internal study: a way of understanding the causes and conditions for a WAC program's origins and reproduction, mutations and adaptations, endangerment, or extinction.Moving from taxonomy to evolutionary theory follows a historical pattern.Evolutionary theory represented the next scientific step beyond taxonomy for advancing our understanding of the natural world.Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linn), author of Systema Naturae, 1735, is credited with establishing hierarchical structures for classifying organisms according to their physical traits and their methods of reproduction.His taxonomy relied on visible, observable characteristics.In the late eighteenth century, Cuvier's functional taxonomy superseded Linnaeus's descriptive taxonomy (Foucault 268).In contrast to the externally visible traits emphasized in Linnaeus's taxonomy, Cuvier was beginning to theorize internal causes and conditions that could account for differences and disruptions."From Cuvier forward, " Foucault argues, "it is life in its non-perceptible purely functional aspect that provides the basis for the exterior possibility of a classification" (268).Classification is still useful for Cuvier, but he shifts the categories from highly specific traits to very general principles.In his emphasis on function, Cuvier thus helps lay the ground for Charles Darwin's theory that species formation depends on the natural selection of traits that help an organism adapt to its environment and reproduce successfully. 1 Darwin's theory of natural selection relies on environmental conditions, mutations, and change.His famous finches adapted to different environmental niches on the Galapagos, with the most relevant factor being the type of available food.In a different place, adaptive coloration may have led Darwin to study predatory/prey relationships.The point remains: if a particular mutation lines up with an environmental niche and gives an organism a reproductive advantage in terms of a food source, protective coloration, or something else it can productively exploit, that trait gets passed along to subsequent generations and eventually a new species is formed.WAC also speciates by adapting to its local environment.Evolutionary metaphors help explain and explore patterns, interrelationships, and the conditions under which a program can thrive.The metaphor can also help us understand that not all mutations are adaptive or successful, and that certain conditions threaten a program's survival.Evolutionary and ecological metaphors are, of course, not new to WAC discussions or to more general discussions of writing practices.In 1986, Marilyn Cooper argued for "The Ecology of Writing, " where writers are part of a varied and inherently dynamic system.Rather than paying attention to individual writers and their immediate contexts, Cooper asks us to attend to the ways in which, "all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the system" (368).For Cooper, contextual models serve a taxonomic function; she notes, for instance,The WAC Journal 24 (2013).

WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM linkages are generally acknowledged to help students improve as writers and engage more deeply in disciplinary course content. However, the extent to which the literacy skills that are taught in general writing courses transfer to the specific writing needs of a particular discipline remains a debatable issue. Referring to first year writing courses, Amy Devitt notes that writing courses “have been attacked as not useful, in part because of a potential lack of transferability of the general writing skills learned in composition courses to the particular writing tasks students will later confront” ( ). Margaret Mansfield similarly maintains that attempts to reproduce real world writing in the classroom are “intrinsically doomed” ( ), as do many of the essays in Joseph Petraglia’s collection, Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, which question the value of what Petraglia terms GWSI (General Writing Skills Instruction). However, an important benefit of a cross curricular model, one that receives little attention in writing across the curriculum scholarship, is that linked courses not only help students improve as writers, but they can also enable students to understand that “when people learn, they don’t take on new knowledge so much as a new identity” (Lindquist ). Identity is closely linked with writing, but WAC tends to focus primarily on the actual writing, not on the role writers play in a discourse community. In this essay, we discuss a successful linkage between a writing class and a class in Health Sciences that used rhetoric, with particular emphasis on the concepts of identity, genre, and performance, to help students gain insight into the role of writing in the field of Public Health and understand what it means to be a Public Health professional. Differences in students’ responses to essays written at the beginning of the semester as

Graduate students often feel anxious about whether their writing is as it should be—and if not, why not? (How should it be? And how can they tell, other than by pleasing or displeasing their supervisors?) At the same time, some wish to be more creative, but not to risk the success of their academic “audition.” This article discusses a WAC-like seminar that, drawing on genre studies, helps to mediate these concerns for graduate students in an Australian university. They are introduced to genre analysis and encouraged to find patterns of structure, style, or strategy in theses in their area. At the same time, they look at examples that suggest a range of possibilities for creativity. The seminar demonstrates how the “interpersonal” work of a thesis can be achieved both by adhering to convention and by diverging from it.

Ensuring that students graduate from post-secondary institutions with good writing skills presents two related challenges: assessment of writing and the teaching of writing. In this essay I want to address a commonly-used solu-tion to these twin challenges: the administration of an institution-wide compe-tence test to place students in WAC courses. I will begin with some of the reasons that this combination of a writing competence test and mandatory WAC courses is an attractive, and therefore commonly used, solution to this challenge of both certifying writing skills and educating those who do not earn certification. In the remainder of the essay, however, I will use a case study of the University of Calgary, and to a lesser extent Laurentian University, to illustrate some serious dangers of this relationship. I don’t want to suggest that competence testing and WAC can never exist in harmony. Like all WAC stories, the stories of the University of Calgary and of Laurentian are enmeshed in local politics that could well be different elsewhere. There may be ways to avoid the pitfalls I describe. But I will be quite candid: my experience has led me to become soured on the idea of combining institution-wide competence testing and WAC. I believe that their seemingly complementary approaches to what appears to be the same problem mask some deeply divided pedagogical assumptions that threaten to undermine the benefits of a WAC program, leading me finally to advise those who would contemplate such a potentially Faustian bargain to use extreme caution or avoid it altogether. I will end with a brief look at an alternative way of gaining traction on the difficult problem of ensuring students graduate with adequate writing pro-ficiency—first year seminars. In first-year seminars students learn and practice academic writing in a content-specific environment, and instructors are less apt to feel burdened by low-performing writers than in a course that links in-struction to universal testing. Why Combining Testing and WAC Looks Attractive Let us set to one side for a moment all the pedagogical and theoretical arguments for and against institution-wide writing competence testing (though I will come back to these arguments briefly later in this essay), and assume for

In her book Risking Who One Is, Susan Rubin Suleiman asks, “Why ... write? Why tell the tale?” and reflects further that “although the double bind of ‘having to tell, having to fail’ belongs most excruciatingly to those whose [stories] are the most painful, the most unrepresentable, perhaps it is inherent in all autobiographical writing. No one will ever experience my life as I have, no one will ever fully understand my story. Will I ever fully understand my story?” (212-213). Suleiman relates at the same time the explicit impulse to write her story, brought on by reading autobiographical texts: “Reading other people’s war memories,” she says, “has become indissociable, for me, from the desire (and recently, the act) of writing my own” (199). Suleiman’s reflections convey the importance of lived history—the personal perspective within historical, cultural, political changes and social movements—and provided the impetus for an upper-division course I designed for the spring semester 2003 at the University of Minnesota. Taught in German and intended for students who had taken at least one introductory literature class,1 the course concept reflected my sense of the inextricable connections between personal and political perspectives involved in narrating one’s experience, connections I hoped to bring out both in the course texts themselves as well as in the students’ writing assignments. Here I will discuss the design of the course and my rationale for the incorporation of a creative non-fiction writing assignment, the outcomes of the project and the challenges I faced in facilitating it, and finally will suggest how foreign language teaching, particularly at the upper levels, could benefit from a reflective engagement with the body of scholarship on college-level writing generated by the nation-wide Writing Across the Curriculum movement.2 Titling the course “Life Stories/Lived History,” I chose personal narratives that covered the post-1945 period in German-speaking countries. Ranging from a Nobel Prize winner’s autobiography to a controversial work of undercover journalism, from interviews exploring women’s lives in East Germany to a memoir of an Afro-German activist from the west, the course texts confronted us with powerful stories of individual lives.3 As we explored the clearly personal dimension and the wider social significance of each text, I

the Curriculum. It crosses over all disciplines and has the two characteristics of Writing Across the Curriculum: note taking helps students learn, and note taking helps students learn to write.

“The first thing I want to say to you who are students is that you cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education: you will do much better to think of being here to claim one. ” —Adrienne Rich (1979, p. 231) It may seem odd to begin a discussion of academic research by quoting Adrienne Rich’s well-known 1977 speech, “Claiming an Education. ” But, if one substitutes “research ” for “an education, ” the sentiment more or less de-scribes the situation faced by most first-year students assigned research in com-position. Completing the monumental academic “Research Paper ” in first-year writing courses is considered a rite of passage for students in many universities (including my own, Auburn University), and is one often performed with grim resignation and uncertain purpose by many of those involved (Schwegler & Shamoon, 1982). Such was the case when I began teaching English Composi-tion II, a second-semester, first-year writing course that makes up one of sev-eral humanities core courses within Auburn’s curriculum. These core courses, including a two-semester sequence of composition, are mandated by our state articulation agreement, and many curricular guidelines are predetermined by that agreement. Our department has molded this curriculum somewhat, but any innovations must be implemented cautiously and creatively. Drawing on previous WAC research about disciplinary writing as well as classical rhetoric and critical pedagogy, I will describe my response to this mandate, theorizing a new critical space for WAC, one that promotes students ’ civic engagement while they are researching an academic discipline. Operating at the nexus of rhetoric, critical theory, and WAC scholarship, I will discuss ways that a criti-cal WAC pedagogy encourages students ’ investment in their own research and encourages students to become responsible “citizen-experts ” within their com-munities. Though the purpose of Auburn’s research paper in English Composi-tion II is to prepare students for academic research, I also strive to include a strong critical component, highlighting moral and ethical concerns within academic discourse much like that described by John Pennington and Robert Boyer (2003), wherein students are conscious of the responsibility they have

While we have different methods of teaching, WAC teachers, writing tutors and teachers of EAP share a common goal: to help students learn how to write effectively across the curriculum. To do this, students have to be able to situate each assignment within the larger context of questions and discussions in their course, in order to understand the role of that assignment in inducting them into the discipline. This article demonstrates the importance, students, of discerning this academic purpose, and suggests some ways in which students can be helped to develop routines of interrogating their essay questions to discover the purpose behind the question. It concludes by describ- ing ways of mainstreaming this teaching in collaboration with discipline professors across the curriculum. Working with undergraduate students in an Australian arts faculty, every day I grapple with the problem of purpose in students' writing the disciplines: a problem shared, in universities around the world, by WAC teachers, writing tutors (like myself), and teachers of English Academic Purposes (EAP) who aim to prepare non-English-speak- ing-background students for the demands …(of) subject-matter class- rooms in English-medium universities (Stoller 209). The nature of our concerns varies, depending upon our role in the students' writing

Beginning in 1999, City University of New York (CUNY), significantly increased its commitment to Writing-Across-theCurriculum (WAC) by funding faculty development, Writing Fellows, and Writing Intensive courses on the majority of its 18 campuses. With this renewed interest in WAC, administrators and faculty across the disciplines are increasingly taking responsibility for using writing processes to foster learning and thinking as well as teaching writing in the disciplines. As teachers use writing more as a communicative tool in the content areas, how they respond to students’ writing becomes increasingly important. As a WAC Coordinator at Bronx Community College (BCC), I have had the opportunity to work with faculty in professional development seminars. A common concern teachers often raise is how best to respond to students’ writing. In turn, I, too, have often wondered how students in my classes react to my feedback on their written texts. Careful consideration of what we say and how we say it is an important part of good teaching practice. Teachers typically invest much time and effort in responding to students’ texts with the assumption that their feedback will help improve students’ writing. Teacher feedback takes on greater significance when students are revising their writing through multiple drafts. But what do students really think about our comments? Do our words help students move their thinking and writing forward on subsequent drafts?

The majority of people, mathematicians included, think that writing out formulas is exactly what we call writing in math-ematics. I was guilty of the same preconceptions before I started to work with the Writing Across the Curriculum Project at Medgar Evers College (WAC @ MEC). The definition of writ-ing to learn that we use at MEC helped me come up with the idea that served as the basic principle for my further experi-ments and conclusions as I implemented writing to learn in math-ematics. Our definition of WAC @ MEC is this: We define writing across the curriculum as a means to connect writing to learning in all content areas. We define writing as the process through which students think on paper, explore ideas, raise questions, attempt solutions, uncover processes, build and defend argu-ments, brainstorm, introspect, and figure out what’s going on. We define all of these as thinking. Writing to learn across the curriculum provides a potent way for students to exercise their own voices as well as to take on new voices which represent their knowledge of the content and the language of the discipline they are learning (Lester, et. al, 2000, p.4). The words that I have underlined gave me the idea of what the concept of writing to learn in mathematics should be–learn-ing the new language of the new discipline.

Writing across the curriculum means more than creating opportu-nities to learn by writing; it means, also, focusing on the nature of writing for particular purposes, in particular fields. In Australia, B.A. students are required to write extensively for all of their courses, but usually receive no theoretically-informed instruction about writing itself. This paper offers a framework that discipline specialists and their students might use in analyzing the varieties of writing in their field, to inform the students ’ subsequent choices of suitable forms and language when they write for different au-diences in a professional role. The paper follows the application of this framework in an archaeology subject where an academic skills adviser collaborated with an archaeology lecturer in invit-ing upper level students to closely examine the discourse of their profession.

Two recent books on writing across the curriculum—The WAC Casebook: Scenes for Faculty Reflection and Program Development and WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs—provide two operative words that are vital to any discussion of WAC: “reflection” and “strategy.” As Chris Anson contends, “We do not always find opportunities to reflect on the teaching process, even though it makes up an important part of our professional lives [...] But such investigations work most successfully when they become public—when we talk about our teaching, share ideas, and solve problems with our colleagues” (xii). To reflect upon WAC now is timely, especially if we heed the advice of Susan McLeod and Eric Miraglia, who argue in WAC for the New Millennium, that “higher education is facing massive change in the next few decades, which could spell trouble for WAC programs” (1). A reflection on WAC, consequently, becomes dependent on particular strategies to keep the movement vital for the future. At St. Norbert College, a Catholic, liberal arts college of 2000 students in Wisconsin, we have developed a WAC program that complements our mission to provide for a values-centered curriculum. Our program, which situates writing as a moral and civic responsibility, has been a key factor in gaining both ad-

Writing Across the Curriculum places considerable demands not only upon the students in writing intensive courses, but also on the writing center staff to whom they go for help. This paper looks at some of the problems raised by tutors in this situation, and presents a case study in which such problems are negotiated in the course of a consultation between a student and a tutor. The kinds of revision resulting from this process are explored for the light they can throw on the relationship between language and content, as well as the relationships among discipline teachers, tutors, students, and the students’ texts. One aim of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement is that every teacher should be a writing teacher. However, while WAC assignments provide opportunities to write, the work of helping students to do it often falls to tutors in writing centers; and both tutors and teachers have expressed uneasiness about such consultations for a number of reasons. First, WAC assignments can challenge the tutors’ priority of respecting students’ ownership of their texts. What does it mean to own your text if you are writing on a topic set by somebody else, drawing on other people’s ideas, and conforming to conventions of structure and voice imposed by a discipline? Conventions of one sort or another have always surrounded writing, and even students’ “personal” writing is often largely a matter of reproducing commonplaces (see, e.g., Bartholemae). However, it is in the context of writing for unfamiliar disciplines that students and tutors are forced to confront these issues, identify the constraints and opportunities peculiar to writing in each discipline, and work within them. This brings

If the tale we are about to tell sounds familiar, the reason lies in a familiar pattern. An awareness of the status quo arises from emerging dissatisfaction with an increasing number of features of that situation. A certain floundering around ensues, during which various factions propose various solutions. Finally, a new plan emerges and is put into place. Over time, that new plan becomes a new status quo; and the cycle continues. Robert Connors describes that cycle within the field of Rhetoric and Composition, but the pattern itself is hardly new. Thomas Carlyle described it in his 1831 essay “Characteristics. ” Thomas S. Kuhn documented similar cycles throughout the history of science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a work that reads across disciplines to chart revolutionary shifts in accepted intellectual paradigms. Our story of WAC’s evolution at Carleton College chronicles two of these cycles, and what justifies the telling is the way the story parallels WAC’s evolution from a faculty development movement to a multi-disciplinary initiative, and finally into an era when demands for outcomes-based accountability extend what we believe are unprecedented opportunities for WAC programs, which are a nexus where several important dimensions of student learning come together. Our tale, then, chronicles an alliance between WAC and assessment, an alliance that we believe represents WAC’s third evolutionary stage. On the other hand, if the tale we are about to tell sounds new, the reason stems from that very alliance, from the fact that what we are chronicling is WAC on a new frontier. For a variety of reasons, the growing accountability movement has focused on Writing Across the Curriculum. Of course, WAC in its writing-in-the-disciplines mode brings together

You write what you, what you understand, what you know, right? About the topic or about the concepts...--Lata, a community college nursing student in a writing-intensive course Still in the relatively early stages of our college’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative, we have begun a study to assess its impact. As members of the WAC committee, full-time instructors in two of the college’s career programs (human services and early childhood respec-tively), and qualitative researchers, we were charged with the task of de-veloping and implementing the study. In our urban community college we often conduct interdisciplinary work, and both the WAC program and committee reflect that. The WAC committee has enlisted support for WAC from the variety of career programs and liberal arts departments. Our role as assessors is to look at and learn from the way instructors are imple-menting WAC. Walvoord & Anderson (1998) state that assessors are not external imposers of something brand new but in-vestigators, ethnographers, and facilitators. The assessor’s approach is not to get people to do assessment, but to examine how people teach and assess critical thinking, and to help them improve. (pp.150-

Background While all institutions of higher learning value writing, each institution manifests its values in different ways. Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) has established an Office of Campus Writing, with a Director to design and offer faculty development opportunities to integrate writing more meaningfully and more effectively in the curricula of the 21 academic and professional schools that comprise the campus. One major faculty development offering is the annual two-week intensive Summer Faculty Writing Forum. This Forum accepts up to 15 faculty each year from schools and disciplines across the campus. These faculty, more used to the role of writing to demonstrate learning, investigate the capacity of writing to communicate learning, enhance learning, improve critical thinking, and reflect upon and evaluate learning. They design writing assignments, develop rubrics, and explore how to respond to written work more effectively. Upon completing the Forum, all faculty are asked to apply what they have learned to their own teaching, and to disseminate successful applications among their colleagues. This article focuses on the three-semester application of one Forum participant, an application that has evolved into a research project that clearly demonstrates the power of writing-to-learn to improve student understanding of quantitative analysis. It traces this evolution through e-mail exchanges between a professor of Computer Technology (Bob) and the Director of Campus Writing (Sharon).

As Director of a Learning Center, a faculty advisor, and a parent of two college graduates, I have frequently heard students rationalize their minimal performance in courses by saying, “It’s just a gen ed. ” To faculty who teach general education courses1, who believe in the value of general education requirements and advocate a liberal arts education, those five words raise concerns. General education programs have several goals in common with Writing-Across-the-Curriculum programs. These common-alities, along with several ideas about writing and learning, persuade me that WAC programs, and Writing Intensive (WI)2 courses, in particular, have the potential to effect positive change in student attitudes toward general education courses, and ultimately to effect reform in pedagogy in general education courses. Since 1978 when the Carnegie Foundation indicted colleges and universities for the lack of coherence in their general education programs, slow but steady progress has been made toward reforms in general educa-