Although faculty across the curriculum are often faced with issues of racial identity in the teaching of writing, WAC has offered little support for addressing race in assignment design, classroom interactions, and assessment. Through examples from teaching workshops, I offer specific ways that we can engage discussions about teaching writing and race productively.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) create new common ground for high school – college collaborations through emphasis on expository writing in English language arts (ELA) and writing in content areas across the curriculum. This article, written collaboratively by a composition-rhetoric scholar and a secondary education leadership scholar who together directed Bridgewater State University’s WAC program, further explores the CCSS in relation to WAC, discusses why WAC programs in higher education should seek to create venues for conversation among secondary teachers and college faculty, and shares several programs facilitated by the WAC program at Bridgewater State University that seek to open and sustain such conversations.

This article is a report on the 2006 WAC Conference at Clemson University, written from the perspective of two international friends. We use our reflections on the conference as a springboard for exploring the current state of play of the WAC movement, and for suggesting future areas for development. We noted three common sets of metaphors at play throughout the conference: spatial/architectural; mechanical; and aging. We suggest that these metaphors are triply revealing. They help reveal the healthy and vibrant range of WAC activities; they point towards common problems and shared difficulties; and they illuminate some of our current blind spots about our own practice and our critical understanding thereof. We end with some suggestions relating to the future work we consider significant for the continuing flourishing of WAC, and look forward to WAC 2008.

Faculty resistance to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is an issue that has been recognized by WAC program directors and practitioners for decades, yet it remains unresolved. Perhaps the problem is not resistance per se, but how we interpret and react to it. Faculty resistance is typically viewed as an impediment to the pedagogical change WAC programs hope to achieve. Moreover, the label of "resistance" is often used without further examination of the underlying causes. Based on research and experience as doctoral Writing Fellows in the Borough of Manhattan Community College WAC Program, we argue that so-called resistances are often justified concerns in regard to implementing WAC under given institutional, disciplinary, departmental, and personal constraints. We also suggest that if we listen and respond to these concerns, they become means to facilitate faculty engagement with WAC. By working through their concerns and adapting WAC to their context, faculty can take ownership of WAC and further develop the practice. Thus, what at first appears to be an impediment to deep-rooted pedagogical change ”resistance” can be used to encourage faculty to make WAC their own.

The Faculty of Engineering, University of Melbourne, enrolls a culturally and linguistically diverse group of ESL students into its postgraduate coursework (M.A.) and Ph.D. research programs, many of whom also enroll in a semester-long (12 week) English for Academic Purposes (EAP) class called 'Presenting Academic Discourse--Engineering.' Enrollees include those who do not meet the minimum language requirements and others who are recommended to take the course by their thesis supervisors. During the research period discussed here, a majority of students who completed the classes were from Southeast Asia, and EAP class size averaged twenty five students. Initially most were coursework masters students; as time passed, an increasingly significant number came from research (Masters and PhD) programs. The combination of research and coursework students created a slight tension in that the first group had immediate need to write a literature review and the second did not. These students arrive in Australia with varied levels of English proficiency, diverse cultural backgrounds, and prior educational experiences. Students from Asia often come not only with limited English proficiency but also with other academic practices that may be obstacles to good writing in a Western academic context, including conservative rather than critical learning approaches and issues with establishing an academic voice through writing (Ballard & Clanchy 1984; Ramanathan & Atkinson 1999). Ward (2001) notes that Engineering students in Thailand often learn strategies to avoid reading engineering texts in English in their undergraduate training, a practice which may perhaps extend to other Asian countries. Not surprisingly, a limited ability to read required texts is not conducive to learning to write a literature review. This paper has foregrounded the need for students to understand and engage in critical analysis through an assessment process that culminates in a literature review task and oral presentation based on discipline-specific research sources.