Across the Disciplines

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January 2026

  1. From the AWAC Chair: Stewardship, Visibility, and Writing Across the Curriculum
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2026.22.3-4.06

January 2024

  1. Biliteracy Agendas for WAC/WID Research and Teaching � On Mundane Genres, Translation, and Systemic Change
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2024.21.2-3.07
  2. History and the Teaching of Dialect and Slang in Screenwriting
    Abstract

    This article explores academic and industry perspectives on the use of dialect, slang, and historical language in screenwriting. It offers a chronological overview of major screenwriting manuals’ treatment of dialect and slang (or lack thereof) 1946-2020. It then presents survey data of 53 currently-practicing screenwriters’ views on working with dialect and historical language in scripts, as well as their sense of possible changes in the industry regarding attitudes towards diverse voice representation on the page. It concludes with examples from a teaching sequence that illustrates strategies for writing with dialect, researching it, and ethically considering its usage in scripts. Situating this work as an important intervention in historical English language studies as well as writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines, the article advocates for a focus on teaching concrete, actionable steps that align academic practices with industry norms. It also encourages students to critically engage with those practices and norms.

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2024.21.2-3.13

January 2022

  1. Changing Conceptions of Writing through Situated Activity in a Geology Major
    Abstract

    This essay explores how students' misconceptions about writing might be transformed into accurate threshold concepts of writing through disciplinary writing experiences. Through an activity analysis of a geology major and students' writing in that program, I demonstrate that these students' conceptions of writing changed through their legitimate peripheral participation in geological activity. Students' learning in the major situated writing within the activity of professional geological communities, and they recognized both how writing constructs and circulates knowledge within their discipline and their need for writing to enable participation in those communities. Their example suggests that WID programs attend to conceptual change and legitimate peripheral participation as essential mechanisms for creating transformative writing experiences that enable student learning.

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2022.18.3-4.07
  2. Introduction to Volume 18, Issue 3/4
    Abstract

    This double issue of Across the Disciplines features seven articles, as well as a book review. I am confident that individuals interested in research on WAC faculty development, writing in STEM, threshold concepts of writing, and writing transfer will find much of value. Two articles take up the central WAC matter of faculty development: Elisabeth Miller et al. ( Three contributions engage

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2022.18.3-4.01
  3. Mapping the Relationship of Disciplinary and Writing Concepts: Charting a Path to Deeper WAC/WID Integration in STEM
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2022.19.1-2.08
  4. Making WAC Accessible: Reimagining the WAC Faculty Workshop as an Online Asynchronous Course
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2022.18.3-4.03
  5. What Can We Learn about WID from Exceptionally High-Achieving STEM Majors?
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2022.19.1-2.10
  6. STEM and WAC/WID: Co-Navigating Our Shifting Currents
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2022.19.1-2.01
  7. More Useful Beyond College?: The Case for a Writing in the Professions Curriculum in WAC/WID
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2022.18.3-4.08
  8. Getting Personal: The Influence of Direct Personal Experience on Disciplinary Instructors Designing WAC Assignments
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2022.18.3-4.02

January 2020

  1. Designing a racial project for WAC: International teaching assistants and translational consciousness
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2020.17.1-2.03
  2. Fifty Years of WAC: Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2020.17.3.01
  3. Theorizing WAC faculty development in multimodal project design
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2020.17.1-2.04
  4. A Review of Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity, edited by Mya Poe, Asao B. Inoue, and Norbert Elliot. (2018). The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. 438 pages. [ISBN 978-1-64215-015-5]
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2020.17.3.04
  5. Reflecting on the past, reconstructing the future: Faculty members� threshold concepts for teaching writing in the disciplines
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2020.17.1-2.02
  6. Low-Stakes Writing as a High-Impact Education Practice in MBA Classes
    Abstract

    Studies examining writing as a High-Impact Education Practice (HIP) have focused primarily on writing in terms of major project assignments, thus directing attention away from the promising high impacts that low-stakes writing (LSW) assignments have on student learning. This study piloted assigning LSW in two MBA classes to test the extent to which LSW assignments align with Anderson et al.'s (2016) study on high-impact writing assignments, and further, how accessible and beneficial LSW assignments are for non-WAC faculty and their curricula. Interview data from this study shows encouraging potential for WAC expansion and recruitment, and student survey data shows a promising relationship between LSW and the HIPs. This study ultimately shows low-stakes writing to function as a HIP, recruitment tool, and resource for correcting misconceptions about assigning writing.

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2020.17.3.02

January 2019

  1. A Review of Sustainable WAC: A Whole Systems Approach to Launching and Developing Writing Across the Curriculum Programs
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2019.16.2.10
  2. Writing in the Disciplines and Student Pre-professional Identity: An Exploratory Study
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2019.16.2.09
  3. Using Shared Inquiry to Develop Students' Reading, Reasoning, and Writing in the Disciplines
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2019.16.3.15
  4. Tracking the Sustainable Development of WAC Programs Using Sustainability Indicators: Limitations and Possibilities
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2019.16.4.20
  5. WID Course Enhancements in STEM: The Impact of Adding "Writing Circles" and Writing Process Pedagogy
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2019.16.4.19
  6. The WAC-driven Writing Center: The Future of Writing Instruction in Australasia?
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2019.16.3.16

January 2018

  1. The Translingual Challenge: Boundary Work in Rhetoric and Composition, Second Language Writing, and WAC/WID
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2018.15.3.10
  2. Introducing Bringing the Outside In: Internationalizing the WAC/WID Classroom
    Abstract

    Chapter 1 be especially important to undergraduate science students, whose confidence in their own abilities as writers may have been damaged by experiences with writing in the classroom during their schooling (Choi et al., 2010;Shanahan, 2004).Several of the scientists and mathematicians in this study discuss damaging experiences with school and English teachers in particular.The anxious mathematics student, sitting in a writing class, who reads this comment by a successful applied mathematician, What's interesting is I did mathematics, I think, because I found English so difficult . . .I failed . . . on English and I was fine on mathematics.I was top in maths but I was desperate in English.I can remember the essay.The title was "Your House."Now as a mathematician . . .I've got to write about my house.What is my house?And I went to numbers straight away.It's got five windows, it's got one door-this is age 10 or 11.I knew it was a disaster when I wrote it.But I was incapable of doing anything better-Timothy, Chapter 3. may recognise a similar incident of their own, and may never have realised that the successful science or mathematics professor in their writing classroom may have experienced this kind of setback.Reading of

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2018.15.1.01
  3. WAC/WID and Transfer: Towards a Transdisciplinary View of Academic Writing
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2018.15.3.11
  4. Rewriting Disciplines: STEM Students' Longitudinal Approaches to Writing in (and across) the Disciplines
    Abstract

    Drawing on three cases from a larger (N=169) longitudinal study of student writing development, this article shows how STEM students “rewrote” disciplines to suit their writerly purposes as they moved through their undergraduate years. Students made it clear that the institutional dimensions of disciplines, visible in administrative units or departments that control resources and records, remained visible in their mental landscapes, but they had a much more flexible view of the epistemological dimensions of disciplines. Rather than entering a field as novices aiming to emulate the writing of its experts, they drew on the intellectual resources of multiple disciplines in order to carry out their own projects. The goals and choices of these students suggest that the term new disciplinarity has implications for the ways WID is conceptualized. As theorized by Markovitch and Shinn (2011, 2012), new disciplinarity posits elasticity as a central feature of disciplines, calls the spaces between disciplines borderlands, and affirms the dynamic nature of projects and borderlands with the term temporality. As such, new disciplinarity offers terms and a theoretical framework that conceptualize the intellectual negotiations of students.

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2018.15.3.12
  5. Languaging about Language in an Interdisciplinary Writing-Intensive Course
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2018.15.3.14
  6. Translinguality and Disciplinary Reinvention
    Abstract

    Dominant narratives of disciplinarity that WAC/WID confronts conflate disciplines with departments and material institutional structures, such as departments and professional organizations—what is here called “departmentality.” The relative autonomy of disciplinarity from departmentality means that challenges to foundational concepts of disciplines are in fact normal to disciplinary work and do not threaten the material institutional structures associated with those disciplines, as illustrated by the history of challenges to foundational disciplinary concepts of basic writing and second language acquisition carried out in disciplinary writing. The relative autonomy of disciplinarity enables us to accept the legitimacy of the challenges translingual theory poses to conventional notions of language, identity, writing, and their relations to one another circulating in composition studies generally and second language writing in particular as contributions rather than threats to the disciplinary work of these areas of study.

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2018.15.3.13
  7. Modern Languages, Bilingual Education, and Translation Studies: The Next Frontiers in WAC/WID Research and Instruction?
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2018.15.3.16

January 2017

  1. One-Credit Writing-Intensive Courses in the Disciplines: Results from a Study of Four Departments
    Abstract

    Chapter 1 be especially important to undergraduate science students, whose confidence in their own abilities as writers may have been damaged by experiences with writing in the classroom during their schooling (Choi et al., 2010;Shanahan, 2004).Several of the scientists and mathematicians in this study discuss damaging experiences with school and English teachers in particular.The anxious mathematics student, sitting in a writing class, who reads this comment by a successful applied mathematician, What's interesting is I did mathematics, I think, because I found English so difficult . . .I failed . . . on English and I was fine on mathematics.I was top in maths but I was desperate in English.I can remember the essay.The title was "Your House."Now as a mathematician . . .I've got to write about my house.What is my house?And I went to numbers straight away.It's got five windows, it's got one door-this is age 10 or 11.I knew it was a disaster when I wrote it.But I was incapable of doing anything better-Timothy, Chapter 3. may recognise a similar incident of their own, and may never have realised that the successful science or mathematics professor in their writing classroom may have experienced this kind of setback.Reading of

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2017.14.1.01

January 2016

  1. TA's and the Teaching of Writing Across the Curriculum: Introduction
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2016.13.3.08
  2. How to Create High-Impact Writing Assignments That Enhance Learning and Development and Reinvigorate WAC/WID Programs: What Almost 72,000 Undergraduates Taught Us
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2016.13.4.13
  3. Improving Success, Increasing Access: Bringing HIPs to Open Enrollment Institutions through WAC/WID
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2016.13.4.15
  4. Introduction to ATD Special Issue on WAC and High-Impact Practices
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2016.13.4.12
  5. Studying and Supporting Writing in Student Organizations as a High-Impact Practice
    Abstract

    Institutions of postsecondary education, and the field of writing across the curriculum and in the disciplines (WAC/WID) in particular, need to do more to trouble learning paradigms that employ writing only in service to particular disciplines, only in traditional learning environments, and only in particular languages, or in service to an overly narrow or generalized idea of who students are, where they're going, and what they need to get there. In relating a cross-section of a larger effort to study and support writing as a high-impact practice in a student chapter of an international nonprofit humanitarian engineering student organization, I will demonstrate that WAC/WID can and should empower students to use writing in student organizations, especially those that align with the four learning outcomes deemed essential by the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America's Promise, as a means of integrating into and interrogating their social and political realities, and reshaping postsecondary education to better meet their needs and goals as individual learners and as citizens in a deliberative democracy.

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2016.13.4.20
  6. "A Way to Talk about the Institution as Opposed to Just my Field": WAC Fellowships and Graduate Student Professional Development
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2016.13.3.09

January 2015

  1. Writing-Intensive Approaches in a Typographic Design Studio Class: Holding Students' Feet to the Fire of Cultural Context
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2015.12.4.14
  2. A Review of 'WAC and Second Language Writers: Research Towards Linguistically and Culturally Inclusive Programs and Practices
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2015.12.2.03
  3. Is WAC/WID Ready for the Transdisciplinary Research University?
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2015.12.2.02
  4. Writing to Learn and Learning to Perform: Lessons from a Writing Intensive Course in Experimental Theatre Studio
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2015.12.4.19
  5. Just Care: Learning From and With Graduate Students in a Doctor of Nursing Practice Program
    Abstract

    In 2010, Fairfield University, a Jesuit Carnegie Masters Level 1 University located in the Northeast, established its first doctoral -level program: the Doctorate of Nursing Practice (DNP). In a developing program such as the DNP, some of the most pressing concerns of current rhetoric and writing in the disciplines align and interact with the education of clinical nurse leaders — questions of transfer, ethical practice, reflection, assignment desi gn, and community engagement. Clearly, nursing scholar/practitioners and writing scholar/practitioners have much to offer and to learn from each other. In this article, we trace the initial action -research undertaken by the School of Nursing, the Writing C enter, and the Center for Academic Excellence to document, reflect upon, and support the reading and writing experiences of DNP graduate students as they negotiate the new curriculum.

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2015.12.3.10
  6. Introducing...Create, Perform, Write: WAC, WID and the Performing and Visual Arts!
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2015.12.4.11

January 2014

  1. Extra-Disciplinary Writing in the Disciplines: Towards a Metageneric Pedagogy
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2014.11.2.04
  2. The WAC Glossary Project: Facilitating Conversations Between Composition and WID Faculty in a Unified Writing Curriculum
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2014.11.1.02
  3. Notes from the Margins: WAC/WID and the Institutional Politics of Plac(ment)
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2014.11.3.12
  4. WAC/WID Campus Concerns: "Growing Pains" or Perspectives From a Small Branch Campus
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2014.11.3.10
  5. Economics of Place and Power: Lessons from One Regional Univeristy's Writing-Intensive Initiative
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2014.11.3.09
  6. Effective Comments and Revisions in Student Writing from WAC Courses
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2014.11.1.03
  7. Introduction to the Special Issue on WAC/WID at Rural, Regional, and Satellite Campuses
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2014.11.3.08