“Toward a Writing-Intensive Curriculum”
CTE workshop, 3/28/07
Excerpts from:
Carter, Michael. “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines.” College
Composition and Communication 58:3 (Feb. 2007): 385-419.
“One way of helping faculty understand the integral role of writing in their various disciplines is to present disciplines as ways of doing, which links ways of knowing and writing in the disciplines. Ways of doing identified by faculty are used to describe broader generic and disciplinary structures, metagenres, and metadisciplines” (385).
“WID developed as a response to the recognition that different disciplines are characterized by distinct ways of writing and knowing. Thus, a specialized conception of disciplinary knowledge is integrated with a specialized conception of writing” (387).
disciplines as “repositories and delivery systems for relatively static content knowledge”
versus
disciplines as “active ways of doing”
declarative/conceptual knowledge” versus “procedural/process knowledge”
“knowing that” versus “knowing how”
In order to “conceptualize writing in the disciplines in a way that is grounded in the disciplines themselves,” Carter and others at the NCSU Campus Speaking and Writing Program looked at the set of outcomes each department had developed, statements that say in effect “this is what our majors should be able to do when they graduate.” Carter found that what departments identified as those things students should be able to do (outcomes) was represented in large part by the writing their students were asked to produce in classes.
Four “Metagenres”
Responses to Academic Situations That Call for Problem Solving (e.g., business plans, feasibility reports, marketing plans, project reports/proposals, technical reports/memoranda)
Responses to Academic Situations That Call for Empirical Inquiry (e.g., lab report, poster presentation, research proposal/report, scientific article)
Responses to Academic Situations That Call for Research from Sources (e.g., research paper)
Responses to Academic Situations That Call for Performance
Carter notes that the outcomes supplied by the faculty in microbiology and political science were nearly identical.. “Though the research conventions of [the two fields] differ in significant ways, the faculty in both fields point to similar ways of doing: identifying questions related to the field, establishing a hypothesis for answers to the questions, testing the hypothesis by gathering data based on observations, and drawing conclusions about the hypothesis from the data” (397). (These are essentially the parts of a scientific report.)
Four Metadisciplines
Problem Solving Disciplines (e.g., accounting, agriculture, animal science, business management, forestry management, mathematics, psychology, so on)
Empirical Inquiry Disciplines (e.g., anthropology, biology, chemistry, geology, political science, sociology)
Research-from-Sources Disciplines (i.e., history, literature, philosophy, religious studies, women’s studies)
Performance Disciplines (e.g., architecture, art and design, industrial design, writing and rhetoric)
“Broadening the focus to metadisciplines enables WID professionals to identify the larger structures that form the academy and the role that writing plays in constituting those structures. [Doing so] also tends to further complicate the assumption that disciplines are defined exclusively or even primarily by content knowledge” (404).
Disciplines as ways of doing.
######################################################################
WAC Clearinghouse at Colorado State U
The International WAC Network
http://wac.colostate.edu/network/
Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum, by Charles Bazerman, Joseph Little, Lisa Bethel, Teri Chavkin, Danielle Fouquette, and Janet Garufis
The books in this series, edited by Charles Bazerman and published jointly with Parlor Press, provide compact, comprehensive and convenient surveys of what has been learned through research and practice as composition has emerged as an academic discipline over the last half century. Each volume is devoted to a single topic that has been of interest in rhetoric and composition in recent years, to synthesize and make available the sum and parts of what has been learned on that topic. These reference guides are designed to help deepen classroom practice by making available the collective wisdom of the field and will provide the basis for new research. The Series is intended to be of use to teachers at all levels of education, researchers and scholars of writing, graduate students learning about the field, and all who have interest in or responsibility for writing programs and the teaching of writing.
Links to Established WAC/CAC/WID Programs
http://www.siu.edu/departments/cac/
http://www2.chass.ncsu.edu/CWSP/
Benefits of Writing Intensive Courses
Writing Intensive courses maintain a low student-to-teacher ratio (20:1), require at least 5,000 words of writing, and give students ample opportunity to revise their work to improve their performance. Writing assignments are designed to teach course content and to assess students’ learning, giving faculty the chance to focus on content, concepts and quality of argument while students take responsibility for surface features such as grammar and syntax. WI assignments are tied directly and specifically to the goals of the course and are fully integrated into the syllabus. Through writing and revising, students not only master course concepts, they also learn to think and write in ways particular to their chosen disciplines.
Writing Intensive courses attempt to foster the ability to
pose worthwhile questions,
evaluate arguments,
give and receive criticism profitably,
distinguish among fact, inference and opinion,
articulate complex ideas clearly,
deal with problems that have no simple solutions,
consider purpose and audience,
understand how given disciplines define themselves,
become informed, independent thinkers.
From “TWENTY FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT WRITING-INTENSIVE CLASSES” ( an interview with Thomas Hilgers, Professor & Director of the Mānoa Writing Program)
1. Just what are writing-intensive classes?
They are classes which use writing as frequently as possible to help students to learn the content of the course. In a conventional class, students are often asked to read, think, discuss, and then write or take an exam, pretty much in that order. In a writing-intensive class, professors ask students to write, read, write as they read, write as they think, write before they discuss, write after they discuss, and then read and discuss even more in order to write again.
2. Give me some examples of how a writing-intensive class might be different.
In a writing-intensive math class, for example, students may be asked to write out proofs in conventional English. (Professors who have had their students do this, by the way, tell me that written proofs are far better indicators of students' understanding of concepts than are the same proofs in mathematical notation.) Students in a music class will write reviews of a performance along with analyses, sometimes in technical language, of their responses. Or students in a botany lab meet with their professor to go over drafts of their lab reports before they revise them. Students in a clinical nursing class keep a "problem-solving log" in which they note the rationales behind the decisions implicit in their clinical write-ups. In the writing-intensive classroom, students may write on a topic for five minutes before full-class or small-group discussion. A professor may have students write answers to three questions and then discuss their answers in small groups rather than give a lecture on the topics. Almost inevitably, professors in WI classes will use essay rather than multiple-choice exams.
3. Why the shift? Why should I bother to change my class to the writing-intensive mode?
Two basic reasons. The first is that we learn by doing, particularly by doing what we're trying to learn in the appropriate context. Students in astronomy learn astronomy best by doing astronomy. You don't learn to swim by watching tapes of Greg Louganis. To learn to write, students have to write, and write often. To learn to write as a philosopher or an agronomist writes, students have to write with guidance from a philosopher or an agronomist.
The other reason for the shift is that students will learn better what they learn through writing. Psychologists have shown that we learn best that which we do in many modes. Students in lecture-based classes learn by reading, by listening, and by memorizing. When we add writing, we increase the likelihood that they will learn better. And in virtually every field, writing is one of the ways of "doing" the specialist's work. So writing is a way of learning by doing.