Course Development: collegial workshops between course instructors and members of the WAC Advisory Committee regarding principles of WAC pedagogy

Course Review: WAC Committee designating (or, rarely, refusing to designate) courses as writing intensive; analysis of materials submitted by instructors (syllabi, assignments, course descriptions, sample student papers, etc.)

VIII.A.4 Assessment Phase IV (Fall 2004-indefinitely): Soliciting Student Input and Measuring Student Outcomes

Key Questions:

1. How do students view their own writing education, both in particular Writing Intensive courses, and overall throughout their undergraduate experience? Do they see the connections? What do they see as major turning points or moments of progress?

2. Are faculty and students on the same page regarding WAC/Writing in the Disciplines principles? Do students agree that what they're getting is an initiation into a particular discourse community, or does it seem to them random or arbitrary, a matter of figuring out "what the instructor wants"?

3. How can we measure student writing outcomes over time? Is there a way to implement, for example, portfolio review without ending up in logistical nightmares?

Activities:

1. Writing Intensive Student Exit Survey . We will request all instructors in all writing intensive courses, Fall 2004 and possibly ongoing, to assign this to students, perhaps in conjunction with the usual TEC course evaluation): In an effort to combine a quantifiable response with a more nuanced texture, we will ask students

to pick which of 7 possible descriptions of a student's writing education at Rutgers-Newark is CLOSEST to their own and

to WRITE a few paragraphs in which they modify or qualify their chosen description, and offer examples from their own experience, from composition or developmental writing through the present writing intensive course.

2. If we decide that we need more detail than the Survey can provide, we can follow up with individual interviews or focus groups.

3. The best way to measure students' progress across the whole of their undergraduate career would be to compare samples of work from various points in that process. However, both collecting and evaluating this material present serious practical difficulties. First, the problem of sorting and storing large amounts of paper, or, equally arduous, converting it to digital form. Even if this could be accomplished, it would still take significant numbers of faculty hours to evaluate the students' progress. Nevertheless, some form of portfolio system is desirable and we should look into the options.

IX. Support for Student Learning: Assessment and Recommendations

Do we have a writing center staffed with tutors who are available to work with WAC students who need remedial or elementary writing instruction? I had thought we did, but a colleague informed me that our writing center is open only to students currently enrolled in composition classes. If so, that's nuts. In every class I've taught I've taught writing, and in every class I taught there are at least a few students who are in need of remedial tutoring. I can teach students who already know the basics how to write better, in some cases much better. But I am not trained to teach writing from scratch, and I honestly do not know how. I suspect that I am not alone.

-FASN Faculty Member, from the faculty survey

If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a university to nourish a mature writer. The central interface in writing instruction, of course, is between teacher and 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. What do students need to be successful in Writing Intensive courses, beyond what can be provided by individual faculty members? What kind of support can we provide, as an academic community, and how can we best structure its delivery?

In general, support for student learning, as I'm using it here, refers to learning opportunities for students that are outside the classroom or the immediate context of the course (that is, beyond the professor's office hours). Sometimes the "help" may simply be access to various reference resources, whether in print (a handbook, a practice exam), online (grammar exercises, treatment of other writing questions, library resources, file-sharing with other students for peer critiques, etc.). Most usually, though, support will involve student interaction with university personnel who are charged with the task of aiding students in their learning (tutors, reference librarians, workshop leaders, etc.) These personnel may be accessed in a variety of venues, ranging from a formal classroom setting (attached workshops) to the library bibliographic instruction classroom and/or reference desk, to the Writing Center (ongoing or "drop-in" tutoring) to online (e-tutoring) to more informal interactions with embedded "curriculum-based peer tutors."

The key to working together as a team, in any endeavor, is close and frequent communication, and that is one of the fundamental principles of an active culture of writing instruction and practice. With regard to support for student learning, this means that there must be coordination, interaction, and a common sense of purpose, among teachers, tutors, students, librarians, and administrators. We all want the same thing: for students to learn the course material better, to improve their writing skills, and to gain a deeper understanding of the world that they live in, in a way that will enable them to make a difference in it.

IX.A (Hawaii I.11): Can students who need help on writing problems get help?

The Hawaii question frames it starkly, simply, and, I think, correctly. The bottom line is whether students who need additional help get access to it in a timely manner, or whether they fall through the cracks. This simple question, however, gives rise to a number of complicated issues, both theoretical and practical. It seems to me that there are several processes here which need to occur almost simultaneously, and yet are interdependent by definition.

IX.A.1 Identifying Students Who Need Support Services

We can say that in theory all students could use additional help, beyond what individual instructors can provide in the context of a particular course, but a) not all students want formal help or would take advantage of it and b) trying to mandate universal tutoring, for example, would stretch our limited resources in a way that would dilute the worth of it for the students who need it most. So we need to find ways of identifying students who are most acutely in need of tutoring, who are most likely to benefit from it, and who are willing to engage in the often time-consuming process.

Sometimes this can be done even before the course begins, through the placement process. If we have ongoing communication with the Writing Program, for example, and students are given appropriate exit advice when they are finishing English 102, then they will end up in a writing intensive course that is suited to their interests and their current level of writing achievement, and they will also be encouraged to seek additional support services as necessary. For example, students who have passed 102 but who still need additional work on discipline-specific reading skills might be advised to sign up for Arts and Sciences 200, the WAC Workshop, or to a course that has an attached workshop or curriculum-based peer tutoring, or to a particular instructor who is known to work particularly well with WAC tutors.

What kinds of writing problems require help? At one level, a "writing problem" is whatever a particular student considers a "writing problem." If a student asks for help, we should do our best to find some help, because such self-motivated students are those most likely to show up regularly and to work hard on improving their writing, and thus most likely to succeed at doing so. But we cannot simply rely on self-identification as the sole means of recruiting students for additional help. There are other students who could benefit from it, but will not do so unless it is strongly recommended to them, most usually by an instructor in the course. Part of this will involve properly training the instructor in the course to recognize students who would benefit from additional help. This will require, at minimum, that a diagnostic essay be given early in the semester, and that as a result instructors refer students for help. We should develop a formal application for student support services, a referral form that may be filled out by instructors and given to the student, and which would include some indication of why the instructor is making the referral. This kind of information would be of great use to a tutor or a workshop leader in carrying out an individual instruction plan for a particular student.

But what kinds of "writing problems" call for such an intervention? Without training, instructors tend to focus on surface errors in grammar or diction, which is certainly one kind of writing problem, but not necessarily the most important kind, especially if the student is not a native English speaker; such students often will retain some irregularities in their use of the English language while otherwise operating quite competently within it. Some kinds of apparent "writing problems" are actually reading problems: students have difficulty handling complex texts, and the problems with their "writing" often disappears once they have received additional instruction and practice in strategies of approaching discipline-specific texts. We need to define, as specifically as we can, at what population our support services are directed, so that we can develop appropriate services.

Once we have identified students who need help, we need to match them appropriately with available resources. Different students have different strengths and weaknesses in their writing, and different personalities and backgrounds which make them more likely to respond to different types of interventions. Here the input of the instructor is crucial, because no one knows the student better, and an instructor in a relatively small class such as writing intensive section is in the best position to make such a judgment. Certain students will benefit most from individual tutoring, for example, while others may be better served by a group workshop on particular topics, such as those offered by the Writing Center, or by specific online exercises. In some cases we will have an attached workshop staffed by a PTL or Assistant Instructor, while in others a "curriculum-based peer tutor" will be embedded in a particular section, or perhaps a student might need training in research skills moderated by a librarian. Sometimes students need the help of a tutor, sometimes of the instructor, sometimes of a librarian, sometimes of a program administrator, sometimes of all of the above working in a coordinated fashion. Once again, the instructor needs to function as the friendly and knowledgeable gatekeeper for access to appropriate services. We need to encourage instructors to assign diagnostic essays early in the semester, and, based on the results, to recommend to students immediately that they seek the proper forms of additional support.

IX.B WAC Tutoring

The most obvious form of "help" for student learning is tutoring, which can take a number of forms. One of the two areas in which our current program most falls short of state-of-the-art programs around the country is in the area of support for student learning (the other is in faculty training and professional development). The best WAC programs are closely integrated with their Writing Centers. There are WAC-specific tutors on staff, and students from writing intensive courses--or indeed from any course that includes writing--will be matched with a tutor who has some expertise in their field, or at least in a related area or "group": social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, business, etc. Some programs go further than this, and incorporate "curriculum-based peer tutoring": trained student tutors who have some background in the content of a course, and who attend the lectures, meet with the professor to become familiar with assignments, often make specific appointments with some or all students to go over drafts of a particular assignment.

Many programs also offer specific workshops, taught by experienced writing teachers, designed for students in Writing Intensive courses, some tied directly to particular courses and assignments, others covering more general issues in academic writing.

Before making specific recommendations about WAC tutoring, let me first lay out what I take to be fairly self-evident principles about tutoring in general, and about the place of tutoring in the overall mix of services supporting student learning.

IX.B.1 Principles of WAC Tutoring

1. The student needs to be committed to improving his or her writing. Enforced tutoring is a contradiction in terms; the student must actively want to be there, and to be positively engaged in the process. Tutoring is often a long and time-consuming process, and a reluctant student, or one who will not perform the necessary work to improve writing skills, is wasting both his or her own time, and that of the tutor. So WAC tutoring must be voluntary, not mandated, though certainly all instructors should strongly recommend tutoring for those students who, in their judgment, both need it and would benefit from it.

2. Close communication between instructors and tutors is a must. In every tutoring interchange, there are three implicit presences, even if only two are physically there: the student, the tutor, and the course instructor. In many cases, the instructor will be represented only by a piece of paper describing the assignment that a student is working on, and by what the student tells the tutor about how the instructor has explained the assignment and its objectives in class. Sometimes this is sufficient, but whenever possible it is advantageous for tutors to have a more detailed idea of instructor expectations of student writing.

One approach might be to provide tutors who frequently deal with students from a particular course with access to password-protected course websites such as Blackboard. This can give the tutor more of a sense of the culture of a course and the voice of a particular instructor. The tutor should also be encouraged to contact the instructor directly via e-mail, telephone, or office hour visit if there are any questions about a particular assignment or about course writing expectations.

Beyond this, actual in-person meetings with particular instructors, either before the beginning of a semester or shortly thereafter, can be an important means of ensuring that instructor and tutor function as a team, and that they are not working at cross-purposes in helping students with their writing. Certain instructors may also have particular preferences about issues that they want tutors to address-or in some cases not to address-with their students, and this can be communicated in such an early-semester meeting, which could either be individual to individual, or in a group setting, perhaps as part of a departmental re-orientation program, or as part of tutor training sessions.

3. Student confidentiality must be protected, but more information is better. The tutor and the instructor are part of a team addressing different aspects of a student's writing process, and their roles frequently overlap. Many instructors, for example, do "tutoring" themselves in individual conferences with students, while tutors are often in the position of needing to explain feedback that instructors have written on a returned paper. If that feedback is ambiguous, then further communication between student and instructor, or between instructor and tutor, would help to clarify; if instructors begin to address an issue in a student conference or in a comment on a paper, it would be useful to communicate that priority specifically to a tutor, who could then follow up on it. Especially when the tutor is a peer tutor, as opposed to an experienced writing instructor, the benefit from conversation and guidance about how to approach a particular student's writing would be correspondingly greater.

Often students themselves will be the couriers of such information, telling the tutor that the instructor had stressed, say, paragraph development in a recent conference or end-comment on a paper. But we need to develop avenues for direct communication between instructor and tutor about a particular student. In order to protect student confidentiality, it might be necessary for a student to sign a voluntary waiver allowing the sharing of such information, probably as part of the initial referral process, but I believe that we should investigate this possibility in the interest of helping students. Students may have the right to opt out of having the instructor involved, but if they make this choice they are shooting themselves in the foot. The instructor and the student are already in a confidential professional relationship, to which tutoring is a supplement. Seeking tutoring is not a shameful activity that should be hidden from the instructor, but rather demonstrates a commitment to improving one's writing, which is what everybody-student, teacher, tutor, and the university as a whole-wants. And it will work much better if it is out in the open, with direct communication between all three people involved.

4. A written Individual Instruction Plan (IIP) for every student referred to tutoring should be developed in consultations between the student, the tutor, and the course instructor, and carried out under the supervision of the Director of the Writing Center. Ideally, an early semester in-person meeting between the student, the tutor, and the instructor will result in a written Individual Instruction Plan (IIP), setting out the goals for the semester and the basic techniques to be applied for addressing them in the tutorial. As the experienced educational professional monitoring the student's progress in the course, the instructor must be involved, informed, and ultimately responsible for the shape of this plan, and for making adjustments as necessary, based on the student's work in the course as the semester goes on, and on input from the tutor. The tutor is responsible for the implementation of the plan, and for keeping in frequent consultation with the instructor. The Director of the Writing Center is responsible for supervising the tutor's work, discussing with the tutor particular pedagogical strategies for fulfilling the goals of the IIP, and helping the tutor to improve as a beginning teacher. The student is responsible, quite simply, for improving his or her writing, taking advantage of the learning opportunities presented.

The logistics of such three-way IIP meetings are difficult to arrange, and in some cases they may be done by e-mail or telephone, or sometimes tutors will have to work just from the written referral from the instructor. But the relevant principles are that the instructor and the tutor must work together in a coordinated fashion, and that the tutor's role is to serve as an extension of the instructor and the course, carrying out a supplemental instructional program with particular defined goals, under the supervision of a professional teacher.

5. The closer tutors are to being qualified instructors themselves, the better. Peer tutoring has certain advantages-an immediate rapport between tutor and student is more likely, for example, since they share a common enterprise of being enrolled students-but it also carries considerable disadvantages. For one, students who are still in the process of learning how to write at a college level themselves may not be the most useful candidates to instruct those who are acutely struggling with similar issues. Second, student tutors may be less clear than instructional professionals about exactly what their role is, and may move from appropriate activities such as helping students to clarify their own thought processes and urging them to revise their own writing, to instead providing proofreading services or even re-writing in ways that exceed permissible collaboration. Third, writing intensive courses are by definition more advanced than freshman composition courses, and so the greater the background in writing instruction of the tutor, the better the advice they will be able to offer.

For budgetary reasons, and also because of some of the advantages named above, we will certainly make extensive use of student peer tutors-indeed, the writing center is currently based on this model-but whenever the situation permits, we should preferentially staff WAC tutoring with graduate students, or, even better, with assistant instructors or PTLs.

IX.B.2 Tutoring for Writing Intensive Courses: Recommendations

In Part One of this report, I described a "Unified Writing Curriculum," which would integrate our approach to teaching writing at all levels from developmental through advanced writing intensive courses. For the present discussion, the most pertinent aspect of that description is the distinction between different levels of Writing Intensive courses, which I think can form the basis for a diversified approach to the problem of delivering tutoring services to such a dispersed population of students in such a wide variety of courses as are encompassed by the WAC program. Specifically, I would make the following recommendations:

1. For Introductory Writing Intensive courses-Level 4: These courses are often general-education courses that have few prerequisites and do not assume a lot of specialized knowledge coming in. These sorts of courses are perhaps best supported using a model similar to that currently applied to the Writing Program courses: a group of tutors in the Writing Center who are available to work with particular students on a regular weekly basis, and some provision for drop-in tutoring on an as-needed or one-shot basis. The type of training that they would require would, at one level, be similar to that for Writing Center tutors at present, since they will be dealing with many of the same basic writing problems, such as grammar, organization, transitions, etc. But WAC tutors should also receive additional specialized training in the types of writing appropriate to courses in various disciplines. Perhaps some tutors, depending on their own background and training, might specialize in humanities courses, or social science courses, or laboratory science courses, since each of these have very different requirements.

2. For Intermediate Writing Intensive Courses--Level 5: In these courses, we can assume that the population is principally students who intend to major in the subject, but who are still relatively early in their college career. This seems like a good situation in which to experiment with embedded tutors in the course, what is often called "Curriculum-based Peer Tutoring." These tutors would operate out of the Writing Center, but would also attend classes that they are tutoring for, and work closely with instructors in those courses. In Level 5 courses, welcoming students into a disciplinary community is a high priority, and an excellent way to do that is to have an upper-level student from the discipline serve as a dedicated tutor; not only are such students familiar with the type of writing assignments and reading materials that students are likely to encounter, but they've probably taken the course themselves in the past, and are in a position to put a friendly face on the discipline.

This model might also be useful in departments which have had to run courses at larger than the customary 25 students, for budgetary reasons; the presence of tutors might help to mitigate this unfortunate situation, though they would not be an overall cure for a chronic shortage of resources. In other cases where a PTL or Assistant Instructor is available, an attached workshop model, similar to the successful approach to English 101, might be employed.

3. For Advanced Writing Intensive courses-Level 6: These courses assume more background and more specialized knowledge, and are likely to be sticklers for the rhetorical conventions and documentation practices native to a particular discipline, and thus would be difficult for outsiders to tutor. Here the process of identifying appropriate tutors is best done by individual departments: most likely they would be, at minimum, an advanced undergraduate student, one who, for example, has already demonstrated an ability to successfully produce the sorts of documents required in a particular 300-level Writing Intensive course. For level 6 courses, the most appropriate tutors would be graduate students or teaching faculty such as assistant instructors or PTLs. For tutors in courses at this level, the Writing Center could offer some general tutoring training, but the tutors would basically operate within a particular department and would work closely with individual instructors.

IX.B.3 Challenges for WAC Tutoring

In all three of these groups of tutors, the participation of the Writing Center in the training and supervision of tutors, and in matching students who need help with appropriate tutors, will be essential. The Writing Center has been the only source of writing support for writing intensive courses up to this time, and, as the above recommendations indicate, I envision Writing Center tutors as being at the center of the WAC tutoring effort, especially for Level 4 courses.

One of the unavoidable major issues, both for the Writing Center in particular and for WAC support services in general, is that of making provisions for sufficient resources. The sheer size of the WAC program presents a challenge. With 40 to 50 total Writing Intensive courses offered every semester, WAC is as large as the freshman writing program, but it does not have the same centralized decision-making authority. Once we have identified a particular group of students who need additional help, we can begin to budget for tutoring resources. But with this high number of Writing Intensive courses, dispersed across campus and taking place in every department, it is obviously impracticable to assign individual tutors to every section, and yet simply having a central cadre of generalized "WAC tutors" will not be sufficient.

Another obvious challenge, even assuming that we had sufficient resources to compensate tutors, would be recruiting appropriate ones for WAC. The needs of students in each Writing Intensive course are demonstrably different. One of the basic assumptions of Writing in the Disciplines programs, such as we have here, is that students need to learn how to become a member of a disciplinary community, which thinks, writes, and researches according to its own formal and informal customs. And this assumption has important consequences for the delivery of WAC tutoring. Students who are taking an upper-level economics course, for example, would ideally require a tutor who has some understanding of economics, both in terms of the ideas that are being discussed, and in terms of the customary format and rhetorical conventions that are assumed and practiced by professionals in the field, but which may not be immediately apparent to an outsider.

Thus: if we are using peer tutors, we need to recruit students who a) are fairly advanced in their field, b) who are good writers, within that discipline, themselves, and c) who have the correct temperament for helping others with their writing. These three characteristics do not necessarily go together: students who are good at mastering content may themselves have problems with their writing, while good writers may be impatient with those who have more difficulty. Ideally we should strive for either advanced seniors or else graduate students in the field as WAC tutors.

Once we have managed to attract the right kind of tutors, we need to train them in an appropriate way. Writing Across the Curriculum, by virtue of its dispersal of the responsibility for writing instruction throughout the campus, presents a challenge for the delivery of tutorial services that is in some ways similar to but in other ways fundamentally different from the tasks associated with providing tutoring for freshman composition courses. In the latter case, there are many sections of a few basic courses, and a fairly homogenous student population, at least in terms of their level of preparation and the stage of their college career. In the case of Writing Intensive courses, students may be anywhere from third-semester sophomores to last-semester seniors, and the courses that they are taking may range from introductory courses in various disciplines that satisfy general education requirements to more advanced seminars that presuppose extensive specialized knowledge of particular subject matter.

WAC tutors need to begin with the same basic training as current Writing Center tutors, but then may require additional training in the conventions appropriate to writing in particular disciplines or disciplinary groups (humanities, social sciences, laboratory sciences). Students who come in for tutoring will be assigned a tutor based on the general category of the course that they're taking (philosophy in humanities, geology in science, etc.) This is the usual model of the "WAC Writing Center" as it is practiced nationwide.

The specific modalities of tutoring that will be available in any given semester or to any particular student applicant (traditional drop-in tutoring, ongoing weekly tutoring by appointment, attached workshop, curriculum-based peer tutoring, e-tutoring, etc.) is best left to the Writing Center, in consultation with instructors and other administrators. The key is to match students to resources that will draw on their particular strengths while offering them the opportunities for improvement that they need.

IX.B.4 Support Services Network For Student Learning in Writing Intensive Courses: Fall 2004 Pilot Project

The program that we put forth below is designed to address the problem of remedial tutoring: students who are in upper level writing intensive courses who still have serious problems with their basic writing skills.

[The following is an implementation plan for the Fall 2004 semester of a pilot project designed to provide support services for students enrolled in Writing Intensive courses. It was developed through consultations between Patricia Bender, Director of the Writing Center; Jonathan Hall, Writing Across the Curriculum Coordinator; Mal Kiniry, Director of the Writing Program; and Annette Juliano, Associate Dean of FASN, and was discussed at the WAC Colloquium.]

Support Services Network For Student Learning in Writing Intensive Courses:

Fall 2004 Pilot Project

Introduction

In the past, Writing Intensive instructors have sometimes felt overwhelmed and helpless when confronted with a student who clearly needs additional help with his or her writing before being able to complete the assigned work in the course at an appropriate level. This support plan is meant to address that difficulty, and to ensure that students get the help that they need.

In order to get this system to function efficiently, we need to ask for the cooperation of instructors in Writing Intensive courses to help us to identify early in the semester those students who need additional help, so that we can match them with appropriate resources.

For this pilot phase, we are targeting "Introductory Writing Intensive Courses," 200 and 300-level courses that have minimal prerequisites (usually English 102 or 122). Those courses that depend upon extensive preparation within a discipline will require more specialized services than we can provide at this time.

What we are able to offer, for Fall 2004:

a) We will train two Writing Center tutors who will be specifically dedicated to students enrolled in Writing Intensive courses. One of these tutors will be available in the evening for University College students in Writing Intensive courses. Depending on demand, we hope also to be able to offer some "drop-in" tutoring, where your students can make an appointment to meet with a tutor to go over a particular writing assignment in your course.

b) We will offer two sections, limited to 10 students each, of a new workshop, tentatively called Arts and Sciences 200: WAC Workshop. This workshop, which will carry 1 N credit and meet once a week, will begin in the 3^rd week of the semester, and will be taught by instructors who will be trained to support Writing Intensive courses in the disciplines. The workshops will probably be taught during the Monday and Wednesday free periods to allow maximum student access.

At this time the workshops will not be specialized by discipline, though in the future we may be able to offer workshops focused on supporting courses in the social sciences or in the laboratory sciences, for example. Instead, we will assume that the students who will be referred to these workshops will be those who, despite having either passed 102/122 or (in the case of transfer students) having been exempted from that requirement, still require additional work to bring their writing up to the level expected in the 200 or 300-level Writing Intensive course. The workshops, then, will focus on reviewing Level 3 (Freshman Writing II) writing and reading skills on the Unified Writing Curriculum, as well as helping students with their specific writing assignments in their co-enrolled course. (See following workshop description)

WAC Workshop

Practice in analytical writing skills based on short nonfiction readings from various disciplines. Emphasis on in-class writing, and on the development of arguments and the ability to write about readings in relation to one another.

Limited to 10 students each section. Meets once a week. Non-credit.

Population:

1) Students enrolled in a Writing Intensive course (numbered 200-300, especially those which are customarily open to non-majors) who self-identify as wanting more help with their writing.

2) Students enrolled in such a Writing Intensive course who are recommended for the workshop by their Writing Intensive course instructor based on a first-week diagnostic, and who accept the opportunity.

Course activities:

1) Grammar review and sentence level development (10%)

2) Practice in critical reading skills with short readings from various disciplines (30%)

3) In-class writing practice, focusing on sentence and paragraph level (10%)

4) Detailed work on writing projects from the co-enrolled course (50%)

Course Procedures:

1) Workshops will begin to meet in the third week of the semester, and so will meet 12 times. But instructors will have training meetings during the first two weeks of the semester. The first one will go over course procedures and general orientation. The second one will address a more specific issue, such as a common approach to grammatical issues for all workshop sections.

2) Mid-term evaluation: Workshop instructors will fill out a brief mid-term evaluation form for each student that will be forwarded to the instructor of the co-enrolled course and then returned with comments. This exchange will help instructors to adjust their approach to individual students.

3) Last meeting of the term will be devoted to taking stock with each student of what has been accomplished in terms of improving the student's writing, and what remains to be done in the future.

IX.C How can we empower students to access, in a timely and effective manner, resources for help with grammar, ESL-related problems, documentation formats, and other basic writing issues?

Up until now we have been discussing labor-intensive interventions that involve interactions with staff, such as tutors or workshop leaders, whom we need to recruit and compensate. But some problems can be approached using a mixture of old-fashioned books and new-fangled online technology. These can be integrated by professors as part of a course (probably the most effective model), or they can be assigned or recommended by tutors who are helping students with particular problems (grammar, etc.), or they can be accessed by students themselves who are seeking references that will help them with common writing problems. The role of the WAC program here will be to help instructors to identify these resources, to make them available to students (through purchase, site license, etc.), to offer training sessions and other in-person support when necessary, and to publicize that availability both to students and to instructors.

IX.C.1 Adoption of a Common Handbook

For many years the Writing Program has required a common handbook for all of its English composition courses. Until recently it had adopted the St. Martin's Handbook, but in academic year 2003-2004 it switched to the Longman's Handbook. The use of such handbooks is a traditional tool in teaching basic writing courses. Generally they provide references on various writing issues. They tend to provide extensive reference materials having to do with basic grammatical concepts, from parts of speech through the sentence and paragraph levels, and to contain equally exhaustive treatments of various formal documentation systems, such as MLA, APA, and others. That coverage has been extended over the past several decades to include more sophisticated concepts such as the components of the writing process; common forms of rhetorical structure; principles of argument, appeals to audience values and logical fallacies; and increasing attention to writing from sources and the entire research process.

Handbooks can be a valuable reference resource for students, and they can be extremely useful for tutors in helping to develop individual study plans for particular students. Having a standard one has proved useful in the context of the Writing Program, though there have been some concerns expressed about the cost of the handbooks chosen (often in the vicinity of $50), especially when many instructors do not make extensive assignments out of them, but use them for general reference and individual assignments to students who have shown that they need more attention to particular writing areas. But having a single standard textbook required for all levels of freshman writing, from developmental through English composition, has helped to avoid the needless expense of multiple handbooks, and has given instructors and tutors enough time to get used to the organizational principles of a particular handbook so that students can be given individual assignments in a meaningful way.

What I would recommend is that the WAC Program adopt the same handbook for all Writing Intensive courses, and require-or strongly recommend-that all sections of Writing Intensive courses list the current handbook on the syllabus as a required text, in addition to whatever else is assigned in the course. This will result in hardly any additional expense to students, since most of them will already have the book from their freshman writing courses (the only exception being a few transfer students who were admitted at an advanced level), but it will offer a useful tool for instructors and tutors, and knowledge of this requirement will prevent students from selling this useful reference once they have finished with their English 102 requirement.

On the faculty survey, WAC Faculty strongly supported the adoption of a common handbook.

IX.C.2 Online Handbook Resources

Another advantage to adopting a common handbook for WAC is that this would give all students in writing intensive courses access to the online resources that go along with these handbooks. These can be extensive, and are sometimes more useful than the printed book itself. Certainly these ancillary services were a major factor in the current choice of the Longman's Handbook. Most obviously, these online sites offer easily accessible versions of the handbook itself, with extensive exercises on grammatical issues, diagnostic tests (the results of which can be e-mailed to instructors to see that students are keeping up), anti-plagiarism tutorials, opportunities for students to exchange papers for peer critiques, and even, in some cases, online tutoring provided by the publisher. We need to explore what services are available when we make future decisions about handbooks, and we need to invite representatives of the publisher to come to campus to demonstrate these ancillary online resources for instructors, tutors, and students, and to train us in how to use them most effectively ourselves. Currently these resources are already available, at no additional cost to students or to the institution, but most instructors don't know how to use them themselves, much less how to instruct students. We need to ensure fuller and more efficient access to these currently-underused resources.

Perhaps in the future we will decide that we do not need the printed version at all, but will contract with a vendor for site-licensed access to the online resources, at a reduced cost to students, in a manner similar to the way that the library has "Rutgers-only" access to many specialized databases. This should be a subject of continuing review, involving frequent communication between the Director of the Writing Program, the Director of the Writing Center, the WAC Coordinator, the Developmental Writing Coordinator, the WAC and Developmental Advisory Committees, and anyone else concerned with the teaching of writing on this campus.

IX.C.3 Locally--our own internal Student Guidebook?

Another possibility in the future would be the development of our own internal student guidebook, giving course procedures and tips for writing courses at all levels. This could be combined, through custom publishing, with a traditional handbook-some institutions have done this already-or else the publication could be a free-standing booklet focusing narrowly on our own procedures. A similar project is already underway for composition and developmental writing courses, which we could perhaps use as a partial model. Or the whole thing could be done online, as part of the WAC website or a larger online writing effort at Rutgers-Newark.

IX.C.4 The WAC Website

We currently have up a preliminary prototype of a WAC website, but in the future we hope that it will grow to include numerous resources for both faculty and students. We don't need to re-invent the wheel in this regard, since there are numerous online writing labs, grammar resources, and specific WAC sites already on the web. I envision the role of our WAC website to be two-fold. First, we need to offer resources that are specific to this campus and to the particular needs of our faculty and students. Some of this may be pertinent to a general audience and would be available on a general website. Some of it would be confidential, and would be available only on the special password-protected WAC faculty area that has already been created.

The process of deciding what should be on a WAC website can itself be a useful bonding experience for various constituencies in the program. We can ask for contributions from individual faculty members, from students, from tutors, from librarians-from anyone, in short, with anything to give to the program. We already offer listings of all Writing Intensive courses that are offered each semester, and we hope shortly to incorporate course descriptions for all of these into the mix. We have posted general information about the WAC program and its requirements, and put up specialized pages addressed to faculty, students, and department administrators. We will attempt to conduct much of the business of the WAC advisory committee and of the program as a whole online.

IX.D WAC and Library Services

As a research university, Rutgers-Newark has made an implicit commitment to ensuring that its students can handle multiple sources in their own writing, and will be able, by the time they graduate, to design and carry out an independent research project, including writing up the results in a rhetorical format appropriate to the discipline. For this type of research to be possible, the cooperation of library staff is essential.

At the level of freshman composition, the Writing Program has mandated that all students in English 102 be offered at least one bibliographic instruction course taught by library staff. More than the traditional "library tour," this presentation incorporates basic search techniques and helps students to become comfortable with accessing modern resources. Dana library reference librarians are currently developing an online tutorial to cover the most basic of library services. Once this is in place, and instructors require it of students, the actual class conducted during the library visit can be conducted at a higher level, focusing on more sophisticated search strategies and on the key skills of source evaluation. Many students believe that access to the Internet is all that they need to conduct research, but it's a lot more complicated than that, and instructors in Writing Intensive courses need to build on the foundation that was laid at the freshman level.

Many of the advanced resources provided by the library are not being used by students, or even by their professors. Training in these resources needs to be part of the WAC mandate. In most cases, the best way to do this will be for individual instructors to contact library staff to arrange an advanced bibliographic instruction class appropriate to their particular discipline, course, and even individual assignment. Perhaps there will be certain standard modules that will be appropriate to WAC as a whole, or that will be useful for WAC faculty training purposes, or as general resources for professional development. In any case, Dana library and its staff provide an important resource for Writing Intensive courses, and Writing Intensive instructors should be urged to make use of it as students pursue the research-writing aspect of their education.

IX.E Anti-plagiarism education initiatives.

In the long run, the WAC Program will need to take the lead in developing an anti-plagiarism program here at Rutgers-Newark. Student plagiarism is a problem in all academic disciplines, and Writing Across the Curriculum programs are ideally situated to provide campus leadership against it, both conceptually and practically. WAC should avoid getting bogged down in futile searches for a technological magic bullet, because what we have to offer is both a more nuanced way of thinking about plagiarism, and a set of pedagogical approaches to preventing it.

WAC programs have a responsibility to encourage serious re-examinations of plagiarism, through campus forums, faculty seminars, scholarly conferences, web-based discussions, or any other means. A good place to begin, I believe, is with the idea, emphasized by Writing in the Disciplines initiatives, of the specificity of academic disciplinary cultures, with their own subject matters, methodologies, conventions of writing and documentation, and codes of behavior. All students, whatever their cultural origins, are immigrants into such discourse communities, and each course is a process of initiation: into a group of writers in a particular classroom, into broader practices of a given discipline, and into the values and responsibilities of the academic enterprise as a whole. Plagiarism is perhaps best conceived as a failure of that initiation, on any or all of those levels.

Detection-based anti-plagiarism strategies can create an adversarial relationship between teachers and students, but WAC initiatives offer the possibility of prevention. The basic principles of the WAC classroom-integrating writing with learning course material, nourishing the feedback/revision loop, intervening in incremental stages in the composition process-are precisely those best suited to head off plagiarism by engaging students in the specific language of a particular course. The promise of Writing Across the Curriculum is that instructors will construct their courses in ways that will authentically welcome the participation of new arrivals to the disciplinary conversation, and will reward them with fledgling membership in their communities.

X. Faculty Support and Development: Assessment and Recommendations

Occasional opportunities to meet with colleagues and writing professionals on how to teach our students to be better writers would be valuable.

Our students, even in my department, do not get enough practice in writing. I'm not interested in workshops or seminars in pedagogy. I know how to teach writing to students who have basic competence. They should acquire this basic competence in English comp. Those students who have not achieved basic competency must have tutoring services available to them...I don't think we really need a writing-across-the-curriculum "program" or a newsletter any more than we need a breathing program or newsletter: Writing should be an integral part of every student's college education, but since it isn't, the writing-across-the-curriculum requirement is the least we can do.

I wish 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.

-Three comments from the FASN faculty survey

If we provide resources to support student learning, as I have just proposed, we are also, of course, supporting faculty in writing intensive courses by taking some of the burden off of them, especially when it comes to remedial instruction in basic writing skills, which many faculty in the disciplines feel unprepared to deal with, even if they had the time to concentrate on it, which they don't. The other resources for students are resources for faculty as well as they design their courses: they know that students will possess a common handbook and an internal program guide; they can count on students having access to campus-wide print and online resources for basic writing issues (grammar, anti-plagiarism etc.); they can refer students to the WAC website for more information about the WAC program, graduation requirements, and student support services.

Writing Across the Curriculum, by its very nature, is asking faculty in the disciplines to do what many of them have never done before: teach writing. Or at least they think that they have never done it before. Actually, any time that they have challenged a student to analyze a problem and back up conclusions with evidence, they have been teaching writing, because critical thinking is intimately bound up with writing. Any time they have helped students to work through a difficult passage in an assigned text, they have been teaching writing, because developing close reading skills is part of building that intimate relationship with language that is at the heart of writing. So sometimes, when asked to teach a Writing Intensive course, an instructor may react by asking, "Who, me? I'm not a writing teacher." But yes, you are.

The reason that we are teaching writing in the disciplines, and not just in freshman composition, is that the thought processes, as well as the writing processes, are different as we move across the curriculum. It goes a lot deeper than whether one is allowed to say "I," or whether students should quote or paraphrase, or whether they should use MLA or APA documentation style. Writing in a discipline is a fundamental expression of an approach to thinking and a way of being, a particular concept of how the world works, a specific definition of what counts as knowledge.

That said, there is more to the problem of teaching writing than just realizing the interrelatedness of various skills and competencies. It is important to conceive writing broadly enough to include these larger issues, because otherwise we might fall into the trap of focusing on mere grammatical correctness or conformity to a particular format as the be-all and end-all of academic writing. This reductive conception of writing is one of the most frequent traps that new writing teachers fall into, and it's one of the things that a good WAC faculty support program can help them to avoid.

What we need, as writing teachers in every discipline, is a common framework for approaching the question of student writing. We need access to the latest research from composition studies, ESL pedagogy, psychology, and elsewhere on what works and what doesn't work in terms of helping students improve their writing. Especially for new Writing Intensive teachers, we need not only an orientation to our particular program, but also an introduction to the basic principles of WAC pedagogy, and of writing pedagogy in general, as they've been developed over the last thirty years. The teaching of writing is a serious intellectual enterprise, and it is the responsibility of the WAC program to support our faculty as they undertake it.

Many faculty members can be excellent teachers, scholars, and writers themselves, without necessarily having developed the specialized pedagogical skills to help students improve their writing. Faculty in the disciplines thus will usually require additional training in the pedagogy of teaching writing, in which most have no specific background. Most successful WAC programs offer some form of faculty support in this area, and here the possible formats are many: orientation workshops, ongoing pedagogical training, and professional development opportunities to instructors in writing intensive courses.

One common component of all of these formats is that they should include appropriate compensation for the time that faculty 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.

Even more basically in terms of increasing faculty ownership of WAC, we need to explore ways of increasing attention to and respect for undergraduate teaching in general on this campus, and specifically for the teaching of writing. Some of these will carry a price tag, sometimes a hefty one, but others are relatively simple and even cost-free. Faculty documents for tenure and promotion, for example, 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 teaching a higher profile and importance will be part of WAC's mission.

(Hawaii I.4): Is there a network of support for WAC Faculty? What kinds of support would help faculty in Writing Intensive courses both cope with the workload, and improve writing instruction?

X.A The WAC Workshop and Other Methods of Faculty Training and Development

One of the basics of any WAC program, since the beginning of the movement in the 1970s, has been the "WAC Workshop." As the movement itself has expanded and changed and linked up with other developments in higher education over the last several decades, "the workshop" has also gradually evolved to include a multitude of formats. But what they all have in common is the goal of acclimating the faculty member in the disciplines, who may not have been trained as a writing teacher, to find creative ways to incorporate writing into courses where it may not have been extensively used before.

X.A.1 Alternate Models of Faculty Orientation Training and Professional Development

When a WAC program is first initiated, the principal need, across the institution, may be for education of faculty in fundamental WAC pedagogical principles: writing to learn, learning to write, etc. This need will never fully go away, because of course new instructors will cycle into the program all the time, and they will require extensive background in basic writing pedagogy and fundamental WAC principles. While these basic orientation and initial training activities continue, a second audience for professional development begins to emerge as a WAC program matures: those who are veterans of multiple writing intensive courses need to be addressed at a more advanced and sophisticated level to help them further hone their skills and take WAC to the next level.

So a WAC program needs to tailor its training and professional development activities to the state of WAC development, to the specific culture of an institution, and to the sometimes idiosyncratic preferences of a faculty. Just to get a feeling for the diversity of approaches and formats to the contemporary WAC workshop, here are a few examples taken from successful programs around the country:

Ongoing Faculty Workshops (Texas A&M Writing Center): Frequent detailed workshops ranging from 1 ½ hours to 3 hours, held regularly throughout the semester. Topics range from detailed procedural orientation (e.g., process by which Writing Intensive courses are approved) to teaching techniques (e.g. "Using Peer Response for Feedback").

Learning the Disciplines Through Writing (Grand Valley State University): One-day seminar focusing on WAC Basics: Writing-to-Learn,. Learning to Write, Writing in the Disciplines.

Writing in the Disciplines Workshops for Faculty (University of Houston): "1 ½ day faculty workshops in the opening weeks of every semester...A series of group and breakout sessions..."

Teaching with Writing: Assignments and Assessment: A Faculty Workshop (Washington University): A three part workshop series, 2 hours each, held once a semester on consecutive Monday evenings.

Writing Across the Curriculum Extended Workshop. (University of North Dakota): Six MWF morning sessions 8:30-noon daily held in May after end of semester. Participating faculty receive stipends of $600.

Communication Across the Curriculum: Faculty Seminar (University of Pittsburgh): Every other Wednesday throughout the semester. In the off week, participants meet individually with instructional designers. 15 faculty receive $1000 fellowships to redesign an undergraduate course to better use writing and speaking to promote student learning in their disciplines.

This collection of alternate models hints at the complexity of the training task, and at the multifarious possibilities for approaching them. The bottom line, of course, is ensuring faculty participation. Partly this involves making it convenient: are brown bag lunches going to be better attended than evening seminars? Would people rather meet three times for two hours or just one six-hour session?

But it also involves, as some of our examples indicate, making it worth the faculty member's time. They need to get credit for professional development activities when it comes to tenure or promotion decisions, and they also need, not to put too fine a point on it, to get paid for their time. Sometimes these will involve significant sums of money, but more often they will be symbolic, relative to the number of hours that will be put in: they are a measure of the commitment of the institution to making WAC an important element of the academic culture. Initiatives that are not funded are initiatives that are not taken seriously; this is the reality, perhaps sad but certainly true, of contemporary American life, and the university is no exception.

X.A.2 Recommendations for WAC Faculty Training at Rutgers-Newark

The precise form that WAC workshop training takes will be dependent on local factors at each institution. So what, then, of Rutgers-Newark? What existing resources do we have to draw upon, and what will we have to create from scratch? What elements of our campus culture will dictate one approach rather than another?

X.A.2.a) For New WI Instructors: Ongoing Workshops on the Teaching of Writing

One important existing resource that we can use to build our WAC training component upon is a major "professional development" initiative that has been designed and put in place by the Writing Program, beginning in June 2004. Roughly once a month all year round, there will be a "workshop" or presentation by an experienced writing teacher in the program. Although they are initially and most directly addressed to new instructors in the writing program, these workshops should be of very practical interest to anyone who is involved in teaching a writing intensive course, as well, because they involve key issues in course design, assignment design, and course workload management. They would be of special utility to anyone in the process of designing or revising a syllabus for a writing intensive course.

This model would be similar to the first one on the list of examples: ongoing faculty workshops. The pros and the cons of this format are fairly clear. These workshops are currently scheduled to go for 2 1/2 hours, which, while not an inconsiderable commitment of time in itself, is also not enough for a novice writing teacher to get a full sense of the pedagogical issues and techniques involved. The Writing Program is requiring all of their new hires to attend at least three of these presentations over the course of the academic year, which seems reasonable. (They are being paid for this requirement, of which more below.)

Here are the announced topics for the first year, running from June 2004 through April 2005:

Writing Program Workshops for Faculty

"Grading and Commenting on Student Essays"

"Constructing and Sequencing Writing Assignments"

"Reverse Outlining and Revision"

"Critical Reading"

"ESL Issues in Non-ESL Classes"

"The `Three Voices' of Research Essays"

"The Fundamentals of English 102"

"The Challenge of Plagiarism"

"Writing Events"

Some possible future topics: handling the paper load; working with non-native speakers (a huge issue, of course, here at Rutgers-Newark); connecting reading, speaking, and writing (especially in the sciences); developing evaluation criteria (rubrics, etc.); understanding composing processes; writing online; classroom research to assess the impact of new assignments.

The WAC Program also hopes to add a couple of workshops that will be specifically aimed at WAC audiences and issues. I've already been using the WAC e-mailing list to recommend these workshops strongly to anyone who will be teaching a writing intensive course in the coming academic year, and I'll continue to send out reminders.

Thanks to Mal Kiniry and Jennifer Arena for setting up this series.

X.A.2.b) For Both New and Ongoing WI Instructors: Faculty Seminars

When WAC was being developed and first implemented, the WAC Committee sponsored a series of presentations concerning issues in WAC. Sometimes this involved outside speakers who were invited to come and share their experiences and their theoretical perspectives on WAC, and this was supplemented by opportunities for Rutgers-Newark faculty members to meet with their colleagues and to present and exchange ideas about how writing fits in to various disciplinary environments.

These seminars were useful, though attendance varied. The most important element, I believe, is that they approached WAC pedagogy as an important subject, with intellectual substance, something that needed to be thought about seriously and debated in the same way that other topics in various disciplines routinely become the object of scholarly concern.

These seminars pretty much dried up, however, as soon as the original grant money was exhausted. I think that we should try to bring these back as time goes on, making use of both external guests and the internal Rutgers speakers. To ensure attendance, we will need to compensate faculty (see below).

X.A.2.c) For Advanced WI Instructors: The WAC Colloquium

The WAC Colloquium is a gathering of faculty involved in the teaching of writing intensive courses, for the purpose of exchanging experiences and ideas, and also for formulating a general direction for the program for the next year. It is thus a cross between a scholarly "conference" on Writing Across the Curriculum, with the presentation of papers and panels, and a program retreat for members of the WAC Faculty-a term that I use to include anyone who has ever taught or might teach a writing intensive course.

There have actually been two WAC Colloquia since the beginning of the program. (Both programs are in the appendix.) The first one, one, October 20, 2001, was entitled "Writing Across Campus." The WAC requirement was a new one at that time, and so the emphasis was on 1) implementation (there was a "roundtable" featuring representatives from various departments discussing how their departments had approached the requirement and 2) workshops on basic writing instruction.

The second colloquium, May 15, 2004 was entitled "Writing Across the Curriculum at Rutgers-Newark: Launching the Next Phase." Obviously, since that is also the title of the present report, (and of the grant that supported both of them) there was a close connection between the proposals presented here and what was discussed at the colloquium. The morning session included panels on the introductory writing intensive course and the advanced writing intensive course, and also a panel of students and tutors to present the experience of WAC from the other side of the desk. In the afternoon we discussed WAC issues such as student support issues, administrative and budget issues, faculty training, etc. The overall consensus was that WAC needed to be institutionalized, and that it needed to be supported with sufficient funding.

This second colloquium was better attended (39 people), partly because funds from the grant were able to support stipends-very modest, in fact symbolic ones-for every department to send a "WAC Fellow": a representative who had been teaching writing intensive courses on a regular basis, and who also agreed to serve as a "resource person" in their own department during the upcoming academic year.

I think that the general consensus was that the colloquium was a success. There was a lot of positive energy in the room as teachers got together to talk about teaching, to share their experiences and perspectives with each other. The policy discussions revealed some discontentment with the chronic underfunding-in fact the non-funding-of the WAC Program, and there were passionate calls for more resources.

The colloquium should become, I think, an annual event. The time of year was appropriate: the day after the end of finals. Although people sometimes had to duck out to turn in their grades, it was a time when people were still on campus, and in the mood to think about teaching. And if the Colloquium is able to reach consensus on certain directions, there is time to try to implement them over the summer. Perhaps in the future it will have a more specific theme. (One idea for May 2005: plagiarism.)

The Colloquium is both an occasion for discussing writing intensive courses on a relatively advanced and sophisticated level-since the WAC Fellows in attendance are, by definition, the people who have been most involved with teaching it. It is not, then, an orientation or a training in basic pedagogy, but rather an occasion for experienced writing intensive instructors to recharge their batteries and reconnect with each other.

X.A.2.d) The WAC Fellows Program: Informal Mentoring in the Departments

Currently this is a grant-funded program. The WAC Fellows are paid a symbolic stipend to attend the WAC Colloquium and to serve as a "resource person" for others in their department. Obviously this mentoring would be done one-to-one, and in a very informal way. In this way we hope to distribute the expertise of our most experienced writing intensive instructors. At the age of three, our program is now developed enough that we have such people available, and the WAC Fellows program is a way of making use of them, without unduly burdening them or requiring others in their departments to jump through hoops to get assistance; they can just ask the colleague down the hall to look over their syllabi.

The WAC Fellows program should become a regular hard-funded part of the WAC Program once the grant runs out.

X.A.2.e) For All WI Instructors: The Course Development Process

I have already discussed the "Course Designation Process" as an administrative matter. Its three parts-Course Planning, Course Development, and Course Review-are bound up together, but have logically separate functions. The Course Planning step is primarily administrative, intended to address both short-term and long-term problems in meeting WAC requirements in particular departments as early in the process as possible, when there is still time to do something about them. The third part, the Course Review process, is intended as an assessment tool: it allows the WAC Advisory Committee to see what has been proposed as writing intensive courses in a given semester, allows them to review them , to see what is happening in actual classrooms, and thus to see where we are as a program.

The middle part of this trilogy, the Course Development process, is intended as a collegial workshop for the benefit of the writing intensive instructor. Although the information that is submitted-syllabus, assignments, sample papers, etc.-is essential to the course review process, the feedback that the instructor gets from the members of the WAC Committee is intended to be not a matter of "do this or else we won't approve it" but rather, "have you thought of doing this?" They will generally be suggestions; the committee is not in the business of sending orders to instructors or trampling on their academic freedom. It's just the job of the committee to determine that writing intensive criteria are being adhered to, and to give the instructor some ideas. In that sense, the Course Development process fits in with our other instructor education initiatives that I have been describing in this section.

X.A.2.f) Professional Development Stipend

Rutgers-Newark faculty members are very busy people, with full teaching schedules, research projects, committee meetings, etc. If we want their time for WAC, we are going to have to pay for it. This is not because they are hard-nosed or primarily driven by a desire for cash: if that were the case, they would not be in academia at all, but in the private sector.

Rather, putting some money behind these professional development initiatives is a signal from the administration that we want them to take these responsibilities-including their teaching responsibilities-seriously. That has not always been the message that has been coming from the administration of this university, in which respect, of course, it is not unique among research universities in this country. But WAC is supposed to be a challenge to all that, and so the funding of WAC-and payment for attendance at WAC workshops, etc.-is a tangible sign that the administration is serious about transforming the way that we do business both with our faculty and with our students.

There are, of course, other ways to pay faculty, other than cash on the barrelhead. Even more than money, faculty members need time: if we give them released time, if we give them graduate assistants, if we give them embedded curriculum-based peer tutors, if we give them more computer equipment, we can make their lives easier, and they will be more likely to put more effort where we want them to.

Even a very modest stipend can have an important effect, and that's what I propose here. I suggest that we appropriate enough money so that a certain amount-a minimum of $100-is attached each year to each faculty member who teaches one or more writing intensive courses, as a "Professional Development Stipend." The $100 (or whatever amount) would not be automatically paid, but only if the faculty member attends a certain number of professional development events.

This idea has already been implemented among PTLs and Assistant Instructors in the Writing Program, where the going rate is about $25 an hour for attending workshops, etc., with a minimum of three workshops being required. We also have already, in the WAC Program, paid WAC Fellows $100 for attending the WAC Colloquium (that's actually less than $25 an hour, since it went all day.) I propose that we do something similar for writing intensive instructors.

This, of course, would cost some money. We customarily run about 40 writing intensive courses in the fall semester and 50 in the spring. (These are FASN and UC figures only; the Business school is a special case, and its training needs will need to be addressed separately, as discussed above in the administrative section.) Thus the raw figure would be 90 courses * $100=$9000. But it would actually not be that much because a) the stipend attaches to the faculty member, not to the course, and some faculty members teach writing intensive courses in both the fall and the spring; they wouldn't get a second stipend, and b) participation in the professional development program would be voluntary, and not everyone would do it. Of course, there are also costs associated with putting on the training sessions themselves: the workshop instructors need to be compensated for developing their presentations, sometimes food is provided, etc. The WAC Colloquium had its own relatively modest expenses, which were paid out of grant money. So yes, it would cost some money-probably about $10,000 a year for faculty development. But it would be a good investment in improved teaching.

X.A.2.g) Possible future directions

In the future we may want to look into some more extended workshops and seminars, such as those described toward the bottom of the list of models. Probably for this we would need to get a special grant to support faculty attendance. But for the immediate future, I think that if we fully implement the measures described above: the Faculty Workshops on Teaching Writing, the Faculty Seminars, the WAC Colloquium, and the Course Development Process-and if we manage to fund them with a "Professional Development Stipend", we will have a full plate for now.

X.B Other forms of support available to faculty

In addition to the several types of workshops described above, to the informal one-on-one consultation available through the WAC Fellows Program, or to the more formal feedback arising out of the Course Development Process, we need to provide additional materials and resources that faculty can easily access on their own, as they educate themselves about Writing Across the Curriculum, and as they design their syllabi and writing assignments.

X.B.1 Print Resources

X.B.1.a) Books: WAC Library

The WAC Program already owns, thanks to an earlier grant, a number of books pertinent to WAC theory and practice in general, and, perhaps more useful for individual faculty members, various guides to writing in particular disciplines. Currently these books are housed in the Writing Center, where they are available for consultation any time the Center is open. A list of these books is available on the Writing Center website.

Once the WAC Program has a space of its own, and administrative/clerical help, we will probably re-locate these volumes there, where they will be available for faculty to consult and check out. We also hope to expand this collection, not only by adding additional books about WAC, but also by soliciting publishers to send us examination copies of books that might be useful for adoption by individual faculty members. After consultation with the WAC Committee and other interested faculty members, we will draw up a list of recommended texts by discipline, and post this on the WAC website.

We will also be working with Dana Library personnel to expand the library's collection of pertinent materials, including subscriptions to pertinent journals.

X.B.1.b) Faculty Orientation Package and Program Guidebook for Faculty

At the WAC Committee meetings during Spring 2004, there was a consensus that an important element of the course designation process would be the development of an "orientation package" that would be sent to the instructor of a writing intensive course, especially an instructor new to the WAC Program, once the department chair has announced the intention to designate the course. That instructor will be asked to submit a syllabus and other materials for feedback from the committee, and the suggestion from the committee was that the instructor ought to have some sort of written guidance about how to proceed before submitting that first draft.

Elements of such a package might include:

A description of the procedures in the Course Designation Process

A brief description of the WAC Program and definition of writing intensive courses

Writing intensive criteria and unified writing curriculum guidelines

Examples of successful syllabi and writing assignments

A narrative description of a typical writing intensive course from the instructor's point of view

Handouts/articles on basic WAC pedagogy: writing to learn, learning to write, etc.

References for further study

Respondents to the faculty survey also declared themselves strongly in favor of the proposition that "Rutgers-Newark should develop an in-house guidebook for faculty teaching Writing Intensive courses, describing procedures and standards, offering hints about techniques and course structure, etc." Once such a guidebook (I call it a guidebook to distinguish it from the commercial handbook for students-Longman's-that I've proposed adopting earlier) has been developed, it would obviously be ideal as an "orientation package."

So there seems to be a strong consensus among faculty in the program that some form of guidebook for the program ought to be published, and development of such a publication will need to be one of the WAC program's activities during the next academic year. This will go hand-in-hand with the production of a student guidebook, as discussed in the previous section, because some content will overlap. Some of this material can also be made available more efficiently and economically online, but it seems clear that faculty believe that there should be something on actual old-fashioned paper as well.

X.B.2 Online Resources

X.B.2.a) Public WAC Website: wac.newark.rutgers.edu

We now have the beginnings of a website up at wac.newark.rutgers.edu. It was designed by Housen Maratouk, operating under a previous grant, and Jonathan Hall. I have discussed above the need to have someone with web skills on a more regular basis to get things online more expeditiously, since Housen's work with Blackboard has been overwhelming him.

As it expands, the website will have several areas:

General program information: mission statement, WAC requirement for graduation, writing intensive criteria, procedure for course designation, statistics about course offerings, contact information for WAC personnel, etc.

List of current Writing Intensive courses, with course descriptions provided by instructors (during the Course Designation Process). This will be one of the most important functions, since the paper version of the schedule of classes, which customarily contained a list of WI courses each semester, is being discontinued. We hope to link our list directly to the online schedule of courses, which is where most students get their information.

Resources for students. This will be a directory of where students can go for additional help if they're finding it difficult in their writing intensive courses. We will be able to refer them locally to services such as the Writing Center for WAC tutoring, or to the online resources associated with the common WAC handbook, and also to the many excellent online writing labs nationally that provide comprehensive reference on grammar, etc.

Resources for faculty. There are hundreds of WAC programs nationwide, and most of them have their own websites. Some of this is information of general utility, often very helpful to faculty designing their own courses, while other material is only pertitnent to a particular campus. We will try to weed out the useful from the not-so-useful. My own experience in researching this report is that there are a lot of links collections out there that just list every program that there is, but this is not very useful. I favor more of an annotated and selective approach: not every program, and not even every page of the programs that I select, but only the ones that seem particularly interesting, innovative, or of general interest. I hope to get another Honors Research Assistant to help with this part of the project.

We hope that the references in faculty resource section will challenge our faculty to engage with each other and with the ideas of WAC faculty elsewhere. We also encourage individual faculty members to get involved in contributing materials or references that they have come across to the website. Ultimately, we would like to have specific areas devoted to resources for science, for example, and the involvement of faculty in the disciplines will be critical to that endeavor, as we will need to draw on their expertise.

X.B.2.b) WAC Faculty Area: Restricted Access

Using a Blackboard shell, we now have a password-protected area where WAC Faculty can exchange ideas freely. We have a discussion board enabled already, and we encourage faculty to begin using it.

One of the prime uses of this faculty area will be the submission of syllabi, writing assignments, course descriptions, and other materials descriptive of particular writing intensive courses as part of the Course Designation Process. All WAC faculty will be authorized to post materials on this site, and the Blackboard format makes it very easy to do so.

As time goes on, we will have a constantly expanding bank of syllabi and writing assignments available for other instructors to consult. The initial purpose of this posting will be to enable the course development and review process, and to allow the WAC Committee to offer feedback to the faculty member. But we anticipate that this material will remain available indefinitely, and that other instructors can use their colleagues' course designs and assignments as reference points and inspiration for their own efforts in their writing intensive courses.

[Note: We are assuming that most instructors will not object to having their materials available within the password-protected WAC Faculty Area for other Rutgers-Newark faculty to consult. But if a particular faculty member prefers that such materials not be available, there will also be an alternate method of submitting material electronically to the WAC Committee: via the "digital dropbox" on the Blackboard site. Material submitted through this alternate method will not be posted on the WAC Faculty site, and only the WAC Committee members will have access. We encourage faculty to make their materials available in a collegial way, but of course respect anyone's desire for confidentiality.]

X.B.2.c) WAC Committee Area: Confidential Access

A similar password-protected Blackboard area has been created for the use of the WAC Committee members. This will enable confidential communication between members discussing materials submitted by faculty members as part of the course development process. It can also serve as a site for deliberation on matters that arise in between meetings via the online discussion board (it may even eliminate the need for some meetings). Drafts of various WAC documents can be posted for the committee's examination, as has already been done with parts of this report in their earlier incarnation.

X.B.3 Communication within the Program

X.B.3.a) WAC E-mail List

One of the advantages of the online WAC Faculty Area is that it is now very easy to send e-mail to everyone involved in the program, or potentially interested in WAC material. It has already been used to announce changes in procedures, to solicit participation in the faculty survey, and to announce particular upcoming events (workshops, etc.) We promise not to bombard WAC faculty members with excessive numbers of messages! Of course, anyone has the option to opt out.

X.B.3.b) WAC Newsletter

In Spring 2004, the WAC Program published its first newsletter, cleverly called the "Rutgers-Newark Writing Across the Curriculum Program Newsletter." It announced some of the new initiatives of the program, including the awarding of the grant, the appointment of a coordinator, the membership of the WAC Advisory Committee, and other news and procedures of interest to WAC Faculty and administrators. We will be adding schedules of workshops and other events in the future, as well as short articles on pedagogy and other issues of interest to WAC Faculty. Currently the newsletter is being published in electronic format only, and sent to the WAC mailing list, as well as being posted on the WAC website. We anticipate that the newsletter will come out probably once a semester, or more often if events warrant.

XI. Conclusion: Funding the Revolution-WAC as a Regular Budget Item

Among the arguments against WI designations are these: Budget-wary administrators often view them as a cheap, easy fix to students' writing "problems." Promised support doesn't materialize, or, as budget cuts become necessary, WI courses are easy targets. One recent horror story ... involved administratively mandated WI classes with no resources, no WAC director, no budget, no programmatic support, no criteria for designating WI classes, and no faculty workshops...

Proponents claim that WI requirements, when properly implemented, can cause faculty to realize the importance of writing, feedback, revision, well-designed assignments, and thoughtfully constructed assessment in the curriculum. The WI requirement, with the supporting apparatus that accompanies it (e.g., faculty workshops, consultation with WAC personnel, informal meetings of WI teachers to discuss problems and results), can serve as a catalyst for more writing across the curriculum in all courses whether WI or not...Writing program personnel at various institutions report that WI influence has "bubbled up" to the graduate level, that talk about the importance of writing to learning has turned up in unexpected campus committee meetings, and that once faculty have experienced success in their WI teaching, they can't "go back" to their previous methodologies.

-Martha Townsend ⁽⁶⁾