Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum traces the Writing Across the Curriculum movement from its origins in British secondary education through its flourishing in American higher education and extension to American primary and secondary education.

The authors follow their historical review of the literature by a review of research into primary, secondary, and higher education WAC teaching and learning.

Subsequent chapters examine the relations of WAC to Writing to Learn theory, research, and pedagogy, as well as its interactions with the Rhetoric of Science and Writing in the Disciplines movements.

Current issues of theory and practice are followed by a presentation of best practices in program design, assessment, and classroom practices. An extensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading round out this comprehensive guide to Writing Across the Curriculum.

Download Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum

PDF edition, 1.7MB, 186Pages.

REFERENCE GUIDES TO RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION
Series Editor, Charles Bazerman

The Series provides compact, comprehensive and convenient surveys of what has been learned through research and practice as composition has emerged as an academic discipline over the last half century. Each volume is devoted to a single topic that has been of interest in rhetoric and composition in recent years, to synthesize and make available the sum and parts of what has been learned on that topic.

These reference guides are designed to help deepen classroom practice by making available the collective wisdom of the field and will provide the basis for new research. The Series is intended to be of use to teachers at all levels of education, researchers and scholars of writing, graduate students learning about the field, and all who have interest in or responsibility for writing programs and the teaching of writing.

Parlor Press and The WAC Clearinghouse are collaborating so that these books will be widely available through low-cost print editions and free digital distribution. The publishers and the Series editor are teachers and researchers of writing, committed to the principle that knowledge should freely circulate.

We see the opportunities that new technologies have for further democratizing knowledge. And we see that to share the power of writing is to share the means for all to articulate their needs, interest, and learning into the great experiment of literacy.

Visit Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum's Web Page

Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition
Series Editor: Charles Bazerman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum
By Charles Bazerman, Joseph Little, Lisa Bethel, Teri Chavkin, Danielle Fouquette, and Janet Garufis

© 2005 by Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse. 188 pages, including bibliography and index.

Preface:

In editing this series of Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition I have been motivated by the need for the field of composition to synthesize the work of the last several decades of its professionalization. I have also wanted to gather the perspectives of people who have been deeply engaged in building this practical and research knowledge in each of its subfields to assess what we have learned.

I arrived in the profession via the City University of New York during the early years of the pioneering Open Admissions Policy, a few years before the first murmurings about Writing Across the Curriculum. This policy put the issue of what writing skills were necessary for college success front and center to those teaching writing. The nontraditional students we taught were frequently basic writers, and we needed to help them develop quickly and in a focused manner sufficient writing competence to deal with the demands of higher education. What that competence was, however, was under-defined and under-studied. There was virtually no understanding of what, if anything, distinguished academic writing from other forms of writing, particularly literary writing and popular journalism. A number of us, urged by Mina Shaughnessy, started probing this issue.

When we first caught wind of the writing across the curriculum movement being born in other regions, we immediately saw the great value of this. I remember a contingent of us heading down the New Jersey Turnpike in Spring of 1978 to the Delaware Valley Writing Conference with the theme of Writing Across the Curriculum run by Elaine Maimon at Beaver College, just outside Philadelphia. From my perspective, this seemed exactly what we needed to begin to understand what academic writing was, how it varied across disciplines, and how work in various disciplines supported the development of academic writing or penalized the lack of it. While WAC had great force as a programmatic and practical endeavor, it also created the need for research into writing in the disciplines at both a professional and classroom level.

Over a quarter of a century later, we have learned much about writing across the curriculum and the associated disciplines and professions. We also have learned much about how to grow and run successful WAC programs in different campus cultures. This book draws the history of the movement together with the research and programmatic savvy we have developed. I hope the synthesis here will help us make sense of where we have been and where we are heading. Working with my coauthors Joe Little, Lisa Bethel, Teri Chavkin, Danielle Fouquette, and Janet Garufis, who were viewing this material with a fresh eye, I have come to appreciate much more all that has been accomplished in this period. We would also like to thank Susan McLeod, Michael Palmquist, and David Russell for their careful reading of the manuscript and helpful suggestions.

We hope this reference and synthesis will spur a new generation of research, theory, and program development. We are now starting to understand the writing challenges students face in their educations and how programmatic support can be offered to help them meet these challenges, but we need to know much more and at all levels of education, from the primary years through graduate school.

—Charles Bazerman

Comments (0)

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment