Higher education is facing a number of challenges in this new millennium; one well-known management guru has predicted the demise of university education as we know it. Yet the writing-across-the-curriculum movement, now more than twenty-five years old, has remained a stable part of the educational landscape, outlasting other educational innovations by adapting to new educational initiatives. How has WAC transformed itself, and what can WAC directors learn from those who are leading continuing WAC programs? This collections of essays describing how WAC programs have adapted and continue to adapt to meet new challenges is a must-read for everyone concerned with the quality of writing in higher education. Respected WAC advocates and WAC educators explain strategies for continuing WAC programs in an atmosphere of change; explore new avenues of collaboration, such as service learning and the linked-course curricula of learning communities, and predict areas into which WAC programs need to move; and suggest new directions for research on writing across the curriculum. -- From publisher's description.

In Assignments across the Curriculum, Dan Melzer analyzes the rhetorical features and genres of writing assignments through the writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Presenting the results of his study of 2,101 writing assignments from undergraduate courses in the natural sciences, social sciences, business, and humanities in 100 postsecondary institutions in the United States, Assignments across the Curriculum is unique in its cross-institutional breadth and its focus on writing assignments. The results provide a panoramic view of college writing in the United States. Melzer's framework begins with the rhetorical situations of the assignments—the purposes and audiences—and broadens to include the assignments' genres and discourse community contexts. Among his conclusions is that courses connected to a writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative ask students to write more often, in a greater variety of genres, and for a greater variety of purposes and audiences than non-WAC courses do, making a compelling case for the influence of the WAC movement. Melzer's work also reveals patterns in the rhetorical situations, genres, and discourse communities of college writing in the United States. These larger patterns are of interest to WAC practitioners working with faculty across disciplines, to writing center coordinators and tutors working with students who bring assignments from a variety of fields, to composition program administrators, to first-year writing instructors interested in preparing students for college writing, and to high school teachers attempting to bridge the gap between high school and college writing.

This reference guide provides a comprehensive review of the literature on all the issues, responsibilities, and opportunities that writing program administrators need to understand, manage, and enact, including budgets, personnel, curriculum, assessment, teacher training and supervision, and more. Writing Program Administration also provides the first comprehensive history of writing program administration in U.S. higher education. Writing Program Administration includes a helpful glossary of terms and an annotated bibliography for further reading.

Editors and contributors pursue the ambitious goal of including within WAC theory, research, and practice the differing perspectives, educational experiences, and voices of second-language writers. The chapters within this collection not only report new research but also share a wealth of pedagogical, curricular, and programmatic practices relevant to second-language writers. Representing a range of institutional perspectives—including those of students and faculty at public universities, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and English-language schools—and a diverse set of geographical and cultural contexts, the editors and contributors report on work taking place in the United States, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Writing Centers at the Center of Change looks at how eleven centers, internationally, adapted to change at their institutions, during a decade when their very success has become a valued commodity in a larger struggle for resources on many campuses. Bringing together both US and international perspectives, this volume offers solutions for adapting to change in the world of writing centers, ranging from the logistical to the pedagogical, and even to the existential. Each author discusses the origins, appropriate responses, and partners to seek when change comes from within a school or outside it. Chapters document new programs being formed under changing circumstances, and suggest ways to navigate professional or pedagogical changes that may undermine the hard work of more than four decades of writing-center professionals. The book’s audience includes writing center and learning-commons administrators, university librarians, deans, department chairs affiliated with writing centers. It will also be useful for graduate students in composition, rhetoric, and academic writing.

Clearly explaining writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) pedagogy for English language teachers in university settings, this book offers an accessible guide to integrating writing and speaking tasks across the curriculum and in disciplinary courses. Teachers will find this book useful because its direct, practical advice can be easily incorporated in their classrooms to help their students develop advanced disciplinary English skills in writing, oral presentation, and graphical presentation. Enhancing its usefulness and relevance, each chapter includes coverage of the use of technology for teaching and learning; ways in which teachers can effectively and efficiently assess writing and speaking; and vignettes or examples to Illustrate writing strategies or assignments in different contexts. Pulling together the key features of writing-across-the-curriculum in one volume this book, is an efficient resource for busy EFL/ESL teachers worldwide.

The creative writing workshop: beloved by some, dreaded by others, and ubiquitous in writing programs across the nation. For decades, the workshop has been entrenched as the primary pedagogy of creative writing. While the field of creative writing studies has sometimes myopically focused on this single method, the related discipline of composition studies has made use of numerous pedagogical models. In Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, editors Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley gather experts from both creative writing and composition studies to offer innovative alternatives to the traditional creative writing workshop. Drawing primarily from the field of composition studies—a discipline rich with a wide range of established pedagogies—the contributors in this volume build on previous models to present fresh and inventive methods for the teaching of creative writing. Each chapter offers both a theoretical and a historical background for its respective pedagogical ideas, as well as practical applications for use in the classroom. This myriad of methods can be used either as a supplement to the customary workshop model or as stand-alone roadmaps to engage and reinvigorate the creative process for both students and teachers alike. A fresh and inspiring collection of teaching methods, Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century combines both conventional and cutting-edge techniques to expand the pedagogical possibilities in creative writing studies.

"To understand the ways students learn to write, we must go beyond the small and all too often marginalized component of the curriculum that treats writing explicitly and look at the broader, though largely tacit traditions students encounter in the whole curriculum," explains David R. Russell, in the introduction to this singular study. The updated edition provides a comprehensive history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s, through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s, through the WAC efforts in contemporary curriculums.

In one of the few book-length studies of a major post-secondary writing-across-the-curriculum initiative from concept to implementation, Writing-Intensive traces the process of preparation for new writing requirements across the undergraduate curriculum at Simon Fraser University, a mid-sized Canadian research university. As faculty members across campus were selected to pilot writing-intensive courses, and as administrators and committees adjusted the process toward full implementation, planners grounded their pedagogy in genre theory—a new approach for many non-composition faculty. So doing, the initiative aimed to establish a coherent yet rhetorically flexible framework through which students might improve their writing in all disciplines. Wendy Strachan documents this campus cultural transformation, exploring successes and impasses with equal interest. The study identifies factors to be considered to avoid isolating the teaching of writing in writing-intensive courses; to engender a university-wide culture that naturalizes writing as a vital part of learning across all disciplines; and to keep the teaching of writing organic and reflected upon in a scholarly manner across campus. A valuable case history for scholars in writing studies, WAC/WID, and curricular change studies.

This reference guide traces the writing across the curriculum movement from its origins in British secondary education through its flourishing in American higher education and extension to American primary and secondary education.