Introduction

Dear Reader,

Welcome to our third edition of The WAC Reader, a digest of curated articles and sources focused on reading and writing across the curriculum.

This year’s theme is New Directions in WAC. Drawing on the intersections between foundational WAC principles and emerging pedagogical theories, technologies, and practices, we have included a collection of up-to-date resources that highlight successful teaching methods and look to the future of writing education.

We begin with academic perspectives on WAC’s contemporary place in higher education, titled Situating WAC. Next, we include an interview with a brilliant and dedicated WAC scholar, Professor Christopher M. Anson of North Carolina State University, that outlines significant new trends in reading and writing across the curriculum. We then provide a selection of texts that cover four major areas of transformation in WAC:

• Antiracist Pedagogy and Linguistic Justice
• Community Writing and Student Agency
• Accessibility and Assessment
• Online Instruction and Technology

We’re excited for you to read our third edition of The WAC Reader and look forward to sharing more of our love for writing and reading pedagogy with you.

Your Friends,
Casandra Murray and Teófilo Reis, Hostos WAC Fellows

Situating WAC

We’ve selected three references to showcase contemporary ways of thinking about WAC’s place in the curriculum. Our first suggestion is Writing-Enriched Curricula: Models of Faculty-Driven and Departmental Transformation, a 2021 volume edited by Dr. Christopher M. Anson, our interviewee for this Reader, and Pamela Flash. In Anson's introduction WEC and the Strength of the Commons he explains how WAC movements sprung from grassroots organizing among faculty before inevitably becoming institutionalized by college administrations. He argues for a return to WAC's “bottom-up” roots by relocating curricular agency to departments, where faculty are inspired to design and implement writing-enriched pedagogy that best fits their disciplinary objectives. For further reading, we strongly recommend Flash's chapter Writing-Enriched Curriculum: A Model for Making and Sustaining Change.

Our second source is Rebecca Hallman Martini's 2022 article More Useful Beyond College?: The Case for a Writing in the Professions Curriculum in WAC/WID. Martini calls for the adoption of Writing in the Professions (WIP), an approach that emphasizes "preparing students for their writing lives beyond the university." Her support for WIP stems from her interviews with WAC faculty and administrators to identify common threads in their concerns for students’ writing.

Finally, we want to bring to your attention a recent book chapter by Justin Nicholes, Creative Writing Across the Curriculum: Defining and Illustrating a Method for STEM/Humanities Integration. Although this resource is not open-access, Nicholes addresses an important challenge for WAC — navigating disciplinary differences. Seeking to bridge the divide between the humanities and STEM, Nicholes shows that creative writing has the potential to guide productive STEM/humanities alliances.

Interview with Christopher M. Anson

Dr. Christopher M. Anson, English Professor and Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University, discusses his recent research into new directions in WAC and their impact on our current and future approaches to the teaching of reading and writing across disciplines. Click below to watch his conversation with Hostos WAC Fellow, Casandra Murray.

New Directions and Resources

Antiracist Pedagogy and Linguistic Justice: The relationship between writing pedagogy and social, linguistic, and racial justice is an important recent conversation in WAC theory and practice. Last year, our Reader focused exclusively on Antiracist Teaching scholarship, but given the significance of this field to the Hostos community, we revisit this topic briefly by including a few additional resources here. Teaching Writing After George Floyd is an engaging written interview in which Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young (aka dr. vay) argues for the possibilities available to us when “all language habits that a person or student has are used as a resource.” In reflecting on the cultural realities that led to the murder of George Floyd, Sandra Bland, and others, dr. vay makes insightful connections between the assumptions for code-switching that exist within language learning and racist expectations for code-switching beyond the classroom. Addressing linguistic diversity from a slightly different angle, in Enacting Linguistic Justice: Transnational Scholars as Advocates for Social Change Ligia A. Mihut defines the ways that transnational scholars are reshaping pedagogies to “integrate cross-cultural rhetorics and translingual writing” within writing classrooms and programs. For further reading on this topic, we also recommend locating a copy of the excellent edited collection by Brooke R. Schreiber, Eunjeong Lee, Jennifer T. Johnson, and Norah Fahim, Linguistic Justice on Campus: Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Students.

Community Writing and Student Agency: Aimée Knight places the role of community writing at the center of student learning and social change in her new book, Community is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change. We suggest beginning with the Forward by Paula Mathieu, What Do We Want from Community Writing?, but if you’re interested in digging deeper, we highly recommend clicking through each chapter where you’ll find various concrete methods for connecting classroom learning to the local community using methods such as multi-media projects and partnering with community organizations. In the same spirit of community-building through writing, in Feminist Rhetorics in Writing Across the Curriculum: Supporting Students as Agents of Change Letizia Guglielmo, Judson T. Kidd, and Dominique McPhearson present a conversation among scholars that emphasizes feminist practices of collaboration and collective knowledge production. The writers start from common WAC frameworks like “writing to learn” and connect them to feminist rhetorical practices including “intervention and interruption” and “a commitment to public engagement” to encourage students to form bonds across individual and disciplinary differences and to develop their voices as active participants in their schools and larger societies.

Accessibility and Assessment: Accessibility is a concern that permeates all educational practices, including assessment. We recommend watching the workshop Accessible Assessment, organized by the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum. In it, Molly Ubessen examines assessment through the lens of access to create more equitable practices. Using assessment as an umbrella term to encompass diverse activities and understanding access as opening possibilities and removing barriers, Ubessen walks the audience through multiple forms of evaluation based on student individuality. By developing clear, transparent, and manageable activities and providing students with numerous opportunities to demonstrate knowledge/skills, instructors promote accessible assessment conducive to meaningful learning. To dive deeper into this discussion, Ubessen recommends two books. The first one is Ellen C. Carillo's The Hidden Inequalities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (available online through the CUNY Library), where Carillo analyzes the shortcomings of labor-based grading through a disability studies lens and proposes what she calls engagement-based grading. Ubessen's second recommendation is Susan Blum’s edited collection Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (also available online through the CUNY Library), in which the authors propose de-emphasizing grades and offer productive alternatives like emphasizing feedback and revision.

Online Instruction and Technology: Online education was already growing at a speedy pace before COVID-19. With the pandemic, this modality became part of life for nearly everyone working in education. Fortunately, the WAC community was already addressing the specificities of writing instruction in online environments. The 2015 edited collection Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction takes a comprehensive approach to Online Writing Instruction (OWI). The first part of the book sets the foundations, with a chapter on the principles of OWI, one on hybrid and fully online OWI, and one on asynchronous and synchronous modalities. The remaining sections address topics ranging from inclusivity to administrative decisions. A second outstanding volume on OWI is PARS in Practice: More Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Instructors, edited by Jessie Borgman and Casey McArdle. PARS, which stands for Personal, Accessible, Responsive, and Strategic, focuses on improving the user experience in OWI, that is, the experience the student has with online educational tools. Check out the volume introduction, PARS and Online Writing Instruction, for an overview of the technical aspects of OWI. In addition, Kristy Liles Crawley's chapter Online Writing Instructors as Strategic Caddies: Reading Digital Landscapes and Selecting Online Learning Tools provides a helpful guide to choosing among the many online learning tools currently available.

Until Next Time…

We hope you enjoyed our third edition of The WAC Reader. We plan on organizing time to discuss some of these new pathways in WAC at Hostos this year. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts! If you have a moment, please take our quick Google Forms survey linked below.