This book provides theoretical models and practical methods for helping writing teachers and writing program administrators within postsecondary institutions conduct the interdisciplinary, collaborative consulting activities that are common with formal and information writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs. It specifically discusses how to conduct the day-to-day work of negotiating close working partnerships with faculty in other disciplines and is the first book length treatment to do so. The book deepens current understandings of how writing specialist collaborate with non-writing specialists in academic contexts and provides a map for structuring successful collaborations in the future.
The New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum is a descriptive analysis of how institutions can work to foster stronger intellectual activities around writing as connected to campus-wide diversity and inclusion initiatives. Author Staci M. Perryman-Clark blends theory and practice, grounds disciplinary conversations with practical examples of campus work, and provides realistic expectations for operations with budgetary constraints while enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion work in higher education. Many of these initiatives are created in isolation, reinforcing institutional silos that are not used strategically to gain the attention of senior administrators, particularly those working at state-supported public institutions who must manage shrinking institutional budgets. Yet teaching and learning centers and WAC programs gain tremendously from one another by building explicit partnerships on campus-wide diversity initiatives that emphasize cultural competence. In addition, both cultural competence and written proficiency enhance the transferable skills necessary for completing undergraduate education requirements, and this work can be leveraged to draw the attention of senior administrative leadership. Faculty development and WAC need to make diversity and inclusion initiatives a priority for professional development. The New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum reviews initiatives that point to increased understanding of diversity and inclusion that will be of significance to administrators, WAC specialists, faculty developers, and diversity officers across the spectrum of institutions of higher learning.
Foundational Practices in Online Writing Instruction addresses administrators’ and instructors’ questions for developing online writing programs and courses. Written by experts in the field, this book uniquely attends to issues of inclusive and accessible online writing instruction in technology-enhanced settings, as well as teaching with mobile technologies and multimodal compositions.
"This collection introduces, theorizes, and illustrates the Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC), an approach to integrating relevant writing and communication instruction into diverse departmental curricula. The book organizes into three sections: "The WEC Approach," which tracks WEC's genesis, theorizes its approach, and explicates the model's component moves; "Accounts of Departmentally-Focused Implementation," which provides examples of the model's adaptive implementation in a range of institutional settings (including large research universities and small liberal arts colleges) and departmental contexts (including those in STEM fields, humanities, social sciences, and arts); and "Extensions and Contextual Variation," which evidences ways in which WEC extends pre-existing writing initiatives and forges constructive partnerships between idiosyncratic academic departments and programs. Themes taken up in this collection include the transformative potential of engaging academic departments in collectively examining their own tacit and explicit writing values, and ways in which the WEC model's decentralized and iterative processes circumvent factors that have long threatened the sustainability of writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines programming"--
Writing Across Distances and Disciplines addresses questions that cross borders between onsite, hybrid, and distributed learning environments, between higher education and the workplace, and between distance education and composition pedagogy. This groundbreaking volume raises critical issues, clarifies key terms, reviews history and theory, analyzes current research, reconsiders pedagogy, explores specific applications of WAC and WID in distributed environments, and considers what business and education might teach one another about writing and learning. Exploring the intersection of writing across the curriculum, composition studies, and distance learning , it provides an in-depth look at issues of importance to students, faculty, and administrators regarding the technological future of writing and learning in higher education.
This book demonstrates how to develop and engage in successful academic collaborations that are both practical and sustainable across campuses and within local communities. Authored by experienced writing program administrators, this edited collection includes a wide range of information addressing collaborative partnerships and projects, theoretical explorations of collaborative praxis, and strategies for sustaining collaborative initiatives. Contributors offer case studies of writing program collaborations and honestly address both the challenges of academic collaboration and the hallmarks of successful partnerships.
The role of the writing program administrator is one of diverse activities and challenges, and preparation for the position has traditionally come through performing the job itself. As a result, uninitiated WPAs often find themselves struggling to manage the various requirements and demands of the position, and even experienced WPAs often encounter situations on which they need advice. The Writing Program Administrator's Resource has been developed to address the needs of all WPAs, regardless of background or experience. It provides practical, applicable tools to effectively address the differing and sometimes competing roles in which WPAs find themselves. Readers will find an invaluable collection of articles in this volume, addressing fundamental practices and issues encountered by WPAs in their workplace settings and focusing on the hows and whys of writing program administration. With formal preparation and training only now beginning to catch up to the very real needs of the WPA, this volume offers guidance and support from authoritative and experienced sources--educators who have established the definitions and standards of the position; who have run into obstacles and surmounted them; and who have not just survived but thrived in their roles as WPAs. Editors Stuart C. Brown and Theresa Enos contribute their own experience and bring together the voices of their colleagues to delineate the intellectual scope and practices of writing program administration as an emerging discipline. Established and esteemed leaders in the field offer insights, advice, and plans of action for the myriad scenarios encountered in the position, encouraging WPAs and helping them to realize that they often know more than they think they do. This resource is required reading for the new WPA, and an essential reference for all who serve in the WPA role. As a guidebook for WPAs, it is destined to become a fixture on the desk of every educator involved with or interested in administrating writing programs, writing centers, and writing-across-the-curriculum efforts.
Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures describes a multiyear project to develop a writing curriculum within the College of Engineering that satisfied the cultural needs of both compositionists and engineers at a large R1 university. Employing intercultural communication theory and an approach to interdisciplinary collaboration that involved all parties, cross-disciplinary colleagues were able to develop useful descriptions of the process of integrating writing with engineering; overcoming conflicts and misunderstandings about the nature of writing, gender bias, hard science versus soft science tensions; and many other challenges. This volume represents the collective experiences and insights of writing consultants involved in the large-scale curriculum reform of the entire College of Engineering; they collaborated closely with faculty members of the various departments and taught writing to engineering students in engineering classrooms. Collaborators developed syllabi that incorporated writing into their courses in meaningful ways, designed lessons to teach various aspects of writing, created assignments that integrated engineering and writing theory and concepts, and worked one-on-one with students to provide revision feedback. Though interactions were sometimes tense, the two groups––writing and engineering––developed a “third culture” that generally placed students at the center of learning. Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures provides a guide to successful collaborations with STEM faculty that will be of interest to WPAs, instructors, and a range of both composition scholars and practitioners seeking to understand more about the role of writing and communication in STEM disciplines. Contributors: Linn K. Bekins, Sarah A. Bell, Mara K. Berkland, Doug Downs, April A. Kedrowicz, Sarah Read, Julie L. Taylor, Sundy Watanabe
"To understand the ways students learn to write, we must go beyond the small and all too often marginalized component of the curriculum that treats writing explicitly and look at the broader, though largely tacit traditions students encounter in the whole curriculum," explains David R. Russell, in the introduction to this singular study. The updated edition provides a comprehensive history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s, through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s, through the WAC efforts in contemporary curriculums.
This collection of essays focuses on both how and why assessment serves as a key element in the teaching and practice of technical and professional communication. The collection is organized to form a dual approach: on the one hand, it offers a landscape view of the activities involved in assessment - examining how it works at institutional, program, and classroom levels; on the other, it surveys the implications of using assessment for formulating, maintaining, and extending the teaching and practice of technical communication. The book offers teachers, students, scholars, and practitioners alike evidence of the increasingly valuable role of assessment in the field, as it supports and enriches our thinking and practice. No other volume has addressed the demands of and the expectations for assessment in technical communication. Consequently, the book has two key goals. The first is to be as inclusive as is feasible for its size, demonstrating the global operation of assessment in the field. For this reason, descriptions of assessment practice lead to examinations of some key feature of the landscape captured by the term 'technical communication'. The second goal is to retain the public and cooperative approach that has characterized technical communication from the beginning. To achieve this, the book represents a 'conversation', with contributors chosen from among practicing, highly active technical communication teachers and scholars; and the chapters set up pairs of opening statement and following response. The overriding purpose of the volume, therefore, is to invite the whole community into the conversation about assessment in technical communication.
