Beyond student writing: why writing across the curriculum needs disciplinary discourse

Erika Amethyst Szymanski

The writing across the curriculum (WAC) movement has largely been about writing to learn, bringing novel pedagogical techniques to perhaps less-progressive disciplines. I argue that, both to become maximally useful to the non-English disciplines it claims to serve and to remain relevant and sustainable, WAC as a movement should refocus its attention on helping nonEnglish disciplines teach a rhetorically-aware command of disciplinary discourse to their apprentice-colleague students. Understanding WAC as a means of educating students in disciplinary discourse compels a vision of WAC initiatives as genuinely collaborative enterprises between composition scholars and non-English disciplinary faculty, recognizing the latter as experts in writing in their fields, and calls for assessment at the direct level of student writing rather than the abstracted level of faculty attitudes. I illustrate one way of imaging what writing instruction is taking place, in upper-division courses in the biological sciences, by cataloguing instructor commentary on student writing assignments and find that the vast majority of instructors of these courses are not responding to student writing effectively per contemporary composition scholarship. Interviewing members of the minority of biology instructors who do v use writing in especially effective ways, I identify ways in which these instructors’ selfexpressed writing pedagogies align with recommendations from contemporary composition scholarship and suggest that these instructors may act as the nexus of productive WAC collaborations. Finally, I address concerns that employing WAC initiatives to teach disciplinary discourse works against the goal of interdisciplinarity, arguing that interdisciplinarity – which implies the reduction of differences in disciplinary discourse to lowest common denominators – is impossible, but that WAC initiatives focusing on disciplinary discourse can productively move toward a culture of transdisciplinarity – communication across disciplines via explicit rhetorical awareness of discourse communities – in which students become powerful communicators within and outside their disciplines.

Beyond student writing: why writing across the curriculum needs disciplinary discourse

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