*NOTE* If you are already familiar with the general history of WAC, you may go directly to the Howe Writing Initiative and the "third stage" Of WAC.

When did Writing-Across-the-Curriculum begin? What prompted this movement? What makes the issue of writing a constant "crisis" in education? What we now call "WAC" began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the WAC bandwagon has steadily gained momentum and followers in the last thirty years. But as David Russell points out in "American Origins of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Movement" (see Russell citation in WAC Bibliography), writing has been a controversial issue in American higher education since written papers and exams replaces oral recitations, declamations, debates, and exams in the 1870s. That's 100 years of a literacy crisis. Why has it not been resolved?

Russell argues that increasing specialization of disciplines and increased demand for professionalization of curricula, coupled with the opening of university doors to previously-excluded groups, precipitated the first "literacy crisis" after the Civil War. And that crisis has persisted because those conditions persist -- disciplinary knowledge grows more and more specialized, even within departments as fields beget sub-fields and research grows ever more narrow; at the same time, more and more students are coming to college expecting professional training. In other words, there is more to know and more people who need to know it. Russell says that this pressure had led professors, from the beginning, to make this expedient but false distinction between content and form, between disciplinary knowledge and writing.

One result of this distinction is the uniquely North American Freshman Writing Requirement, usually two semesters of Composition courses, taught by untenured part-time faculty who typically don't have a voice in the university, much less a living wage or a benefits package. Freshman Composition teaches all students to write, once and for all, and it remains separate from the disciplines, even the discipline of English, or literary study. Now, it's a common cliché that "every teacher should teach writing," but what that has meant, in practice, is that every teacher should expect good writing from students. When they don't get it, professors either stop assigning writing, or blame Freshman Composition, or both. Russell accuses all the disciplines of complaining about student writing for over 100 years, but neglecting either to investigate what writing well in their discipline means or to teach those disciplinary conventions to their students. This omission is understandable -- as disciplines have specialized, and as the reward system in higher education has increasingly come to favor research over teaching, faculty have smaller and smaller amounts of time to devote to teaching and larger and larger amounts of material to cover. Something has to give, and that something is usually writing.

Here's where WAC comes in. Although interdisciplinary efforts to integrate the teaching of writing into college curricula have persisted throughout the 20th century (John Dewey's progressive educational movement is one example), the WAC movement as we now know it began in the 1970s. For a lot of reasons, including the fact that the number of college students doubled from 1960-1970, language, rhetoric, and writing came again to the attention of educators, administrators, and the public. WAC began as a response to a perceived problem -- that students were not writing well enough in their disciplines. Or, more commonly, they were not writing at all.

In the last thirty years, WAC describes itself going through three "stages" in helping to integrate more writing more effectively into the curriculum beyond Freshman Composition. In the "First Stage," faculty in rhetoric and composition usually began by inviting faculty from other disciplines to workshops on the teaching of writing. In fact, this faculty workshop model remains the most prevalent sign that WAC exists on campuses, no matter who is leading the workshop. Such workshops were usually "successful" in helping disciplinary teachers see how writing could support their disciplinary goals. However, without changes in institutional structures and rewards, after the workshop, faculty often had difficulty sustaining the kinds of changes suggested. So, the "Second Stage" of WAC moved beyond the initial workshop, toward various ways of making writing a permanent part of all disciplines. Some universities instituted "writing-intensive" requirements into their General Education plans; others designated particular faculty in each department as writing consultants; and a great deal of collaborative research into the construction of disciplinary knowledge through writing marks this stage of WAC, often called its "institutionalization."

What's next? Since there are still the same kinds and numbers of complaints about the quality of student writing as there have been for over 100 years, and since the system still does not reserve its highest rewards for teachers of writing, has WAC made any difference? Yes, to the extent that universities are more aware of what's involved in teaching writing, realizing that it's not a skill learned once and for all in two semesters during a student's first year, and since there is a wealth of expertise available now to anyone who cares to find it. That's one of the reasons for this Web Site -- to make those resources in WAC accessible to the faculty in SBA.

The Howe Writing Initiative and the
"Third Stage" Of WAC

WAC leaders currently speculate about new directions for study and action. First, there's the matter of assessment. How well do WAC programs work? What's the effect of thirty years of attention to writing? How can we measure "improvement" in writing within and across disciplines and into workplaces? Next, there's ongoing faculty involvement: Barbara Walvoord argues, for example, that WAC must see itself as a "sustaining set of services, a network, a culture within the university that supports ongoing, career-long, self-directed growth for faculty" (See "The Future of WAC" in WAC Bibliography.) She insists that workshops plus "follow-up" will not change the structures that historically have marginalized writing in higher education. Some leaders also argue that WAC should be about more than writing; WAC is about teaching, learning, the relationship of knowledge to discourse. (It's also increasingly about the relationship of discourse, knowledge, and technology.) Daniel Mahala (See "Writing Utopias" in WAC Bibliography) challenges WAC to help faculty analyze and critique their disciplinary and institutional contexts in order to understand how the teaching of literacy in higher education works to empower or to limit students' opportunities. Finally, students must become a more integral part of WAC programs; for too long, their voices have been silent amid all the discussion of their writing. In other words, WAC's "Third Stage" will be about more than writing proficiency.

How does the Howe Writing Initiative fit into this larger picture of WAC nationally? First, the HWI is unusual in higher education, and has the advantage of riding the coattails of thirty years of WAC development. One of the problems WAC has traditionally faced is burn-out: once the initial workshops are over, faculty lost momentum, and without institutional support for WAC, innovative ideas and practices quickly revert to traditionally-accepted (and rewarded) ways of teaching and thinking about teaching. The Howe Writing Initiative counters that trend by endowing a professor as a permanent locus for the "culture of writing" that WAC needs and deserves. The HWI will, of course, engage in many "second stage" activities for faculty, including workshops, class visits, and consultation. (See Faculty pages) But the HWI has already begun several new "third stage" projects that we hope will contribute to the growing body of knowledge about the complex relationships between language and knowledge, writer and audience in context. Some of those activities include:

This is, of course, a quick and general overview of WAC, written from a local perspective and with a local agenda. For more information, and for other definitions, viewpoints, and opinions about what WAC is and what WAC should be, please see the WAC links and bibliography.
--Kate Ronald