|
|
Peer Review, Fall 2003
Writing and the Disciplines
By Jonathan Monroe, professor of comparative
literature, associate dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences, and director of the John S. Knight Institute
for Writing in the Disciplines, Cornell University |
The growing prominence and institutionalization of "writing
across the curriculum" (WAC) and "writing in the disciplines"
(WID) programs throughout the United States and abroad has
occasioned considerable renewed reflection during the past
decade. Although WAC and WID are sometimes used synonymously
or interchangeably, and both terms usefully suggest the importance
of writing in all fields, these two approaches have very different
implications for the role of writing and writing instruction
in higher education. While WAC emphasizes the commonality,
portability, and communicability of writing practices, WID
emphasizes disciplinary differences, diversity, and heterogeneity.
That is, WID emphasizes what remains incommensurable and irreducible
in writing practices both within academic fields and from
one field to the next.
Taken together, the two terms honor the importance of writing
and communicating effectively with audiences situated both
within and beyond particular fields of academic specialization.
"Writing across the curriculum" has played an
important role in (re)establishing and expanding recognition
of the importance of writing in all academic fields, beyond
its traditional associations with English, rhetoric, and composition.
WAC and WID have been mutually allied in calling attention
to the importance of writing in all fields. Nonetheless, I
want to argue here that "writing in the disciplines"
is best understood not as interchangeable with "writing
across the curriculum" but as an alternative orientation
with far-reaching implications for the role of writing and
writing instruction at all educational levels, from K-12 through
higher education.
To the extent that it has remained an administrator-driven
and administrator-identified movement, WAC has only partially
realized its best aspirations. If the goal of WAC is to cultivate
a sense of the importance of writing in all fields, WID is,
in effect, WAC's proper realization. The success of
WAC has depended on the often remarkable energy and investments
of WAC directors. By contrast, WID suggests that primary responsibility
for and ultimate authority over writing rests with individual
faculty situated in particular fields. While the scope and
coherence of the curriculum as a whole is necessarily a central
concern of college and university administrators, individual
disciplines remain the sites of the faculty's primary
investments in research and teaching. As such, they are the
vital link between an institution's vision of undergraduate
and graduate education and the role writing plays, or ought
to play, in the full realization of that vision.
Who Owns Writing?
Effective writing is central to the work of higher education.
It follows, then, that the responsibility for writing should
be vested in the disciplines where this work takes place and
in the faculty who are the ultimate arbiters and authorities,
latently if not manifestly, over what counts as effective
writing in their respective fields. Accordingly, an expanded
sense of faculty ownership of questions of writing and disciplinarity
at all levels of the curriculum must be continuously cultivated.
If faculty are truly to own writing, this ownership needs
to be located and cultivated within the disciplinary investments
of individual faculty--not as an add-on or a detour, but as
integral to the kinds of research and teaching on which students'
success in their respective disciplines necessarily depends.
As interest in WID-based approaches, and academic writing
more generally, continues to expand in the United States and
abroad--e.g., through the recent creation of the European
Association of Teachers of Academic Writing, the disciplinary
investments of individual faculty remain vital to any serious
thinking about the role of writing in higher education. Where
the most profound institutional changes have occurred, the
involvement of higher-level administrators (associate dean
or above) in redesigning and restructuring the role of writing
in undergraduate education has been crucial. As the most effective
of these administrators have understood, implementation of
a WID-based approach depends first and foremost on ongoing
campus-wide faculty commitment and dialogue. To cultivate
a sustainable sense of ownership among faculty that will benefit
both individual departments and the curriculum as a whole,
colleges and universities need to support faculty where they
live and work, at the heart of their interests, in the disciplines.
Begin at the Beginning
Regardless of where an institution is in examining and/or
refining its writing requirements, nearly every college or
university has some first-year writing requirement. If these
requirements are to play a meaningful role in a student's
college studies, then courses fulfilling these requirements
ought not to be designed as general holding tanks for students
not yet prepared to engage fully the intellectual work of
the university. College-level work takes place within particular
disciplines, and in all other areas of serious intellectual
concern, students are not expected to wait until their sophomore
year to immerse themselves in work at this level. The most
philosophically consistent approach to teaching writing is
thus to embed it from the outset as integrally as possible
in the work of the disciplines. To do otherwise is to give
students a false sense of security by suggesting they can
master the diverse kinds of writing they will encounter in
the wide range of courses a liberal education necessarily
involves. A first-year writing requirement embedded in the
disciplines signals that all writing takes place in particular
contexts, for particular purposes and audiences.
The first message any writing requirement should convey to
first-year students is that successful writing and communication--not
only in the first year but throughout their undergraduate
careers and after, whether within or beyond the academy--depends
on the development of multiple literacies and a capacity for
discursive mobility. In pretending to offer a more universal
understanding of what good writing is, single course writing
requirements do a disservice to students and faculty alike;
they persuade students that acts of writing are anything other
than situational and multiple. All meaningful acts of writing
are unavoidably complex negotiations with particular contexts,
purposes, and audiences. In higher education, these negotiations
take place within particular disciplines. A coherent and vertically
integrated approach to teaching writing will thus not defer
the task of situating and attending to the work of writing
within the disciplines until the sophomore year. It will,
instead, begin at the beginning. This approach conveys the
important message that, once they have begun college-level
work in writing, students have also begun, in earnest, the
work of the university. It conveys the message that, rather
than a remedial or ancillary concern, writing is integral
to the learning students will engage and pursue from the first
semester of their first year through their senior years and
beyond.
Local Matters
Writing and disciplinarity are inevitably local concerns,
both for individual fields and for the institutions that house
them. Accordingly, approaches to writing and writing instruction
vary considerably--disciplinarily and institutionally--in
response to local contexts already in place that determine
what is possible and desirable as well as what might yet be
imagined.
Upper-division, writing-intensive courses play a vital role
in offering opportunities for undergraduates to continue to
work with writing at progressively higher levels beyond the
first year. Yet it has been a bedrock conviction at Cornell
for almost forty years that it is important to lay the foundation
for successful college-level writing in field-specific ways
in the first year. Housed in the College of Arts and Sciences,
and serving the university as a whole, Cornell's John
S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines (formerly
the Knight Writing Program) annually administers more than
three hundred First-Year Writing Seminars, as well as sixty
discipline-specific, writing-intensive electives at the sophomore,
junior, and senior levels. As the Knight Institute moves forward
with its four-year study of student writing, now in its third
year, the integral involvement of a wide range of fields remains
vital to our understanding of writing at Cornell, and what
it means to evaluate writing with a specificity that respects
the values of our own local context. What we talk about when
we talk about writing can only be determined with any effective
legitimacy by those engaged in the work of higher education
within their specific disciplinary locations. Similarly, the
implementation of a successful, site-specific approach to
writing and writing instruction is bound up with the disciplinary
investments and curricular vision that are particular to each
college and university.
Staffing
Since writing in higher education takes place within local
disciplinary and institutional contexts, and since effective
writing--as distinct from mere "writing up,"
to borrow Cornell physics professor David Mermin's useful
distinction--involves acculturating students into the
always provisional, historically situated knowledges and practices
of particular fields, responsibility for writing at all levels
of the curriculum properly belongs to the faculty hired to
teach these fields. In the case of research universities,
this responsibility also extends to the graduate students
who will become the future professoriate and are, thus, an
integral part of the learning that takes place within a research
university environment. Even the most sophisticated attempts
to acculturate students into field-specific writing practices
in non-discipline-specific courses are no substitute, in this
respect, for the actual teaching investments of particular
faculty and future faculty located in particular fields.
Against what has come to be called the "adjunctification"
of writing instruction in higher education, Cornell has for
the past four decades invested a significant and growing portion
of its annual base budget in the College of Arts and Sciences
to ensure that writing is understood as a central concern
of all disciplines. In exchange for a total of roughly fifty
First-Year Writing Seminars taught each year by tenure-stream
faculty, some thirty participating departments are guaranteed
support for graduate student instructors of First-Year Writing
Seminars. These graduate student instructors' teaching
is understood to be an equally integral part of a vertically
integrated approach to writing and writing instruction as
a shared enterprise at all levels of the curriculum. Through
Institute-administered sophomore seminar courses and Writing
in the Majors courses, the Institute offers expanded opportunities
for an emphasis on writing to learn in upper-division courses
that is philosophically consistent and continuous with the
field-specific approach of Cornell's First-Year Writing
Seminars. The sophomore seminar courses are taught by tenure-stream
faculty; in the Writing in the Majors courses, tenure-stream
faculty typically work with one or two carefully selected
advanced graduate students from each field in which the particular
course is offered.
A few highly selective, well-endowed research universities
may find the establishment of a multi-disciplinary cadre of
postdoctoral fellows to be a viable alternative or supplement
to use of graduate students for writing instruction at the
first-year level--a path Duke and Princeton have taken
during the past several years. The effectiveness of graduate
student teaching at Cornell over the past several decades,
however, offers compelling evidence of the potential contributions
of the future as well as the current professoriate to a sense
of writing as integral to the work of all disciplines.
First-year students bring to their college-level work the
assumptions and understandings about writing they have internalized
from kindergarten and elementary school through high school.
Students who have become accustomed to discipline-specific
approaches to writing are likely to begin their undergraduate
careers with a significant advantage. Students who have learned
a one-size-fits-all approach will soon discover it does not
fit the varied demands and diverse writing practices they
need to be able to negotiate, not only across but within particular
fields, to write effectively throughout their undergraduate
careers and beyond. Unless first-year writing is to be the
occasion of a vast unlearning (e.g. of the five-paragraph
essay)--prelude to still more unlearning in upper-division
courses--students will benefit from an approach that
teaches the importance of field-specific writing practices
at all levels of education, the sooner the better.
Conclusion
At the end of each semester, all first-year writing instructors
at Cornell distribute a quantitative evaluation form. It asks
students for feedback on their experience with virtually all
levels of what we understand ourselves to be talking about
when we talk about writing--from such nuts-and-bolts
grammatical issues as the uses of active and passive voice,
parallel structure, and subordination, to increasingly higher
order concerns such as organization, thesis development, and
the use of evidence. Both as a teacher of First-Year Writing
Seminars in my home field of comparative literature and as
director of the Knight Institute, I have always considered
one question on this form to be singularly important: How
"intellectually stimulated" were you by the course?
This is arguably the most important question to ask--not
only of a course that explicitly foregrounds writing in field-specific
contexts, but of any course in the curriculum at whatever
level. Unless writing is fully integrated into the intellectually
stimulating work that is articulated in higher education through
the disciplines, students will not do their best writing,
and instructors will not be reading and responding to writing
they understand to be an integral part of their higher educational
mission.
|
 |
|
