Writing Associates program at Swarthmore College

[interesteddad]

<p>This struck me as interesting. It’s an interview in the WAC Journal with “Bud” Weiser, Chair of the English Department at Purdue and one of the country’s top experts on teaching writing. He is the author/editor of notable books on WAC writing instruction programs and trains PhDs in teaching writing. Ironically, his own university does not have a WAC program:</p>

<p>

cr: Your own university is not a WAC campus. There must be a story about that.
Would you care to tell that story?</p>

<p>bw: … Almost ten years ago, the College of Liberal Arts revisited its curriculum and
adopted a requirement for a writing intensive course, post-first-year composition,
for every student in the College. But the College has over 6,000 students, and
the resources for implementing that requirement simply haven’t been available. We
were able to conduct some very popular and effective workshops for faculty who
wanted to incorporate more writing in their courses as part of the preparation for
the W-I requirement, and I know that a number of the faculty who attended the
workshops continue to use ideas and assignments they generated as participants.</p>

<p>cr: As an administrator as well as a faculty member, you must have an internal scale to
assess the difficulty of various problems that come to your attention. In your experience,
how do WAC-ish problems rate relative to other administrative challenges?</p>

<p>bw: Since we don’t have a WAC program, WAC-related issues aren’t part of my regular
work. The closest to addressing WAC issues I face is when other Colleges want us to do
more teaching of writing than we’re able to do and I instead offer to help them develop
ways of doing more writing instruction in their existing courses, or when an administrator
from another College wants to talk about how a course we offer isn’t meeting
their expectations. Both of these things happen rarely.</p>

<p>If we had a WAC program, I doubt I’d be particularly involved in it, since as a
department head, I’d only support having such a program if we had the personnel to
do it right—at least one person designated to direct it, an appropriate way to support
instructors in the program, and sufficient resources to sustain it. My sense is that at
large research universities, it’s been very difficult to sustain WAC programs because to
do them right, it costs money, and too often there’s not an institutional commitment
to provide enough.

</p>

<p><a href=“http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol19/rutz.pdf[/url]”>http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol19/rutz.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;