From: Mike Palmquist [Mike.Palmquist@ColoState.edu] Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2001 8:42 AM To: cwonline@nwe.ufl.edu Subject: Re: Martin's Larger Vision for WAC
Hi Charlie, Your question about who actually delivers WAC courses struck a chord with me. At our university, most of the WAC courses are in fact taught by faculty, but we've embarked on an experiment this year that has me worried. Our univeristy has revamped its honors program over the past two years and this year instituted a two-semester honors intro course. The honors director negotiated an arrangement with our composition director, department chair, and college dean that gives students in the course sequence credit for our introductory composition course. In return, writing is supposed to be _taught_ (as opposed to being used as a learning tool) in the two semesters. Our WAC director has worked quite hard with the honors faculty who are teaching the courses. Sadly, and perhaps predictably, the honors faculty do not seem to be doing a serious job of teaching writing in the two courses. Some of them seem to think that it's okay to give writing assignments, and that the practice is a good thing, but that they don't need to provide feedback. Others are doing somewhat less well than that. As I see this kind of thing going on at my institution, and hear similar stories about this sort of "WAC" implementation at other schools, I worry. For the same economic reasons you talked about in your post, administrators like the idea of supporting WAC programs. But in this case, and no doubt at other schools as well, these efforts fall far short of what students can gain from a "real" composition course. No doubt other schools have done it well, but I suspect that even in those cases there is degradation in instructional quality over time, as enthusiasm wanes and different faculty enter the mix. I've seen plenty of enthusiasm for WAC programs where writing-in-the-disciplines courses of this kind replace regular comp courses. I'm hoping that we won't be moving toward that model at my institution. Mike