The Writing Across The Disciplines: Research Into Practice by Art Young and Toby Fulwiler depicts the genesis of the birth of the Writing Across The Curriculum at Michigan Tech University.
Fulwiler at the beginning of the book details what the English Department attitude towards writing was. Fulwiler explains that the teaching of writing had always been the domain of new hires, novice teachers and graduate students. Writing was considered a chore to teach, and senior professors preferred to spend their time teaching literature.
Like at many universities, professors from other departments complained about the lack of writing skills in their students and therefore, content area professors would blame the English department for not doing their job teaching Freshman Composition. Fulwiler and his department decided to revamp their Freshman English Composition program.
First, they would revise their negative attitude towards writing by insisting that teaching writing is an essential part of the curriculum. That knowing how to write means students know how to communicate their ideas no matter their discipline. Instead of concentrating just on teaching literature, the English department started to integrate writing skills into their classes. Instead of hiring literature teachers who specialized in certain literature areas, his department started hiring faculty willing to integrate writing in their literature classes.
Next, the English Department reached out to other departments to have them integrate the teaching of writing in their department and in their discipline. The problem was many content area teachers did not know Composition Theory (Writing as a Process vs Writing as a Product), so they did not know how to teach writing. The English Department decided to hold Writing Workshops to teach faculty of other departments how to teach Writing as a Process. Hence, the Writing Across the Disciplines movement was born.
What I found interesting about this book was reading about the genesis of Writing Across The Disciplines, and how they created Writing Workshops so all faculty would share the responsibility of teaching writing to students instead of having all content area professors blaming the English Department.
The chapters where Fulwiler talks about how Psychology, Math and Engineering Professors integrated Writing as a Process in their classes turned out to be the most interesting chapters for me. These chapters helps other content area teachers how they can implement WAC in their content area classes too. Although these chapters focus on university teaching, I think these Writing Process methods like (journaling, peer review, modeling good papers, article analysis) can be used at the K-12 level.
I had always associated writing just for the English department but this book opens my eyes to the possibility of having teachers of all disciplines incorporating Process writing techniques in their own classes. At the most basic level, students keep a journal of what they are learning, and students write down their thoughts about what they are learning, they write down problems they may be having with difficult material, they comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the class and of the class material/class presentation, they problem solve (find ways to solve math or engineering problems) and they get the benefit of teacher feedback.
Fulwiler gives many tips on how teachers can incorporate writing in their classes and I will go over these writing tips in a future blog post. I highly recommend every faculty member to read this most engaging and educational book about the teaching of university writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment