Art Young, Clemson University
Thanks to my colleagues, Anne, David, Donna, and Sue for beginning this discussion. And thanks to Mike for initiating and moderating it. When I speculate about the next five to ten years of WAC/CAC, what principles do I believe might guide program development? At first, I considered talking about broader issues of program development: community outreach, assessment, liaisons with other teaching programs, such as teaching and learning programs and service learning cooperatives, and integration with local schools and nearby colleges. But upon reflection, and after having read the lively discussion posted thus far, I've decided to try and articulate two principles associated with classroom practice. The way teachers and students work together in classrooms and across classrooms and beyond classrooms seems to me to be at the very center of WAC.
1. We need to emphasize writing across the curriculum (WAC) significantly more than writing-in-the-discipline (WID). Many teachers and scholars are calling for a greater emphasis on WID, arguing that knowledge is socially constructed and that academic language is constituted by the written conversation of particular discourse communities (i. e., history or physics). I've sometimes simplified, for my own understanding, this concept as: "In order to be a physicist, a student needs to know what a physicist knows, be able to do what a physicist does, be able to read and write the world as a physicist." In some cases, the call for more WID is narrated as a hierarchical advancement over the pioneering but less knowledgeable ways of WAC, with its emphasis on expressivist notions of writing to learn and process notions of learning to write, with its emphasis on authentic voice and negotiating knowledge within the classroom community. For WAC to continue its influence on college campuses and to collaborate more actively with schools and other civic groups, I believe WAC pedagogy needs to be at the philosophical center of WAC/WID programs.
Thus WAC programs need to continue to focus on pedagogical goals associated with expressive writing, reflective writing, writing to learn, conversational discourse, and what I call "the middle ground" of much classroom discourse, a writing space where students develop language and thinking abilities in interplay between what they know and are able to express and the formal language and conventions of academic communities. This is a major way to assist the development of writers in educational settings, kindergarten through graduate school, and this is the way to develop WAC projects that involve students in writing for audiences outside classrooms, and this is the way to develop students who write to make a difference in their own life and the lives of others.
2. We need to broaden further the notion of genre in classrooms across the curriculum. Currently, it seems to me, WAC and composition programs generally emphasize a particular conception of argumentative writing, essayist literacy, and academic discourse. As a textbook publisher told me today, "argument is hot." He is soliciting manuscripts with an argumentative slant for courses in first-year composition, technical writing, and business writing, and for a series of guides to writing in particular disciplines. Rather than narrowing our focus on particular genres, I believe we should be opening up WAC programs to even more genres. We need to include genres that range across the entire continuum from transactional to poetic: 1) forms often associated with the transactional such as essays, reports, and web pages; 2) forms often associated with the expressive such as freewrites, journals, letters, and email; and 3) forms often associated with the poetic: stories, poems, plays, creative nonfiction, and hypertext fiction. We need to mix and blur genres. We need to compose alone and with others. We need to open up WAC to oral, visual, and electronic communication, as many programs have already done. For most of us, reflective learning and effective communication in the twenty-first century will be demanding and complicated tasks, involving a growing number of voices, forms, platforms, and audiences, not fewer and primarily specialized ones. Thus WAC should increase its efforts to collaborate with other educational initiatives that are emerging to meet this need: problem-based learning, project-based education, service learning, learning communities, inter- and cross-disciplinary projects, international collaborations, and group electronic projects.
– Art Young
apyoung@CLEMSON.EDU