Instructors within the writing across the curriculum (WAC) movement leverage student writing for learning and engagement beyond the traditional English or composition classroom. To this end, WAC pedagogy foregrounds the benefits of real-world active learning strategies. Educators often find it logistically difficult to create sustainable versions of these realistic environments, however. The same challenges faced by writing instructors present themselves across disciplinary contexts, including ethics and computer science instruction. In this article, we describe our integrated ethics module linking first-year composition students with computer science capstone design teams to better integrate the study of ethics into the writing classroom while giving students more realistic contexts for practice. The tension between two prominent metaphors for learning – the swamp (the messy situationality of professional practice) and the scaffold (the building of progressively more challenging tasks for students out of smaller, simpler assignments) – guides our discussion of WAC-centered course design.

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).

My aim here is to write out of the experience of “doing philosophy” with graduate students online through an educational web site template called WebCt. WebCt provides me with the ability to custom design a learning environment in which we can read, think, write and share our experiences, sometimes at great physical distance. Writing is the me-dium of communication for every aspect of my online courses. The specific online course I will describe in this paper is ED 501: Philosophy, Education and Ethics. ED 501 is a core requirement in the Graduate Studies Program in Education at Plymouth State College. At the time of this writing, I am teaching two online sections of this course, each with twenty-five students. I have students in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Honduras and in various areas of the U.S. In the online environment that I’ve designed, “doing philosophy ” is a kind of conduct and that conduct is expressed as writing that we share in various ways. John Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education, “To be the recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed ex-perience. ” Dewey claims that “social life is identical with communica-tion ” and that “all communication is educative ” (1985, p. 8). Although he certainly had in mind face-to-face communication, we accomplish this fact of social life in ED 501 through writing within the online environ-ment. Writing as communication is a form of educative conduct. In a typical semester, ED 501 includes the following writing com-ponents: • personal biographical statements which are made public to the class through posting on the website bulletin board • an e-mail dialog with the instructor which is essentially private, but may be shared with the class as a final project • responses posted on the website bulletin board to core questions and topics about a specific reading

It’s a cloudy Thursday morning in November, and the university writing center is humming. A peer tutor sits at a table near the center of the room, listening to a sophomore explain her essay assignment for a recreational therapy class while a second tutor helps a freshman fine tune his thesis statement for a research paper. In the far corner, a third tutor works at a computer, responding to an on-line submission from a student in a local high school’s creative writing class. The director is conferring with a member of the mathematics department on ways to include meaningful writing activities in an advanced calculus class. It’s a typical day at a college-level writing center, but it raises a question for educators. Are similar scenes occurring in our public secondary schools? As an awareness of the importance of writing as a means of learning has grown, the writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) movement has gained momentum on college campuses. One response to this increased focus on the importance of writing in the learning process has been the establishment of writing centers at hundreds of colleges and universities. These centers are designed to serve the needs of both students and faculty and aim to support learning in all fields. While these programs have flourished in many post-secondary settings, formal WAC programs in general and writing centers in particular still seem to be something of an exception in secondary public schools; however, interest in these practices appears to be growing there as well. A number of publications show an increasing integration of WAC philosophy and strategies into secondary public school settings. Pamela Farrell’s The High School Writing Center: Establishing and Maintaining One not only provides practical information on designing and running writing labs in secondary schools, but also illustrates the variety of forms