Across the Disciplines, Volume 5
January through December 2008
- Editor's Note: Reflections on Across the Disciplines.
- Michael Pemberton reflects on new features of the ATD website and looks forward to a year in which the journal will publish two special issues (Published March 29, 2008)
Special Issue. Rewriting Across the Curriculum: Writing Fellows as Agents of Change in WAC
Well-designed Writing Fellows programs—curriculum-based peer tutoring programs, in which undergraduate peer mentors are assigned to work collaboratively with students and faculty in specific writing-intensive courses across the curriculum—can become integral parts of WAC programs in ways that benefit student-writers, faculty, and fellows themselves. Because they embed collaborative learning and contemporary composition pedagogy within courses across the curriculum, Writing Fellows programs also, however, pose various theoretical, pedagogical, and administrative challenges, and they reveal complex intersections of writing, peer collaboration, disciplinary knowledge, and institutional and curricular politics. In this special issue, our contributing authors explore new ways to understand Writing Fellows programs and the connections between them and WAC.
Guest editors: Brad Hughes and Emily B. Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Featured Articles:
Client-Based Writing about Science: Immersing Science Students in Real Writing Contexts, Kate Kiefer and Aaron Leff.
Giving students direct experience with the writing contexts and demands they will soon face as professionals focuses their attention on learning as much as possible from a required writing course. The authors report on the development of a client-based upper-level science writing course, and discuss important issues that must be considered in this sort of client-based curriculum. (Published November 22, 2008)
The Future of WAC - Plenary Address, Ninth International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference, May 2008 (Austin, Texas), Susan H. McLeod.
In this Plenary Address given at the 9th IWAC Conference in 2008, Susan McLeod (who started her first WAC program in 1982) speculates about the future of the WAC movement. She focuses on four issues: The changing nature of communication and the cultural lag in assignment design, the question of who is in charge of the program, the ascendancy of assessment in education, and finally, the democratization and internationalization of higher education outside of the United States. (Published September 15, 2008)
Culture Shock: Teaching Writing within Interdisciplinary Contact Zones, Charlotte Brammer, Nicole Amare, and Kim Sydow Campbell.
To help writing faculty learn the language of discourse communities across campus, we conducted faculty interviews as a first attempt to describe knowledge about disciplinary cultures, specifically with regard to writing. Our interview data suggest that when writing faculty limit cross-disciplinary discussion to characteristics of good writing only, discipline stereotypes are reinforced, and communication may be restricted. However, when writing faculty discuss learning-to-write strategies with faculty in other disciplines, the results reveal commonalities about writing ideology. (Published July 9, 2008)
Reviews:
College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort, 2007. Logan, UT: Utah State UP. [ISBN 978-0-87421-659-2. 242 pages, including index. $24.95 USD (softcover).]
A book review by Dana Lynn Driscoll, Purdue University (Published March 29, 2008)