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 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?

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

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

In the section I teach of Technical Writing at Plymouth State College, students learn to handle the content, form, and style of scientific reports by writing about a snowpack (accumulated snow on the ground). In this context, snowpack study requires students to learn and apply only elementary concepts of snow physics, but it establishes common experiences in science for students with non-scientific backgrounds. During an initial field trip, students examine the layers in a snowpack and observe the various characteristics of snow. For two weeks after the first field trip, students study local weather history and learn basic concepts of snow science, snow stratigraphy, and snow metamorphism. Based on their new understanding of snow, they hypothesize changes that have occurred in the snowpack, and they learn to identify types of snow particles in the field. Then they return to the snowpack to make a second set of observations. During the second field trip, they reexamine the snowpack, compare their hypotheses with actual conditions they observe, and account for persistence and change in the snowpack. At each stage in the snowpack study unit, students write up their findings in a series of technical reports, then write essays in which they examine their personal experience in snowpack study and assess the snowpack

Writing teachers despise grading. They delay it. They avoid it. They strive to minimize its impact and importance, speaking to their students as if it didn’t matter (when, of course it does). But in the end they are faced with it and do it, usually alone, with trepi-dation and a lot of second guessing. Last semester, we decided not to grade our stu-dents ’ portfolios. We opted out of the whole dilemma and in the process, found a way to provide students with a more valid assessment of their work. What grew out of a simple frustration with our roles as evaluators, eventually revealed hidden complexities and subjectivities inherent in grading. We had long been aware of evaluation of writing as a process riddled with doubt. “Is this really an A, or am I too aware of the fact that this is her sixteenth draft, am I too sympathetic to her struggle? ” or conversely, “Is this really a D paper, or am I only reacting to his snide posturing, his bragging to class-mates about how quickly he can ‘slap something together ’ before class? ” No matter how objective we try to be, these uncertainties remain. Some writing teachers embrace this subjectivity.

Creating a Textbook Writing Across the Curriculum activities have been successful not only in improving the art of writing but in fostering a wide variety of other skills critical to collegiate learning, such as conceptual integration (Weiss & Walter, 1980) and interdisciplinary study (Hamilton, 1980). The creation of a collaborative textbook, documents in which student writing representing the bulk of course work is assembled, has been used extensively with young students (Weiss and Walter, 1980). Its use as the exclusive text in a college setting remains unreported in recent educational literature, although this does not mean it is untried. Each semester during the 1992-93 academic year, two sections of undergraduates at Plymouth State College studied introductory psychology without purchasing any text or reserve materials. Students in these sections instead used a Writing-Across-the-Curriculum approach, in which writing and research skills were developed through mutually supporting projects. The students wrote their own textbook after researching key topics, while other students edited their work for accuracy, concepts, and form. All students reviewed and critiqued professional journal research for their semester papers. The students even proposed and wrote the questions on their final examinations. By the end of their term, participants had found, read, and critiqued journal-level research with the familiarity of graduating seniors. They had written an average of two pages of critical essays each week. Three out