Survival or Natural Death? Issues Related to the Sustainability of Writing across the Curriculum Programmes
Abstract
This paper examines the issue of sustainability in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programmes, focusing on the role of ‘bottom up’ initiatives in their development and spread. It argues that, although this element is essential for the start up of WAC initiatives, sustainability can only be achieved through institutionalization, a process requiring ‘top down’ measures. Since both bottom up and top down approaches are essential to successful implementation, it is critical to find the right balance between both approaches. The experience of WAC implementation at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica is used as a context within which to examine these issues. This example demonstrates a mix of bottom up and top down implementation approaches, but with insufficient top down commitment to guarantee sustainability. It concludes by looking at lessons learned and areas of continued activism which have borne some fruit. It is suggested that the issue of sustainability in the case of grassroots advocates is perhaps better conceptualized as sustained efforts to establish programmes, rather than programme sustainability per se.
- Journal
- Journal of Academic Writing
- Published
- 2011-09-01
- DOI
- 10.18552/joaw.v1i1.12
- CompPile
- Search in CompPile ↗
- Open Access
- OA PDF Diamond
- Topics
- Export
- BibTeX RIS
Citation Context
Cited by in this index (0)
No articles in this index cite this work.
Cites in this index (0)
No references match articles in this index.
Related Articles
-
Journal of Business and Technical Communication Mar 2026Book Review: <i>Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change</i> by Knight, Aimée KnightAimée. (2022). Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change. WAC Clearinghouse, University Press of Colorado. 141 pp. Open-Access Resource. ISBN: 978-1-64215-148-0. ↗Yingying Tang
-
Written Communication Jan 2026Parallel Surveys of GenAI and Writing: Students’ Perspectives and Instructors’ Perception of Student Perspectives in Writing-Intensive Courses ↗Hooman Saeli; Jeff Ringer; Chris Mayer; Matt Bryant Cheney; Grace Duncan
-
Across the Disciplines Jan 2026Crystal N. Fodrey
-
Business and Professional Communication Quarterly Dec 2025Book Review: Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication CarradiniS.SwartsJ. (2024). Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication. Denver, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse, University Press of Colorado. 152 pp. ↗Chen Chen
-
Pedagogy Oct 2025modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism genre theory cultural rhetorics first-year composition writing pedagogy advanced composition creative writing writing across the curriculum graduate education two-year college service learning teacher development technical communication professional writing labor and working conditions archival research multimodality artificial intelligence literacy studies race and writing gender and writing disability studies literary studies editorial matter