From: Martin E. Rosenberg [mrosenbe@earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2001 4:56 PM
To: cwonline@nwe.ufl.edu
Subject: Re: Martin's Larger Vision for WAC


Hi Mike:

Absolutely, Mike.  I'm a strong believer in the kitchen table debate 
school of life, and greater self-consciousness about assumptions and 
about methods cannot hurt.  Dickie asked how one might implement such a 
"system" of WAC/CAC (no pun intended) in a way that would work in an 
academic environment much more friendly to inertia than to birfucation 
(an inertial frame tends to respond to change as a source of 
catastrophic threat than promise!).  The answer however is relatively 
simple.

Just as the way any WAC/CAC program requires the building of bridges, 
the emergence of consensus built slowly by opening lines of 
communication between the WAC proponent and professors in other 
disciplines, designing a transdisciplinary program based on a systems 
perspective will depend upon the fact that one may find systems 
specialists in just about any discipline on campus.  This may involve 
many of the junior faculty on campus (that is, recently trained), but 
that's not entirely the case: Bertanlaffy's General System Theory came 
out in 1968.

Let me now say that "systems thinking" is only one form of 
transdisciplinary rhetoric of inquiry that might serve as a way to bring 
critical thinking and writing within the disciplines.  There are any 
number of other ways to forge relationships, but this is one that has an 
already enthusiastic audience across the academic community.

Now, a response to Charlie's missive about economics.  Charlie is 
absolutely right about the problem about economics.  But notice the role 
of the Telemar Corporation in the Brazilian ECAC project.  Since a fine 
way to teach systems in, lets say a technical communication context, 
might be real world problems of systems analysis located among the 
immediate corporate cultures, and given how these corporations are dying 
for not only skilled but globally synthetic thinkers familiar with 
systems concepts and capable of applying that global perspective to 
local problems, I bet any local initiative utilizing a systems 
perspective for the purpose of teaching critical thinking and writing 
across the curriculum would have a field day beating off corporate donators with a stick.

Only slightly hyper-bolic......mer

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