Writing Across The Curriculum - History of WAC

History of WAC

David Russell traces the history of WAC in the United States to the 1870s, the emergence of professional disciplines, and the new need for college-level instruction in writing. Prior to this era, college students were exclusively (for all practical considerations) affluent white men whose natural discourse was identical to the approved discourse of the academy; therefore, their way of speaking and writing was already considered appropriate by and for the academy and composition didn’t need to be taught at the college level. Two changes happened to motivate the need for college writing instruction. Firstly, as disciplines (as divisions within academic studies) and contemporary professions specialized, they developed their own specialized discourses. Because these discourses were not merely the same as the everyday discourse of the upper classes, they had to be taught. Secondly, as college students became more diverse – first in terms of social background and, later, in terms of gender, race, and age – not all college students grew up speaking the accepted language of the academy.

Clearly, composition courses couldn’t be about the content of the writing, because content was what the other disciplines taught. Composition, therefore, had to be about the form the writing took and so “writing” was reduced to mechanics and style. Because of this reduced focus and because writing was addressed by composition, other disciplines assumed no responsibility for writing instruction; most students, then, were not taught to write in the context of their specialties. As American education became increasingly skills-oriented following World War II – in part a reaction to the suffusion of universities with war veterans in need of job training, in part a result of modeling education after the efficiency of Fordian factory production – writing instruction was further reduced to a set of skills to be mastered. Once correct (that is, standard academic) grammar, punctuation, spelling, and style were mastered – preferably before reaching the post-secondary level – there was no need for additional writing instruction save as remedial education.

This product-oriented, skills-focused paradigm of writing pedagogy began to change in the 1970s with the popularization of James Britton and colleagues’ expressivist school of composition, which said that students benefited from writing as a tool for self-expression and that focusing on technical correctness was damaging. Janet Emig’s 1977 article “Writing as a Mode of Learning,” grounded in constructivist theories of education (Constructivism (learning theory)), suggested that writing functioned as a unique and invaluable way for students to understand and integrate information. Simultaneously, widespread media attention around college students' apparently decreasing writing proficiency (more a product of the changing demographics of college students than an overt shift in teaching) provoked institutions of higher learning to reevaluate and increase the amount of writing required of students. Carleton College and Beaver College began what were probably the first contemporary WAC programs in 1974 and 1975, respectively, with faculty workshops and writing requirements shared across disciplines.

In 2010, Thaiss and Porter defined WAC as “a program or initiative used to ‘assist teachers across disciplines in using student writing as an instructional tool in their teaching’”. WAC, then, emerged as and remains a way to bring writing back to disciplines which had become accustomed to assigning relatively little of it. WAC has also been part of the student-centered pedagogies movement (student-centred learning) seeking to replace teaching via one-way transmission of knowledge from teacher to student with more interactive strategies that enable students to interact with and participate in creating knowledge in the classroom.