<p>I provided the statistics above. **In a recent fall semester, approximately 700 (of the 1400 students on campus) had at least one paper WAd. 580 papers were WAd at the drop-in center and another 500 or so in WA courses. **I find it difficult to believe that these numbers are being achieved without widespread voluntary student use of the resources. I know that my daughter voluntarily used the WA resource in all four of her years at Swarthmore, as did the students of several parents here, including students who were themselves WAs and thus identified as top writers at Swarthmore. Each year, the Writing Associates even WA wriiting for alumni who voluntarily submit application, scholarship, and grant proposal writing for independent review.</p>
<p>The paper from Professor Jill Gladstein I linked above specifically addresses the issue of writing peers as generalists focusing solely on writing or specialists with specific knowledge in a department.</p>
<p>The fundamental premise of Writing Across Curriculum (WAC) programs – as opposed to Writing in Department (WID) programs – is to provide a mechanism for collaborative learning about writing that is not department specific, i.e. that effective writing communicates well whether it is in biology or sociology or literature. The reason I used the term “cutting-edge” to describe Swarthmore’s writing program is that, because Swarthmore invests in full-time faculty whose sole responsibility is the writing program, Swarthmore contributes to national discussions of the state of the art in the field. Here is a brief excerpt from Prof. Gladstein’s paper that sets the stage for a discussion of course WA’s in biology:</p>
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As directors of WAC and writing fellows programs, we often need to negotiate the different expectations that exist in a course-based peer tutoring situation. The professor may be assuming the WA possesses skills or knowledge that the writing program does not deem as essential, or the students in the course may demand that the WA note errors in content and format in addition to aiding them with their writing. Peer tutors may feel stuck in the middle as they need to navigate the expectations of the professor they are assigned to work with, the expectations of the writing program director and program, the expectations of the students enrolled in the course, and their own expectations for what defines their work as successful. We attempt to ease the tension by creating protocols for the WAs by applying what we know from current research and theory to our own practice.</p>
<p>A list of such guidelines might include: </p>
<p>* WAs should not work with the content of a paper but rather remain as a generalist who works only with the writing. They are not TAs or graders.</p>
<p> WAs should not assume the responsibility the professor has for teaching writing to his students.</p>
<p> WAs should not serve as proofreaders, making notes about formatting and sentence level issues. Instead they should work with students’ writing processes.</p>
<p> WAs do not need to have disciplinary knowledge because it is the writing rather than the content that they are working with in any given paper.*</p>
<p>Even after we create and distribute these protocols we still hear from the WAs about the anxiety they feel when working as a required resource within a WID context. Asking them to remain as generalists who lack responsibility for the content and who lack disciplinary knowledge does not address the reality of the situation. The work of the WA does not fit within the binaries of generalist/specialist or content/writing, but rather the work takes place in gray spaces between these binaries.
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<p>Gladstein continues to describe how a Swarthmore WA synthesized her knowledge of lab reports with training in rhetoric to help chemistry students:</p>
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Each spring I meet with WAs for a reappointment meeting when we discuss the feedback they have received and their goals for the next year. On the course feedback form there is a question that asks students which strategies the WA used to help improve their writing. Reading over Kathleen’s course feedback, I saw that several students mentioned a chart that Kathleen had used to illustrate how to write a chemistry lab report. </p>
<p>When I met with Kathleen I asked her which chart the students were referring to and she said, “Jill you know them, they are the ones from 1C.” What she was referring to were the argument boxes from Williams and Colomb’s (2001) The Craft of Argument. The graphic is used as a form of post-outlining to show writers how to better organize their writing. Kathleen had discovered during her conferences that the students did not understand the purpose of the lab report and therefore did not see it as a form of argumentation. Through the use of the argument boxes, she used the language of the lab report to show students that even though the lab report follows a particular format, it still needs to contain an argument.</p>
<p>Kathleen was a chemistry major who, left to her own devices, took what she knew about writing a chemistry lab report with what she had learned about writing strategies and combined them to help a group of students. By showing students that the lab report was not just an exercise but rather a form of argumentation, she operated within the gray space of WAC and WID, combining the disciplinary expectations of the lab report with WAC’s goal of using writing as a tool for learning. Additionally, she educated me on science writing and how it compared with writing in other disciplines. She showed me how the WAs could wind up as proofreaders if they did not take what they learned from the training course and adjust it for work in the sciences. By listening to and asking questions of Kathleen I discovered at that moment that the situation with the WAs in the sciences was not a matter of whose expectations were right or wrong. Kathleen, through her navigation of the gray spaces, used her knowledge of the discipline, her status in the course, her expectations for the written product, and her communication with the students to create a relationship between the lab report, the students, and herself as the WA.
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<p>And a bit on how the WA program has evolved at Swarthmore:</p>
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Prior to my arrival at Swarthmore, the WA Program followed Haring-Smith’s (1992) recommendation that tutors remain generalists in order to keep their distance from the content. For some time I was not sure what I thought about the content question. Most of the literature suggested that WAs remain generalists, yet through observations and conversations like the ones with Kathleen, I started to see the benefits of having WAs assigned to a course where they did have some disciplinary knowledge. I was not alone, as Soven (2001) documents a shift of thinking in a survey she conducted at the beginning of the new millennium in which directors articulate the importance of disciplinary knowledge in the course-based tutoring situation. Now when assigning WAs to courses I do look at the majors of the WAs and the courses they have taken in order to place them in a course where they have some knowledge of the course content or experience with the professor making the request. It is not always possible or desirable to assign a knowledgeable WA to each course. There are times when a faculty member requests generalist WAs to guarantee that the WA will not address the content of a paper, though this request is not made often.
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<p>And, just for kicks, a comment from a Bio professor who taught the intro Bio course before and after it had course WAs:</p>
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The professors teaching the course had been satisfied with the work of the WAs:</p>
<p>Since I taught here before there were Writing Associates I remember very much what happened in that first year or two when we had Writing Associates, and essentially it meant that students gained two to three years sophistication in their writing.
Cuz there was a period there where you know, students who had Writing Associates in their freshman year were then sophomores, and they were writing as well or better than seniors. And so, it was just very clear that this is an enormously useful thing. (interview between student researcher and biology professor, 2005) </p>
<p>Even though the department was satisfied with the WAs’ relationship with the course, some WAs experienced frustration and anxiety. During training some WAs questioned how writing was being taught in the natural sciences, if at all, and shared the belief that the focus might be too product based before students understood the process of writing a lab report. These student-generated questions, along with my own question as to why writing and WAing in science is perceived as different from other disciplines, led me to share these insights with a colleague in the biology department. Together we discussed approaches for researching these observations in more depth. These discussions led to a larger research project where we looked at what happens when writing is assigned in an introductory science course and when WAs are a required resource. I wanted to look at this question from the perspective of the students taking the course, the faculty teaching it, and the WAs working as the main resource or mode of support for the students’ writing.
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