AAC&U News | November 2003

George Washington University Rewrites Its Writing Program

George Washington University (GWU), located in downtown Washington DC, recently changed dramatically how it approaches the teaching of writing to all its students. This revision of its writing program is part of a national trend toward expanding requirements beyond the traditional single, first-year writing course and extending writing activities beyond composition courses. As this fall's issue of Peer Review details, more and more colleges and universities now see writing as an important teaching and learning tool as well as a skill to be developed in all disciplines throughout a student's entire college career.

As it considered changes to its own program, GWU looked at successful models, such as Duke University's writing program (see Peer Review, Fall 2003), and focused on expanding its curricula to ensure that students receive better training in writing--including writing in various disciplines. The university is employing its writing center, developing new courses, and revising existing course offerings to encourage innovative writing instruction. The university also is developing a program in which students present their work at an annual conference in DC.

In 2001-02, GWU's Academic Excellence Strategic Planning Committee identified writing as a key skill for all students and as a means to increase academic engagement. The committee noted research that suggests that, "courses that include recursive writing increase time on task and development of critical thinking skills." Researchers have also found that students perceive courses that include an intense writing component as more rigorous than courses that do not.

The goals of GWU's new program include teaching students:

How to write for a variety of audiences and communicate through several forms relevant to particular disciplines (e.g. research reports, outlines, long research papers, course journals, reflective essays, lab reports, and posters);
How to use writing to develop research and analytical skills;
How to revise and edit drafts, individually and in collaboration with peers and faculty; and
How to structure and organize writing and use documentation and styles of argumentation within specific disciplines.

The university is launching its revised writing program in the 2003-04 academic year. The first phase of the program is beginning with 700 first-year students selected at random in 2003-04. In addition to a new first-year course, they will all also enroll in Writing in the Discipline (WID) courses beginning in 2004-5. These courses will engage students in recursive writing throughout their undergraduate careers.

Implementing the New Writing Program

The GWU Writing Task Force includes faculty from every GWU school involved in undergraduate education, and it gathered insight from faculty from many disciplines in developing the new University Writing Program (UWP). Its goal was to increase academic engagement by including more recursive writing in discipline-based courses in sophomore and junior years. In addition, the revised foundational, freshman writing course reinforces fundamental writing skills. UW20 is a four-credit course for first-year students that, when implemented in conjunction with the WID program, will replace two freshman-level composition courses. In UW20, students develop writing and research skills in a thematically based course. Different sections of the course are organized around a wide array of themes. Students are required to develop ideas through research, critical analysis, and synthesis of information. The course also requires students to produce 30-35 pages of finished writing through at least three distinct writing projects, each involving a process of drafting, revision, and final editing.

The program also includes Writing in the Discipline (WID) courses for sophomores and juniors. These courses are designed to help students become effective writers in a discipline. The classes are limited to an average of 15-20 students taught by full-time instructors and focus on discipline-based writing throughout the semester. According to a memo from Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Donald R. Lehman, “The courses are conceived to facilitate student involvement with particular bodies of knowledge, methods of scholarship, and modes of communicating,” Writing in these WID courses also involves revision and editing with the help of peer and/or instructor feedback and with an eye to making sure the writing is appropriate for audiences in a particular discipline. Teacher-student ratios may be kept low through the assistance of graduate students to support the faculty teaching WID courses.

Structure, Administration, and Faculty Development

The new university writing program will be administered by an Executive Director who oversees the program and collaborates with directors of each of the two new course programs (UW20 and WID). The executive director will coordinate with a writing center director and a multidisciplinary advisory committee, to which each school appoints its own representative. This committee guides the program and reviews syllabi for proposed WID courses. The UWP executive director will develop workshops for faculty and graduate student assistants on the craft of teaching writing. Finally, the University is offering curriculum development grants on an application basis to faculty proposing to develop and offer WID courses.

Students Present Their Work in a Public Forum

This spring the University will launch a new University Writing and Research Symposium, a two-day capstone event at the end of the semester in which select students from first-year University Writing (UW20) and, eventually, Writing in the Disciplines (WID) courses will present writing and research that builds upon work they have begun in their classes. Presentation format will vary depending upon discipline, from poster sessions to performance pieces to papers presented in panels. Students will present their work to an audience of community members, parents, faculty, and fellow students, and engage in question/answer sessions after their presentations.

The Symposium will provide college students with a forum in which their research is presented and recognized as a vital element of public discourse. Because the Symposium will encourage audience members and panelists to debate the issues raised in student papers, student-writers will have a unique opportunity to recognize the impact of their projects.

In addition, in upcoming years, the Symposium will serve as a bridge between the first-year writing course and the WID courses. Student research will be presented from across a range of disciplines, providing freshmen an opportunity to see how research and writing develops in upper-division courses. Furthermore, the presentation modes will vary according to disciplinary practice: in addition to students reading their work in panels, students in the sciences might present poster sessions; students in the arts might perform short works; students in business classes might use Power Point presentations.

Finally, the Symposium will provide an opportunity for faculty development. Writing faculty tend to work in a state of unproductive isolation from one another. The Symposium ensures that at least once a year, faculty members from across the university would come together to discuss the theory and practice of student writing. In particular, the proposal review process (during which instructors would read and discuss the proposals put forward by participating WID and UW 20 courses) affords faculty the opportunity to learn about the work done by students in other instructors' courses. This process will allow for an open, regular discussion of writing pedagogy, of what constitutes good writing, and of disciplinary distinctions in the teaching of writing. In addition, the Symposium introduces faculty members who are not yet involved in WID courses to the philosophy of writing-intensive pedagogy. By seeing how other professors have developed writing assignments, they can begin to imagine how writing can fit into their own courses.

For more information about GWU's new writing program, see www.gwu.edu/~uwp.

To view articles from AAC&U's forthcoming issue of Peer Review on "Writing in the New Academy," (scheduled for release in late December), see www.aacu.org/peerreview.