CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: F.15 With the Rebirth of WAC, Who Teaches Writing? A Survey and Three Case Studies I was actually the chair of this session, but despite having selected the panelists, I feel capable of giving a useful review of their papers. I won’t review my own paper, but it will help clarify the rest of the review if I summarize it, as it provided context for the three case studies. Drawing from a sample of 25 research universities, I presented evidence of an inverse relationship between faculty rank and the intensity of instruction in courses that fulfill the writing requirement. I used measures like amount of drafting & feedback, time spent discussing writing in class, and opportunity for conferences to quantify intensity. Before moving on to the papers, I have to additional notes. (1) The discussion at this panel was particularly lively. About 30 people attended, and at least 12 spoke or asked questions after the last paper. This session was scheduled at the end of the day, and the audience stayed until a member of the security staff came to escort us from the Moscone center. (2) The acoustics were dreadful. Despite our crowding the audience into only three rows, panelists had to stand in the center of the room and just about shout their papers. This problem could have been fixed with the $20 rental of a portable amplifier. Heather Masri presented“Sharing Authority, or How to Make Writing Everyone’s Problem.” Masri’s essay focused on a small program within NYU, the General Studies Program, where the full-time faculty have traditionally taught writing both in composition classes and as integrated into disciplinary courses. When I put the panel together, Masri’s paper was supposed to be the success story. In the interim, a new dean and a new opportunity for GSP faculty (who are not tenure-track) to seek promotion have fractured what she initially saw as a utopian experiment. Ultimately, she raised the question of whether a shared commitment to writing across departments depends on a faculty who sees themselves as equally oppressed, thereby depressing the “natural” tendency of writing to trickle down to those of lowest rank. Celia Bland presented “Surreptitious Composition: Teaching Writing Within the First-Year Seminar.” Bland talked about an indirect but currently promising approach to spreading writing instruction at Bard: training the students to expect better teaching. First-year seminar is the only required course there, and although attention to writing is one of the course goals, no specific criteria are set forth. Working with a very small subset of faculty, with peer tutors, and with her own students, Bland has been trying to cultivate a more process-oriented approach to writing among students in the seminar. As a result, other faculty members have begun to approach her for advice, prompted by students’ requests for draft feedback and advice on writing techniques. Nicole Wallack presented “Leading From the Back: Raising the Curricular Bar with a First-Year Comp Course.” Like Bland’s essay, Wallack’s paper ultimately points to the value of training students to be good clients. She ended with an anecdote about students approaching her for advice about talking to the professor in one of Columbia’s large Core courses; the students wanted to get permission to write their essays in the way they’d been trained in first-year comp. As background to this story, Wallack outlined changes that Columbia began two years ago to integrate writing instruction into their storied Core Curriculum. From 1919-1986, there was no writing instruction in the Core; in the first fifteen years of the requirement, students were not allowed to write about texts, only personal experience and observation. As Associate Director of the Columbia Writing Program, Wallack is part of an effort to integrate the prior emphasis on students as authors with the more academic goal of writing well about difficult texts. |
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