After reviewing my career as a teacher of composition and literature and as a writing program administrator of writing across the curriculum, I discuss the potential of poetry across the curriculum as an important tool for writing “against” the curriculum of academic discourse. When they write poetry, students often express meaningful thoughts and emotions not readily available to them in disciplinary languages and contexts.

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-

Two scenes emerge as I revisit this piece: first, the excitement of the early-eighties Montana State University WAC/WC/FYC collaborations, and, second, the array of WC/WAC configurations that now enrich our campuses. This piece grew out of a "How can we do all that with these paltiy resources?" moment in Bozeman, Montana, a moment that John Bean, John Ramage, and Jack Folsom seized and renamed "an opportunity for conceptual blockbusting." They made us believe, and out of some wonderfully nave questions about writers, texts, instructors, and pedagogies came a revamped FYC program, a WAG program, and a writing center that functioned as the hub for campus writing. This pivotal activity remains for me a model of thoughtful, collaborative risk taking, one that I hope continues to inform the ways we in writing centers work with our present theoretical, political, and pedagogical possibilities.

(2002). Review of Writing Centers and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs: Building Interdisciplinary Partnerships. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 476-478.

The authors argue that writing-intensive service-learning courses extend the lessons of first-year composition courses by teaching students how to understand and negotiate differences between the discourses of the academy and those of community-based organizations. While first-year writing courses lead students through successive approximations of a generalized academic discourse in the relative safety of the composition classroom, service-learning courses create conditions in which students must confront clashing discourses in action. This article present s vignettes of three different courses, one of which intentionally tapped into the discourse tensions the students faced and the other two of which encountered these tensions as impediments to successful teaching problems that could be overcome in future versions of the courses. The challenge of negotiating competing discourses will inevitably be part of any service-learning course that involves extensive writing, the authors conclude; hence this issue should be addressed explicitly in readings, class discussions, and student papers. When addressed directly, the friction between discourses can become a teachable space where teachers can help students explore options for addressing dissonance, and so provide everyone involved with an opportunity for transformation.

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-

Pedagogy - Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2001

Research Article| April 01 2001 Comments on and Addenda to Holdstein's WAC Paradoxes Melinda L. Kreth Melinda L. Kreth Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (2): 287–296. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-2-287 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Melinda L. Kreth; Comments on and Addenda to Holdstein's WAC Paradoxes. Pedagogy 1 April 2001; 1 (2): 287–296. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-2-287 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

This study by a philosophy professor and a compositionist focuses on the progress of an ESL student in the philosopher's writing-intensive Intro course. In it, the authors answer calls for examination of instructional supports that help ESL students in their college classes across the curriculum. Their report is divided into three parts. In the first, the philosophy professor explicates his classroom aims and expectations, rooting them in the educational approaches of Dewey, Freire, and Gramsci. In the second, the compositionist offers an account of the ESL pupil's experiences in this philosophy classroom, describing the pedagogies that promote her progress toward achieving the professor's goals. In the final section, the authors, acknowledging the contested nature of “progress” in this context, describe the ideological conflicts behind their different interpretations of the successes and failures of this ESL student.

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-

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

Research Article| January 01 2001 “Writing Across the Curriculum” and the Paradoxes of Institutional Initiatives Deborah H. Holdstein Deborah H. Holdstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (1): 37–52. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-37 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Deborah H. Holdstein; “Writing Across the Curriculum” and the Paradoxes of Institutional Initiatives. Pedagogy 1 January 2001; 1 (1): 37–52. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-37 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Although rhetoricians have studied the discourse practices of engineers, little is known about the production workers who must assemble engineering knowledge into functional products. This case study examines what happens when a production worker tried to improve manufacturing documentation, and how her success depended upon both her craft knowledge and the rhetorical skills she attributes to a Writing Across the Curriculum program she experienced in college. … although the goal of engineering may be to produce useful objects, engineers do not construct such objects themselves. Rather, they aim to generate knowledge that will allow such objects to be built [1, p. 5].

Urges compositionists to reframe Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) to reach beyond university boundaries. Reviews calls for an expanded conception of WAC, describes a program that carries writing instruction and literacy research beyond university boundaries, and suggests problems and benefits that may accompany this change of orientation for writing programs.

Argues a need to reposition Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) theory. Examines current myths about WAC. Discusses what WAC is, what it does, and what it can become.

This study draws on the perceptions and experiences of upper-division students enrolled in writing-intensive (WI) classes in their majors at a large state university. During extended interviews, students reported confidence in dealing with the writing requirements of their majors and predicted success in future job-related writing situations. The primary bases for this confidence are their experiences with a significant number of WI assignments and their ability to engage a variety of resources and use the knowledge thereby obtained. Students particularly valued research-related writing assignments in the major as opportunities for professional skills development and identity building. The authors discuss findings as they relate to the ideologies of writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines. The authors argue for greater attention to students' readiness to make connections across assignments, courses, and disciplines; they also suggest greater attention to a field's inquiry methods and strategies for solving problems.

Beginning Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students often have difficulty learning the genre of lab report writing. This difficulty can be alleviated through genre theory strategies and research, which writing center consultants, for example, can use to focus on the specific form and content of engineering writing, which then can be taught to students in a writing center environment. Genre theory provides a means (1) for humanities writing center consultants to learn specific characteristics about engineering writing, (2) for interdisciplinary collaboration between writing professionals and engineers to take place, and (3) for students to have increased opportunities to learn the discourse of their field. All of these benefits are enhanced by discipline-specific writing programs that support and facilitate them. In addition, the collaboration provides a stimulating, fluid, creative environment in which to discuss engineering writing, an environment which reflects the changing needs of engineering education as a result of technological advancements. As technology continues to influence engineering education, prompting evolutions in both technical and communication skills and knowledge, genre theory and interdisciplinary collaboration will continue to gain importance as strategies for initiating students into the communication demands of their field. The discussion focuses on the integration of genre theory with writing instruction in the ECE Department at the University of South Carolina. This integration stimulated interaction among ECE faculty, composition and rhetoric faculty and students, and ECE students.

In this article I intend to share my experiences of teaching writingintensive courses at a large state university with the use of computers.' I want to present my positive experiences to the reader in such a way that will make you want to join me in exploring the myriad of possibilities of teaching with technology: ways that will free us, not constrict us-ways that will enhance learning and dialogue, not provide new ways of shutting down the inquisitive minds of students, but rather of expanding and enhancing all their possibilities and ours. Let me explain at the outset that the technologies I am advocating for teaching writing in writing-intensive literature and folklore courses are largely electronic mail formats and web sites for the distribution of assignments, for syllabi, for student writing, written assignments and peer reviews, and for the position of hypertext archives for class listservs.2 E-mail discussion listserv formats provide an easy way for everyone in the class to communicate automatically with every other member of the class, as well as with the instructor(s).3 Teachers, teaching assistants, tutors, and students can all be subscribed to the discussion listserv; whenever anyone on the list posts a memo addressed to the listserv, all persons subscribed to the list receive a copy of the entry. The listserv owner (generally, the teacher) controls who can be subscribed to the discussion list and who can participate in this electronic forum and how the discussion will operate. For example, in my descriptions below, I will illustrate how every student journal entry or writing assignment goes automatically to the computers of all the other students and myself. However, when I wish to communicate privately with a student or send her or him a graded paper, I can send that message only to that particular student simply by addressing the note to the individual student rather than to the entire list; similarly, when students are doing peer reviews of other students' papers, for privacy, they can post their comments only to the author of a paper, rather than to the entire class. In this paper I am advocating the use of the e-mail discussion list format because I believe in its capacity to better enable students to write well

The range of outreach projects recounted in recent journal articles, discussions on WCENTER’s electronic forum, and conference presentations indicate that collectively we as writing center professionals have indeed been working to extend the conversation about one-to-one work across our campuses. Writing across the curriculum partnerships with classroom teachers (Gill; Mullin, “Tutoring for Law Students”; Soliday), satellite writing centers in dorms or specific academic departments (“Advice on Satellite Centers”), on-line writing centers (Denny and Livesey), and administrative portfolios reflecting the complex combination of teaching, research, and administration entailed in the work of writing center directors (Olson; Perdue) are all examples of the expanding presence of writing centers at our institutions. Yet if we are to extend the benefits of one-to-one work to teachers, the individuals who most influence the type of writing our students do, we need to find ways of communicating with them directly and regularly. The conference summary—the record of a tutor’s interaction with a student, written up and sent to the instructor upon the student’s written request—offers one of the few ways we have to extend the discussion of one-to-one work beyond the center on a weekly basis. However, this form is not universally endorsed. Some writing center professionals—including those described as “sharers” by Michael Pemberton in a 1995 Writing Lab Newsletter “Ethics” column—perceive these reports as promoting “a unified educational experience for students” and “productive relationships with faculty” (13). Others—including those described by Pemberton as “seclusionists”—see summaries as just another instance of limiting tutors to the role of “service workers” for instructors (Pemberton 13).

A project in writing-across-the curriculum was launched within a nationally ranked baccalaureate degree program in accountancy at a Boston area college. The project team, which comprised faculty from accountancy and technical communication, attempted to integrate technical communication skills, principally writing, into an accounting information systems course. To improve student writing in this way, the team had to determine what kinds of writing activities would successfully introduce accounting students to the discourse of their profession, and had to select, from all the communication skills that might be taught, only those that should be taught to complement the specialized content of the accounting information systems course. The team's collaborative process produced three critical planning decisions that greatly simplified the integration: 1) establishing Joseph Juran's TQM notion of fitness-for-use for evaluating the quality of student communications; 2) selecting only those forms of communication used in the profession's discourse community in assignments; and 3) teaching only those communication skills that support and enrich the principal technical skills taught in the accounting course. This strategy demonstrates that communication skills can be integrated within a technical course so as to enhance the students' understanding of technical content while improving the students' proficiency in written communication.

Contents: C. Murphy, J. Law, Introduction: Landmark Essays on Writing Centers (1994). Part I:Historical Perspectives. R.H. Moore, The Writing Clinic and the Writing Laboratory (1950). L. Kelly, One-on-One, Iowa City Style: Fifty Years of Individualized Instruction in Writing (1980). M. Harris, What's Up and What's In: Trends and Traditions in Writing Centers (1990). P. Carino, What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Our Metaphors: A Cultural Critique of Clinic, Lab and Center (1992). G. Olson, E. Ashton-Jones, Writing Center Directors: The Search for Professional Status (1984). J. Simpson, What Lies Ahead for Writing Centers: Position Statement on Professional Concerns (1985). J. Summerfield, Writing Centers: A Long View (1988). Part II:Theoretical Foundations. S.M. North, The Idea of a Writing Center (1984). K.A. Bruffee, Peer Tutoring and the Conversation of Mankind (1984). L. Ede, Writing as a Social Process: A Theoretical Foundation for Writing Centers? (1989). A. Lunsford, Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center (1991). C. Murphy, Writing Centers in Context: Responding to Current Educational Theory (1991). A.M. Gillam, Writing Center Ecology: A Bakhtinian Perspective (1991). M. Cooper, Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers (1994). Part III:Writing Center Praxis. J. Simpson, S. Braye, B. Boquet, War, Peace, and Writing Center Administration. D. Healy, A Defense of Dualism: The Writing Center and the Classroom (1993). R. Wallace, The Writing Center's Role in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program: Theory and Practice (1989). R. Leahy, Writing Centers and Writing-for-Learning (1989). H. Kail, J. Trimbur, The Politics of Peer Tutoring (1987). A. DiPardo, Whispers of Coming and Going: Lessons From Fannie (1992). M. Woolbright, The Politics of Tutoring: Feminism Within the Patriarchy (1992).

An English instructor and a science instructor collaborate to inject real-world experience into an introductory content classroom.

The first full-length account integrating both the cognitive and sociological aspects of reading and writing in the academy, this unique volume covers educational research on reading and writing, rhetorical research on writing in the disciplines, cognitive research on expertise in ill-defined problems, and sociological and historical research on the professions. The author produced this volume as a result of a research program aimed at understanding the relationship between two concepts -- literacy and expertise -- which traditionally have been treated as quite separate phenomena. A burgeoning literature on reading and writing in the academy has begun to indicate fairly consistent patterns in students acquire literacy practices. This literature shows, furthermore, that what students do is quite distinct from what experts do. While many have used these results as a starting point for teaching students how to be expert, the author has chosen instead to ask about the interrelationship between expert and novice practice, seeing them both as two sides of the same project: a cultural-historical professionalization project aimed at establishing and preserving the professional privilege. The consequences of this professionalization project are examined using the discipline of academic philosophy as the site for the author's investigations. Methodologically unique, these investigations combine rhetorical analysis, protocol analysis, and the analysis of classroom discourse. The result is a complex portrait of the participants in this humanistic discipline use their academic literacy practices to construct and reconstruct a great divide between expert and lay knowledge. This monograph thus extends our current understanding of the rhetoric of the professions and examines its implications for education.

The paper describes the implementation of a learning community involving a technical communication course and an accounting course. Students are simultaneously registered in all the courses constituting the learning community. The learning community approach to writing instruction can be viewed as one way to implement writing across the curriculum with the following distinguishing features. First, students are registered simultaneously for both courses; the communication skills taught in one course are simultaneously reinforced in another course. Second, the faculty of the two courses interact extensively to deliver skills (e.g., communication skills) in a coherent manner across the two courses. We describe the development of a theoretical framework for connecting the two courses. This theoretical framework guided implementation decisions such as the choice of communication skills to be covered in the accounting course, the design of assignments, and the design of evaluation criteria. While we focus on the integration of an accounting course with a communication course, the learning community approach and the implementation steps are applicable to other disciplines.

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In recent years, compositionists in writing centers and in writing-acrossthe-curriculum and writing-in-the-disciplines

More and more college campuses are offering one or another form of “writing-intensive” classes across the curriculum. This study investigates what students perceive to be the effects of the writing-intensive requirement at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa where students are required to take five courses designated as writing-intensive. To identify the potential composite effects of taking three or more writing-intensive classes and to identify evidence of learning that may have resulted from these multiple experiences, we interviewed 82 randomly selected seniors. Using interview transcriptions, we developed a scheme for analysis of the data. These analyses revealed several areas of self-identified improvement associated with writing-intensive classes: writing skills, knowledge acquisition, and problem-solving abilities. Students also reported that they had become better writers through interaction with their professors during the writing process, although they also reported wanting to better understand the philosophy behind writingacross- the-curriculuma nd the purposes of specific assignments. These student-reported effects of writing-intensive classes support the notion that writing can play an important part in learning.