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119 pages

English

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Composing a Community is not only a history of early WAC programs but also of how the people developing those programs were in touch with one another, exchanging ideas and information, forming first a network and then a community. Composing a Community captures the stories of pioneers like Elaine Maimon, Toby Fulwiler, and others, giving readers first-hand accounts from those who were present at the creation of this new movement. David Russell’s introduction sets this emergent narrative into relief. Susan H. McLeod and Margot Iris Soven, themselves pioneers in WAC history, have assembled some of its most eloquent voices in this collection: Charles Bazerman, John C. Bean, Toby Fulwiler, Anne Herrington, Carol Holder, Peshe C. Kuriloff, Linda Peterson, David R. Russell, Christopher Thaiss, Barbara E. Walvoord, and Sam Watson. Their style is personal, lively, and informal as the authors succeed in putting their personal memories in the larger context of WAC studies.

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Publié par	Parlor Press, LLC
Date de parution	28 mars 2006
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781602358119
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition
Series Editors, Catherine Hobbs and Patricia Sullivan
The Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition honors the contributions Janice Lauer Hutton has made to the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a disciplinary study. It publishes scholarship that carries on Professor Lauer’s varied work in the history of written rhetoric, disciplinarity in composition studies, contemporary pedagogical theory, and written literacy theory and research.
Other Books in the Series
Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, edited by Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo (2004)
Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies (Expanded Edition) by James A. Berlin (2003)

Composing a Community
A History of Writing Across the Curriculum
Editors
Susan H. McLeod
Margot Iris Soven
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2006 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Composing a community : a history of writing across the curriculum / edited by Susan H. McLeod and Margot Iris Soven.
p. cm. -- (Lauer series in rhetoric and composition)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-932559-17-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-25-6 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-81-7 (adobe ebook) 1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching. 2. Report writing--Study and teaching (Higher) 3. Interdisciplinary approach in education. 4. Writing centers--Administration. I. McLeod, Susan H. II. Soven, Margot. III. Title. IV. Series.
PE1404.C61757 2006
808’.0420711--dc22
2006006627
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Cover illustration: “Reading by Candle Light” © 2006, by Adrian Moisei. Used by permission.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 8 1 6 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail editor@parlorpress.com.

Contents
Introduction: WAC’s Beginnings: Developing a Community of Change Agents
David R. Russell
1 It Takes a Campus to Teach a Writer: WAC and the Reform of Undergraduate Education
Elaine P. Maimon
2 A University-Schools Partnership: WAC and the National Writing Project at George Mason University
Christopher Thaiss
3 Circles of Interest: The Growth of Research Communities in WAC and WID/WIP
Charles Bazerman and Anne Herrington
4 The Start of Writing in the Disciplines/Writing Across the Curriculum in the California State University System
Carol R. Holder and Susan H. McLeod
5 WAC Becomes Respectable: The University of Chicago Institutes on Writing and Higher Order Reasoning
Margot Soven
6 Writing across the Curriculum in the Ivy Consortium
Peshe Kuriloff and Linda Peterson
7 Montana, Mina Shaughnessy, and Microthemes: Reflections on WAC as a Community
John C. Bean
8 Still a Good Place to Be: More than 20 Years of the National Network of WAC Programs
Christopher Thaiss
9 Gender and Discipline in Two Early WAC Communities: Lessons for Today
Barbara E. Walvoord
10 Writing Across the Michigan Tech Curriculum
Toby Fulwiler, with Additions by Art Young
11 My Story of Wildacres, 1983–1998
Sam Watson
About the Authors
Index to Print Version

Introduction: WAC’s Beginnings: Developing a Community of Change Agents
David R. Russell
This collection is an informal history of the early years of the writing across the curriculum (WAC) movement, as told by some of the people who made that history. If you are reading this, you probably already know that the WAC movement is an effort to improve education by encouraging students to write in many fields (or content areas). What you may not know is that the WAC movement is an extraordinary example of grassroots change in education. In 1984, when the WAC movement was 14 years old, I first started researching the history of attempts to improve students’ writing across the curriculum, dating back to the beginnings of mass education in the waning years of the nineteenth century (Russell, Writing ). What struck me most often and most forcefully in the early 1990s was that the WAC movement had lasted longer—and involved far more students and teachers—than any previous attempt to improve writing across the curriculum—and there had been many, I found. Now, twenty years later, WAC may well be the largest and longest-lived educational reform movement in the history of American higher education that did not develop a formal organizational structure—with the possible exception of the general education movement. How did that happen?
This book is by and about the people who made that history, people who began, often, as newcomers to education and went on—largely through their involvement in WAC—to become provosts, directors of core curricula, department chairs, deans, heads of teaching and learning centers, as well as WAC program coordinators. And so WAC spread and gained such staying power, to the extent that it has brought about systemic changes rather than just individual classroom change. Though WAC has been important in secondary schools (and is increasingly so), the most visible institutional change came in higher education, the focus of this book. WAC appeals to the way professors work and think (they have more time to ponder questions and do research), and it appeals to something many of them sense they are lacking (more knowledge about teaching and learning). Further, faculty can and do become administrators, who then have the power to change practice in a way that secondary teachers do not (unfortunately, in my view). Thus, WAC has been a training ground for change agents: WAC coordinators who then go on to support other innovative programs that are in line with WAC principles, forging alliances and spreading the insights that into teaching and learning that come though focusing on learning to write and writing to learn.
The book has three main purposes and three audiences—overlapping, I suspect. First, it’s for people interested in the process of educational change, especially when that change takes the form of a movement. From this perspective, the book is a kind of loose case study of one of the longest-lasting and most widespread movements in the history of American education. The WAC movement began with—and maintained—a very informal structure, relying on a network of personal relationships in a community of practitioners in many disciplines, rather than a formal organization (Walvoord). The trade-offs involved offer educational reformers—in WAC and other movements—much food for thought.
Second, it’s for people interested in the WAC movement as part of the larger enterprise of literacy teaching and research. The teaching of writing became a professional field at the same time as the WAC movement began. And the emerging field of composition (as it is still usually called) owes much to the WAC movement. This collection makes that debt clear—and also reveals the complex relation between general writing courses, such as first-year composition, and efforts to develop students writing and learning in other courses.
Third, it’s for people interested in the history—and future—of WAC. The movement has over the thirty-odd years of its existence involved hundreds (perhaps thousands) of K12 and higher education institutions, tens of thousands of teachers, and millions of students. The stories collected here enrich the meaning of that diverse and ongoing work, providing (as history often does) new ideas and insights for the future as it opens up the past. I was asked to contribute this introduction because I wrote a book-length history of attempts to improve writing across the curriculum, Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History, which devotes a chapter to the WAC movement. And readers wanting a more formal overview might begin there. But much is left out in this and other published accounts—very much. And this collection fills in important gaps in the published historical studies.
I’ll take up these three purposes one by one, providing some background for the stories that follow and suggesting some of the many themes those stories offer.
WAC: Case Study in Grassroots Educational Change Movements
Movements are begun as responses to social needs, but they are begun by human beings, shaped by the decisions of those people, their loves and fears and desires and interests (Giddens). People, not “forces,” make a movement happen. These are very much personal stories, stories of intellectual interests developing out of not only institutions and books, but also personal networks, human communities. These sustained and spread the movement despite its lack of formal organization.
As I suggested earlier, the WAC movement did not have an elaborated theory but rather a few powerful ideas, which might be summarized as “Writing to