About the WAC Clearinghouse

The WAC Clearinghouse supports teachers of writing across the disciplines. This site uses a database to allow members to add and update content on the site. The site is hosted by Colorado State University's Composition Program.

The WAC Clearinghouse is a Web site that provides access to information about writing and communication across the curriculum. The Clearinghouse is designed and maintained by Mike Palmquist. It is hosted by the Composition Program at Colorado State University as a public service with the understanding that neither Colorado State University nor any of the other institutions and organizations who are partners in the development of the Clearinghouse make any warranties, either expressed or implied, concerning the accuracy, completeness, reliability, or suitability of the information on Clearinghouse pages.

The Clearinghouse is presented in partnership with the International Network of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs. When you create an account on the Clearinghouse, you become a member of the Network. The Network exists to support the exchange of information and ideas concerning WAC, to support existing WAC programs, and to support institutions considering the development of WAC programs. Members of the Network can display information about the WAC programs at their institutions and can vote on issues brought to the membership by the Network's director and Board of Consultants.

Copyright and Disclaimer: Copyright © 1997-2009 by Colorado State University and/or this site's authors, developers, and contributors. Intellectual property rights in material on this site may be held by the authors. Some material displayed on this site is used with permission. Some of the code for specific applications is copyrighted © 2000-2009 by Mike Palmquist and is used with permission. Some elements of this site use custom tags developed by the ColdFusion developers community. See comments in the code for specific copyright information. All rights are reserved.

Privacy Policy: We do not share information about our members with any individuals or organizations. At their discretion, members can choose to publicize information about their programs (via our WAC Programs, WAC Links, and Writing Fellows Programs listings).

Contact Information:To contact individuals associated with the WAC Clearinghouse, please visit our Contact Information page, our Editorial Board page, or the International Network of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs home page.

A Brief History of the Clearinghouse

The WAC Clearinghouse was originally planned as a companion site for the larger Writing@CSU Web site (writing.colostate.edu). Initially envisioned as a set of resources to support the writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) program at Colorado State University, the growing capabilities of the Web made it clear that the planned site could also address the needs of teachers of writing at other institutions. In spring 1997, Mike Palmquist approached two colleagues, Bill Condon and Christine Hult, about the idea of developing a Web site that would provide access to scholarly work on WAC. By late 1997, an initial planning group, which included Linn Bekins, Nick Carbone, Gail Hawisher, Kate Kiefer, Donna LeCourt, Martin Rosenberg, and Richard Selfe, was working via electronic mail, and a collection of resources had been established on the Web.

When progress on the site stalled in early 1998, due largely to what Bill Condon later described as an inability to find ways to make work on a Web site count for purposes of merit evaluations (personal communication to Mike Palmquist, 1998), the decision was made to convert the project into an online journal. In a May 1998 email message to the planning group, Palmquist wrote:

I am imagining a journal that is essentially an evolving, growing document (or, more accurately, a collection of documents) on the Web. Many, but not all materials published in the journal would be peer reviewed. For instance, in addition to peer-reviewed articles (both linear and hypertext), we could post WAC program proposals, successful grant proposals, program evaluations, material collected during research on WAC, and so on. (These would need to be reviewed, of course, but not in the same way as scholarly pubs, and permissions would need to be obtained before posting.)

In 2000, the Clearinghouse became academic.writing, a peer-reviewed online journal. The collection of resources developed for the Clearinghouse was converted into a "related resources" section of the new journal. Members of the project team subsequently gained recognition for their work through peer-reviewed publications, editorial positions, and editorial board memberships. Over the next few years, however, the original vision of the Clearinghouse continued to shape the direction of the journal, to the point where academic.writing became home to the digital archives of two print journals (Language and Learning Across the Disciplines and The WAC Journal) and one online journal (RhetNet) and provided access to out-of-print books in digital format.

As conditions within the field changed to the point where "working on a Web site" began to be viewed as legitimate scholarly work, the decision was made to restructure the collection of materials that had become academic.writing. The WAC Clearinghouse was re-launched in 2002 as a publisher of scholarly work addressing writing across the curriculum and as a site providing an extensive set of resources for the WAC community (see Figure 2). It subsequently became home to the International Network of Writing Across the Curriculum Programs, launched three new books series (ncluding its first original book, Writing Selves/Writing Societies, a collection edited by Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell), and entered into partnerships with Parlor Press to distribute its digital books in print format. A key element of its new instantiation was a reliance on a cooperative approach in which visitors to the site could contribute to the site's development by creating an account and adding information – such as bibliography entries, program descriptions, conference announcements, and calls for proposals – to the site's database. By 2009, more than 1,700 individuals had created accounts on the site and the Clearinghouse had become the leading site supporting writing across the curriculum.