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Pittsburg State University
1701 South Broadway
Pittsburg KS 66762
Don Judd
WAC Coordinator
English
Phone: (620) 235-4697
Kathleen De Grave
Assistant WAC Coordinator
English
Phone: (620) 235-4705
Cynthia Woodburn
Assistant WAC Coordinator
Mathematics
Phone: (620) 235-4490
Bruce Shields
WAC Graduate Assistant
English
Phone: (620) 235-4686
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History of the Program
WAC Curriculum at PSU
In 1989, Pittsburg State University instituted a Writing Across the Curriculum
(WAC) program to encourage teachers in every discipline to make writing a
regular part of their course requirements. The idea, however, had begun to be
discussed several years earlier. This early discussion among faculty members
and members of the administration is part of the reason for the success of the
program: it is an idea that grew from the bottom up even as the administration,
under the auspices of the Academic Vice-President, fostered the idea by
supplying both a budget and committed guidance. By the time the program became
official, Writing Across the Curriculum was a university-wide commitment. A
WAC committee, made up of faculty from each of the schools, determined that all
students at PSU would take two Writing Intensive courses. This committee also,
in conjunction with the English Department, hired a director for the
program -- an English Department faculty member with one-quarter release time.
Since the 1989-90 school year, when a core of nine faculty members from
nine separate disciplines taught the first Writing Intensive (WI) courses, the
program has grown to 55-60 sections of what we now call Writing to Learn (WL)
classes in spring 2002, taught by faculty in twenty different disciplines.
These disciplines include history, literature and philosophy in the humanities,
art and music in the fine arts, sociology and psychology in the social
sciences, accounting in the college of business, physics, chemistry and math in
the sciences, and wood science and plastics lab in technology. All of the
schools except nursing (which offers no General Education courses) offer
Writing to Learn courses as active participants in the
Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program.
The WAC program at PSU is unique in its streamlined shape. Whereas most
programs simply encourage writing in various courses or at the most require
that students take a Writing to Learn course or two during their college stay,
the PSU program ensures that students take the WL courses when they need them
most -- in their first two years of study. The heart of the WAC program at
Pittsburg is the WL Series of Courses, a coordinated set of composition and
General Education courses that gives students four consecutive semesters in
which writing is highlighted.
Entering freshmen complete a four-semester series of writing courses by
the time they are second-semester sophomores. When freshmen take part in
college orientation the summer before their first semester begins, they are
automatically assigned to a section of English Composition 101 that teaches the
basic writing skills (or if their ACT English score is 27 or above they skip
English 101 and move to the next stage of the series). This composition course
is set up on an A,B,C, No Credit basis so that students do not move beyond 101
until they can write at a college level of C or better. In the second semester
of the freshman year, students take their first Writing to Learn class -- they
choose from among a wide range of specially designated General Education
courses. Then in the first semester of their sophomore year, they take the
second WL course and end with a capstone composition course, English 299,
Introduction to Research Writing. (See flow charts on the
WL Requirements page.)
The program has been designed so that students have a constant experience
with writing in their first years in college, preparing them for their upper
division courses in a systematic way. Instead of teaching students how to
research and write text-based essays as freshmen, a full year before they are
most likely to need those skills, the English Department teaches the research
course right before the first junior semester. The English Department thus can
help students coming and going from the series and can avoid a problem that
haunts the writing programs at many schools. No matter how good freshman
composition courses are, if students do not practice their writing skills when
they are sophomores, their skills will have regressed by the time they are
juniors. At PSU, the practice never stops.
An added benefit is that English 299 can be more sophisticated than the
typical second composition course because the students are more mature by the
end of the sophomore year than they would be at the end of the freshman year.
This way, too, students are more prepared to think critically as they do their
research, because they will have had a full year of Writing to Learn courses to
give them practice with critical thinking.
The advantages of such a streamlined system are easily apparent, not only
in the handling of the composition courses but in the management of the WL
courses themselves: the WL classes can be relatively coordinated, since they
are for the most part General Education courses aimed at students with a
similar level of expertise.
From the start, the Writing to Learn courses have been based on the idea
that students should use "writing to learn," so that writing is an integral
part of the class, not something added on. Teachers assign short, in-class
writing on the subject matter, sometimes asking for more developed out-of-class
essays when the students are ready. For the more formal papers, students get a
chance to hand in a rough draft first. Many faculty have students keep
journals on the subject matter to stimulate thinking and to encourage students
to apply course concepts to everyday life.
Teachers of WL classes typically use the Socratic method of question and
answer and many instructors have also structured the class so that students
have the chance to work together in small groups, a form of collaborative
learning. Student-teacher and student-student interaction is vital in WL
classes because only if all students are actively involved in their learning
will they learn critical thinking skills, so necessary to good writing.
For that reason, the WL classes are kept to 25 students, allowing for a
close relationship between teachers and students and making it possible for
teachers to give thoughtful feedback on writing assignments. Unlike Writing
Intensive courses on many other campuses that often have 100 students or more,
the small size of WL classes at PSU has the added benefit of giving students a
teacher who knows them by name in at least one course each semester in the
freshman and sophomore years, something that is impossible in the typical large
General Eeducation sections. The small size also allows teachers to experiment
with class structure and assignments.
Two good examples of the creative teaching styles in Writing to Learn
courses would be World Regional Geography and College Algebra.
In the geography course, the teachers ask students to keep a journal on how
world events are shaped by where they take place. This is an example of
"spatial thinking" -- students learn to see how a country's physical position
on
the globe and the physical traits of the landscape affect its economy, military
decisions, political decisions, and social structures. The students have to
read articles in national newspapers and interpret the stories in light of the
geographical interconnectedness of the world. The teachers also ask each
student to write a formal essay that uses spatial thinking and a reflective
piece at the end of the semester on how the student's thinking has changed.
In algebra, one of the WL instructors uses e-mail for weekly journal entries.
The students comment on their thinking processes, ask questions, and relate
math to their everyday experiences.
In both cases, faculty have found that the WL version of the course results in
better scores on tests (which are the same for WL and non-WL sections), because
students have taken ownership of their learning.
Because the WL classes are taught across the curriculum, with classes in
almost every General Education discipline, most of the teachers need special
preparation to use writing in the classroom. Each semester, the WAC
coordinator holds a workshop for those faculty members who will be teaching a
WL class for the first time the following semester. The faculty meet with the
coordinator two times, for a total of four hours of workshop over a two-week
period. In the workshop, faculty discuss and practice in-class writing
assignments, such as timed fast-writes, clustering, and journals. The focus is
on writing as a process, with critical thinking and collaborative learning
theories as a base. The administration supplies a text, Teaching Students to
Write Well by Barbara Walvoord, that explains the writing-as-a-process idea and
urges teachers to be coaches rather than evaluators. To supplement the text,
each faculty member gets a packet of materials giving WAC theory and practical
classroom suggestions. The common texts serve as a link among the diverse WL
courses, giving WL faculty a common language.
The workshops have three parts. Part one deals with the pedagogical and
cognitive theories behind "writing-to-learn." In this part, faculty members
learn how to use the Perry scale of cognitive growth -- from dualistic
thinking
to multiplicity and relativism -- and Bloom's taxonomy of learning skills to
create progressively more demanding writing assignments that challenge and
refine students' thinking abilities. This part delineates the critical
thinking basis of the WL program. Part two focuses on how teachers can
intervene in the writing process at various stages to help students generate
and test ideas, begin the first draft of a paper, and revise to a final
product. The emphasis is on the early stages of the writing process, showing
teachers how to use brainstorming techniques, short in-class writing
assignments, journals, and collaborative learning to stimulate students to
think creatively and to develop their ideas. Part three gives the faculty
members practice responding to student writing, through peer review and
conferences, as well as in written comments. The purpose of the response is to
help students revise their work, to see its strengths and weaknesses, so that
ultimately they will learn how to critique their own writing. These are
composition theories applied to content courses.
By the end of the workshop, each faculty member devises a "Statement of
Intent" and a "Philosophy of Writing," both of which will be included in the
syllabus for the WL course. The Intent says what the teacher intends to assign
in the way of writing and small-group work. The Philosophy explains why the
teacher is doing so, specifically for this course. These statements are a way
to coordinate the otherwise disparate WL course structures. (Each faculty
member decides how to use writing in the WL course. The only rule is that
students write frequently -- about once every two weeks at the least.)
The WAC program at PSU is constantly changing as the needs of teachers
and students change. This is a grass-roots program, kept alive by the energy
and interest of the faculty.
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