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Peer Review, Fall 2003
Making Writing Visible at Duke University
By Van Hillard, director of First-Year Writing, and
Joseph Harris, director of the Center for Teaching, Learning,
and Writing, both of Duke University |
In 2000, Duke University put into place a new curriculum
that requires all undergraduates to take a seminar in “Academic
Writing” in their first year and two “writing
in the disciplines” courses afterwards. This new emphasis
on writing as a mode of learning and inquiry was spearheaded
by the dean of Trinity College, Robert Thompson, who made
professionalizing the first-year writing course one of his
priorities. Under his leadership, Duke decided to invest in
a new postdoctoral faculty to teach an ambitiously reimagined
first-year writing course.
“Academic Writing” is now the only course taken
by every undergraduate at Duke. There are no prerequisites
and no exemptions. More than 80 percent of the sections of
this course are now taught by a faculty of twenty-five postdoctoral
fellows in the University Writing Program. This multidisciplinary
writing program is housed in the Center for Teaching, Learning,
and Writing (CTLW), which also sponsors various programs supporting
the work of undergraduate teachers at Duke--including workshops
and consulting on teaching, a tutorial writing studio, training
in teaching and technology, a Preparing Future Faculty program,
a series of teaching breakfasts and lunches, and speakers
and symposia on the scholarship of teaching. Our efforts to
remake the first-year writing course are thus tightly connected
to college-wide attempts to rethink the intellectual work
of undergraduate teaching.
“Writing in the disciplines” (WID) courses are
designed and staffed by faculty and graduate teaching assistants
in the various departments throughout Duke. Students in WID
courses are expected to write regularly throughout the semester,
to discuss the work they are doing as writers in class, to
revise their work in response to comments from their teachers
and peers, and to learn about the roles and uses of writing
in the field they are studying. To have a course designated
as writing intensive, faculty must show how they will teach
towards these four guidelines. The CTLW offers both workshops
and one-on-one consulting for teachers of WID courses.
In the last four years, more than 200 WID courses have been
developed and taught across a wide range of departments, many
several times and in multiple sections. Not all of these courses
center on teaching the critical essay; rather, since their
aim is to introduce students to the actual forms of writing
practiced in the various disciplines, many instructors instead
ask students to compose policy memos, field and lab reports,
grant proposals, conference posters, Web sites, software programs,
or proofs. In describing how these two new writing initiatives
at Duke build on and diverge from each other, we thus might
say that while our first-year course draws on the materials
of the disciplines to highlight issues in academic writing,
WID courses make use of writing to investigate issues in the
disciplines.
Interdisciplinarity
Since one of the aims of “Academic Writing” is
to prepare students to approach writing in a wide range of
disciplinary contexts, it seemed counterproductive to imagine
a faculty for that first-year course composed only of scholars
trained in English or composition. And so the first-year writing
faculty at Duke is now truly multidisciplinary. In the last
several years we have recruited young scholars with PhDs in
African-American studies, anthropology, architecture, biology,
cultural studies, economics, education, engineering, English,
epidemiology, genetics, history, linguistics, philosophy,
political science, psychology, religion, rhetoric, sociology,
and women’s studies to teach “Academic Writing.”
The utopian goal of interdisciplinarity is thus an everyday,
lived reality in the First-Year Writing Program. What gives
our work its sense of coherence is not a set of specialized
topics or controversies, as is the case in most departments,
but a collective teaching project. We all teach the same course,
if in very different ways, and that is what we talk about
when we come together as a group; it is what centers our intellectual
work.
Fellows draw on their interests as scholars to design and
teach five sections of “Academic Writing” per
year. In the current semester, for instance, we are offering,
among many others, writing seminars focusing on “Communicating
Science to the Public,” “Freudian Legacies,”
“Guns in America,” “Imagining the African
Diaspora,” “Judging Technology,” “Media
Nation,” “Stages of Life,” “Interpreting
Slavery,” “Origins of Darwinism,” and “Writing
Ethnography.” These courses are listed by instructor,
title, and brief description in the Duke online catalogue.
Students thus no longer simply sign up for an unmarked version
of freshman comp taught by an anonymous instructor; instead,
they choose a writing seminar much as they would select any
other course, according to their intellectual goals and interests.
Postdoctoral Fellowships
Sections of “Academic Writing” are capped at
twelve students, for a total of only sixty students taught
per year by each fellow in the program. Most fellows design
two different writing courses each year—one for the
fall and one for the spring. We support their work through
a series of symposia, beginning with an intensive three-week
“Summer Seminar in Teaching Writing” in their
first year at Duke, as well as through an ongoing process
of class visits, reviews of materials, and informal conversations
about teaching.
Our fellowships are not tenure-track positions but neither
are they dead-end jobs. Fellows join our program because they
are interested in teaching as serious and complex intellectual
work, and in the past few years, several have made use of
their experiences at Duke in landing tenure-track jobs at
other colleges or universities. The salary is reasonable ($36,000
to $40,000 per year), the support for research strong, the
environment for teaching excellent, and the collegial support
of the other fellows extraordinary. Fellows are offered an
initial three-year contract. In the second semester of their
second year at Duke, they undergo a rigorous review of their
work based on a teaching portfolio that they have assembled.
If this review is positive, their contract is extended to
five years.
Academic Writing
The work that these fellows have done as teachers of “Academic
Writing” has been a success by almost every measure
imaginable. The Duke student newspaper has called the first-year
writing course “the brightest quadrant” of the
new undergraduate curriculum, and, in their course evaluations,
students consistently rank “Academic Writing”
as more intellectually stimulating and harder than most of
the other classes they have taken in their first year at Duke.
A portion of our success so far may be attributed to a set
of ambitious instructional goals that provide the armature
upon which our writing seminars are built. These goals, composed
and regularly revised by all writing faculty, lend the program
a unity that rests not upon a particular set of materials
to teach from but, rather, upon a set of objectives that figure
writing as a set of discursive activities enacted across varying
contexts of inquiry. “Academic Writing” teaches
four intellectual practices: reading closely and critically
for the purposes of scholarly analysis; responding to and
making use of the work of others; drafting and revising texts;
and making texts public.
Our challenge has been to posit a working definition of academic
writing flexible enough to accommodate our own and Duke’s
multidisciplinary interests, but strong enough to provide
coherence in its application without becoming foundational.
While we do not treat academic writing as a single, monolithic
discourse, we do argue that intellectual writing is almost
always composed in response to others’ texts. Academic
writing names the kind of intellectual prose students are
expected to produce as undergraduates: writing that takes
a sustained interest in an issue under consideration and gathers
much of its evidence from a careful reading of sources. We
embrace these intertextual and citational features of academic
writing in our first two instructional goals of reading closely
and responding to the work of others.
The rhetorical practices associated with what we term academic
writing exist, then, in both social and epistemological dimensions.
To be successful, students new to the university must begin
to position themselves as active intellectual agents, ready
to construct arguments built from their careful reading of
others’ texts. Though acts of summary are at times useful,
what is often wanted in college-level prose is something more:
writing that demonstrates not merely a stalwart comprehension
of texts surrounding an issue, but that reaches with its analyses
and arguments to make new uses of prior texts and positions.
In short, what is wanted is writing that works to move knowledge
forward and that clearly earns its new conclusions. Such writing
doesn’t merely quote from other texts but, rather, constructs
its point from an interested reading of them. In social terms,
such student writing actively joins rather than listens to
the conversation of other thinkers. This direct involvement
allows students to frame their positions with and against
the grain of others’ claims and interpretations, and
to extend earlier thinking on a subject, to trace out the
unanticipated implications of one or another line of inquiry.
Assessment
In spring 2003, we conducted a program-wide, text-based assessment
of learning in “Academic Writing” centered on
a comparison of essays written at the start and end of the
semester. We found convincing evidence that, on the whole,
students learn in our courses how to make much more sophisticated
and critical uses of other texts in their writing.* Our assessment
experiment assumes that strong writing is tied to strong reading,
which involves putting what we call “pressure”
on a text under consideration. The metaphor speaks to the
action of applying a degree of interpretive force to a specific
aspect of another’s text in order to assess its ability
to hold up under close scrutiny, to delineate the boundaries
of its scope, or to discover the limits of its explanatory
powers. We value this method of academic reading principally
because it demonstrates not simply that a student has read
a text, but rather how that text has been read. It treats
student writing as an opportunity to comment upon the work
being read, to make judgments about its use and value, and—perhaps
more importantly—to position a student writer’s
thinking rather than a theorist’s thinking at the center
of his or her work. A significant number of our first-year
writers exit “Academic Writing” able to make powerful
use of others’ texts in their own writing, an ability
that we expect them to draw upon in their writing at disciplinary
sites across the university.
Conclusion
In sum, we have tried to structure the First-Year Writing
Program at Duke both to establish an intellectually vibrant
forum for students to learn the defining moves of academic
writing and to help a group of young scholars from across
the disciplines develop new approaches to teaching undergraduates.
We believe this program shows that there are strong alternatives
to staffing writing courses with contingent armies of adjunct
instructors and teaching assistants, and also that the teaching
of writing is not the charge of the English department alone
but the task of the entire university faculty. In doing so,
we hope to make writing a more visible aspect of the intellectual
culture of the academy.
*Please e-mail ctlw@aas.duke.edu to request a copy of
this study.
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