Facilitators: Herb Budden, Linda Hansen (1) and Kevin Sue Bailey (2)
Recorder: Gretchen Bertolet
Discussions 1 & 2 - download in print-friendly format
What is happening currently in writing across the curriculum?
- What are we doing?
- How are we doing it?
- Why are we doing it this way?
- How might this be viewed at different levels? Preschool – college
- How might different community or group perspectives vary?
Discussion notes
Recurring big ideas from the discussion
- A lot of approaches are being tried but not with a lot of great success, often due to the affects of local (school or university) culture.
- Diverse concepts about what writing are root cause of lack of success with WAC or WID programs. There are many sets of misconceptions about writing.
- Professional development and realistic resources are essential for K-16 WAC;
- Making meaning, thinking and discovery are essential skills in the 21 st century. The integration of reading and writing serve as the vehicle for fostering learning.
Transcript (Combined session 1 & 2)
- What is the definition of WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum)?
- Started as means of taking what writing teachers know about writing and move it into other courses.
- WID (Writing in Disciplines) is teaching more discipline-teaching writing, i.e. writing in psychology, social studies, etc.
- WID recognizes differing, even conflicting conventions.
- WAC emphasizes writing as an act of discovery.
- Perspectives
- Writing if often used as tool for learning rather than as a focus.
- Writing to display knowledge
- Writing to learn.
- Diagram (see right)
- From artistic point of point, writing for creativity.
- Writing provides structure and artist returns to dress it up for communication to public.
- This may be a writing process (how to say, how to communicate…it is recursive in that it allows you to go back and draft, discuss, etc.)
- Should grammar be included in the definition of writing? Grammar has to be integrated into writing. Included in the definition of writing: making meaning + thinking and grammar (but the latter is not equal)
- Grammar is not something that happens to you…it is something you use.
- Don’t put grammar last.
- New teachers are doing a better job than veteran teachers.
- Good writing is thinking. Teachers need to be engaged in process.
- What are we doing now?
- Trying to get everybody – students and staff – to write open-ended responses.
- We’ve created rubric and benchmarks.
- Teachers do one open writing per course rather than integrating writing into course.
- At conference on this subject in Orlando, so exciting to hear about writing in all subjects. In the real world there are so many different types of writing.
- We want people to take a chance (in artistic fields) on writing.
- Playwriting techniques, for example, allow for writing in different voices. We encourage people to realize they have beautiful things to say.
- We need writing conventions applied so work is presentable. Ideas and polish is what WAC means to me.
- Adopted system-wide assessment writing; asked non-English teachers not to teach writing but use that assessment as a tool, i.e. for lab reports. It becomes a guide for consistent language. Have kids keep journals and check them…using writing as a tool for learning.
- Did this tool but didn’t have enough practice on how to use.
- At secondary level, been writing across curriculum for about 8 years. Developed rubric.
- Every student to write in every class every six weeks.
- Started a portfolio system. Tracked the three types of writing: creatively, technically, academically.
- Also kept scores and measured them throughout the years. It is part of the school’s S.I.P. (School Improvement Plan).
- There was a writing committee as part of the planning process.
- A little backsliding in the last year as it was a non-reporting year.
- Worked as a teacher-coach to help other teachers with their prompts. Received one period a day for release time to be a coach.
- We are charting curriculum, analyzing error and rewarding progress.
- This year it will be writing twice per trimester.
- We will be teaching revision strategies across the curriculum…importance of rewriting.
- In elementary level, we’ve gone from English-based writing to taking a look at writing in all classes including art, music and gym. WAC is in our SIP.
- There are18 schools in the district, and it is a “hodge podge.” The schools range from doing Suzie Caukins to “give us a plan.”
- Weekly meetings to encourage team collaboration.
- WAC is in most plans.
- We try to have non-language arts teachers share their experience with WAC with the entire faculty. Every teacher of every class must evaluate two pieces of writing each trimester.
- Issues we face
- Very difficult/struggle to find writing for senior portfolios from outside English class.
- Reading is fundamental to writing and the reading part has been neglected…must be integrated.
- There are teachers who can’t read and write.
- Writing about reading does not always mean writing about literature. No equivalent from HS seniors to freshman composition.
- Is it a professional dev issue that your teachers are not responding to WAC?
- Biggest issue is cultural (6th principal in 7 years), so teachers developed this idea that “she’ll go away.”
- Culture of non-compliance
- Non-compliance is more prevalent in universities…people will not be told what to do in their curriculum.
- No core requirement for writing comp.
- It is a requirement for most colleges at Purdue. Past 15 years there has been attempt to dev writing intense courses.
- It isn’t working… Students who need them are the most skillful in avoiding them.
- Needs to be university-wide core requirement. Ball State wants to integrate into all majors. Don’t prepare students in the need to be prepared.
- It is still a sell-job to convince people of the importance of writing courses, often they are the first eliminated when budgets need to be cut.
- People do not understand what writing is. They assume it is mostly red pencil and correcting conventions when we’re teaching students how to think and make meaning.
- Had very few students in 1st and 2nd year writing that had never been told that writing was valuable in their K-12 experience. So many had little or no writing in HS English classes. They only experienced reading or taking grammar in an English course. If my big objective is trying to get them to express themselves through writing then I have to re-think my freshman comp curriculum!
- HS English teachers have little time to focus solely on writing.
- If person is passionate, i.e. playwright, engineering thesis, they’ll invest more time and seek assistance.
- Can college TAs assist in other classes? Yes, if that dept. can has the money to pay them.
- WAC opens opportunity for writing for different purposes – different genres.
- Disciplines have individual conventions, i.e. passive voice in science would flunk in journalism.
- Often a science teacher will say one of their students submits a paragraph but says that is not really writing.
- Florida conference affirmed that each discipline has its own conventions, i.e. web semantics, quantitative analogies. Can’t write Board reports in narrative any longer – it was a chart. There is skill to doing that.
- Different voices do different writing. In doing a writing workshop we do the “juicy” stuff first and then turn to grammar at end. Why is their resistance to collaboration in what seems to be collegial settings? Particularly in K-12.
- Has to do with structure and disciplines…this has led to great departmentalization of faculty. For instance, as an English instructor I cannot accept a science lab report as a piece of writing for my class. Easier to do with sister subjects: English and history; science and math.
- Business knows that people have to work together and we need to be able to teach students how to work as a team.
- Sustainability is difficult for WAC.
- Would you ask an English teacher to teach algebra or art?
- Isn’t their vocabulary in every discipline?
- Writing is really, really hard so how can we prepare people in a “happy” way.
- It takes a lot of professional development and support of the district.
- The definition of writing has to be clarified, communicated and explained in professional development.
- We “punish” teachers when we give them 120 students and ask them to teach each how to write.
- We must provide support. These are unfunded mandates.
- Trimesters provide 75 teachers rather than 120 students. We do not expect all teachers to be writing experts.
- Writing is perceived as an isolated skill, not basic literacy. Put literacy in language arts in your SIP.
- Reading and writing combined = literacy. All of our professions have ways of communicating. Common ground between teachers may be talking about what “got you excited” and “what are you reading.”
- Is there a monolithic idea of good writing? In context, outside school, there is not. It is not all - good writing. How can we help students learn this too?
- Isn’t there always the need for clarity? No matter what you’re writing should be clear…least common denominator?
- A good writer is a clear writer. We write to discover. We ask students to write so we can discover what they know. You cannot teach writing is you do not know how to write; how can we ask teachers to teach writing if they do not know how! You don’t know what you know until you start to write.
- We cannot expect all of these teachers to be passionate about writing but we can provide easier ways to see why this matters.
- How do we train and support teachers at the entry level to become acclimatized to the environment of the school plan?
- At the university, it is a big institution with a lot of opinions and change comes slowly. All teaching students must take a content-area reading course. Hard to have legitimacy of teachers of English recognized by university-level English Department.
- Fair to say that WAC at the university-level is less consistent than in K-12. Also individual writing conventions for disciplines must be recognized…they are often at odds with one another.
- On our campus we have an Improvement in Writing Committee. We evaluated using the same rubric. Huge difference is scores for the same paper.
- I try to persuade art teachers to write. In previous session, Beliefs about Writing, it was about passion and in this session seems to be about mandates. Want to see more passion here.
- There are unrealistic expectations to write when there are time limits and large class sizes.
- Students who are successful motivate teachers. If teachers see successful writing in non-language arts classes, they’ll get excited
- The whole difference comes from the passion of the teachers to help the kids. Particularly if the student says they cannot relate to a prompt or an assignment. The teacher’s ability to assist or direct that student comes from passion.
- Assessment
- Biggest problem with the assessment tool we used was that it was something the principal mandated and therefore teachers lacked buy-in.
- You cannot measure creative writing, you cannot write if you are not creative. One exercise we did was asking students to write poems about the Holocaust pictures…put photos into words.
- Don’t teach to the test
- Resources
- Noted good book and read from it, Rhoda Maxwell, Writing across Curricula.
- “The act of writing is a memory aid….having our writings visible.” This tells content area folks that writing about content allows you to know the content better.
- What direction do we want writing to go…what do we want to tell the State of Indiana?
- Would like to see more collaboration in teacher training and students must be in an environment where the in-service trainers have this experience. It has to be from kindergarten forward.
- We need Indiana to reward accomplished teachers.
- The whole notion of school structure, Carnegie credits, particularly at secondary, works against teacher communication.
- Two themes seem to emerge: professional development; writing as discovery.
- Pre-service teachers need to be included as well as teachers in professional development. Universities need to recognize this too.
- Leads back to national standard boards.
- If you’re not writing you don’t see its role. At the university level people sometimes forget what it is like to be a teacher. Need to do a better job connecting with teachers who teach our teachers. Have a problem when these “teachers” have never taught.
- Hands-on WAC experience demonstrates the power of WTL. Point of view is essential.
FIRST SESSION SIGNIFICANT ISSUES - PRESENTED
- Local school culture affects success of WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) efforts.
- Diverse concepts about writing are root cause of lack of success of WAC or WID (Writing in the Discipline) programs.
SECOND SESSION SIGNIFICANT ISSUES - PRESENTED
- Professional Development & realistic time & resources are essential for K-16 writing across the curriculum or within the disciplines.
- Making meaning, thinking and discovering are essential skills in the 21st century. The integration of reading & writing serve as the vehicle for fostering learning.
- Attention to: under-funded mandates
- Unrealistic expectations (Class size, time, adequate training)
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