Susan McLeod, Washington State University
I'm pleased to be part of this forum, and look forward to learning from it as well as contributing to it. One of the most rewarding things about being a WAC director has been, for me, the opportunity to learn from my WAC colleagues across the country.
Let me respond to the question Mike posed for us: "Please identify and define one, two, or three key principles that should guide WAC/CAC program development over the next five to ten years." I have one basic principle to suggest, one that has served many WAC directors well over the years and that I assume will continue to be a viable one. WAC programs should be flexible and forward-looking, partnering with (or co-opting, if necessary) educational initiatives that are or can be amenable to WAC goals.
Let me explain. As I define WAC, it is an educational reform movement aimed at making college classrooms more student-centered. For example, the ungraded writing assignments that have become so much a part of the WAC effort (see John Bean's Engaging Ideas) are really aimed at changing pedagogy. We encourage faculty to have their students use writing and speaking as a tool, but writing/communication is a means, not an end – student improvement in communication skills is certainly part of WAC, but is not its only goal.
If WAC is a quiet reform movement, it follows that WAC directors are agents of change, working to bring about a peaceful revolution in pedagogy at the college level-away from the transmission model (teacher lectures, students listen, take notes, and memorize) to a model in which students are actively involved in constructing their own knowledge, using oral and written communication as one of the tools for that construction.
One difficulty with keeping a movement like WAC going is that university administrators are not always interested in what they see as "old" initiatives. One said to me recently, "Isn't WAC a 1980s idea?" His concern was genuine – he was looking for an initiative that might have a chance for outside funding, and he felt he needed something newer or flashier. WAC directors should therefore always be attuned to the latest trends in higher education, thinking how WAC programs might profitably piggy-back on the newest campus initiative.
In some cases, the new initiatives are obvious partners. Service learning, for example, is an educational initiative that many administrators and faculty find attractive. Service learning programs provide useful connections between classroom and community, and also mitigate against the ivory tower image of the university. Writing becomes an obvious part of the "learning" that goes into service learning-students use journals or other writing/communication assignments to reflect on their service experiences and apply the knowledge of the classroom to those experiences.
In other cases, WAC may need to quietly co-opt an initiative. Assessment provides a good example here. For many of us, the decade of the 1990s has been the decade of assessment/accountability. As federal assistance for public education at the college level went down, tuition went up with no noticeable improvement in the quality of the educational experience. Legislators, taxpayers, and trustees quite rightly wanted to know what they were getting for their money, and assessment/accountability measures were in some cases imposed on institutions of higher education willy nilly, with no consultation. But WAC directors have in many cases been able to co-opt reductive writing assessment measures by offering to design more acceptable measures tied to instruction. We were able to do this at my present university by instituting a rising-junior portfolio, a measure which now allows us to provide both value-added and longitudinal data to our administrators, who then happily provide it to the Higher Education Coordinating Board. (See Haswell and Wyche for a detailed discussion of how WSU's WAC program developed an assessment program).
What seems clear about the next decade in higher education is that change will be one of the few constants. One of the reasons WAC has survived this long is its adaptability to change. Technology is a good example here. As campuses have become wired and faculty encouraged to retool their classes to involve computer-assisted assignments and instruction (class listservs, web-based assignments, even entire on-line courses), WAC has become fully integrated into the redesigned curricula. The best new book on WAC, Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum, doesn't even have "writing" in the title: WAC has become ECAC. It may be that in the coming decade the term "WAC" will simply disappear. It doesn't matter. As long as there are programs that focus on students' learning through communicating, WAC will continue to be an important part of the educational enterprise.
Works Cited
Bean, John. Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.
Haswell, Richard, and Susan Wyche. " Adventuring into Writing Assessment." College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 220-36.
Reiss, Donna, Dickie Selfe, and Art Young. Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1998.
– Susan McLeod
mcleod@mail.wsu.edu