Volume 6 Number 2, November 2000

Making Writers and Writing Visible in WR Classes
by Katherine Wills and Monica Luebke, WR Assistant Coordinators

Professor Russell teaches rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University.  His book  Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History examines the history of American writing instruction outside of  composition courses. He has published numerous articles on writing across-the-curriculum and co-edited Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum with Charles Bazerman. He has given many lectures and faculty workshops on WAC, nationally and internationally. Last spring he was the first Knight Visiting Professor in Writing at Cornell University.

Professor Russell spoke to WR Assistant coordinators Katherine Wills and Monica Luebke while sharing a chicken wrap luncheon at the University of Louisville Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition Fall 2000 Conference.

WR:  What can we say to our faculty to encourage them to incorporate WAC methods in their courses and not be intimidated by perceptions of workload.

Russell: Can we talk about assessment? The first thing that I think about when I think about course is assessment and stacks of papers to grade.  And I sometimes tell myself, “Gee, if I didn’t assign it, then I wouldn’t have to grade it.”  Over the years, I and many others have found ways to deal with the "grading grind" and to make it intellectually interesting and rewarding--as a way of looking toward the future, not only of the course, but also of one’s profession.  It’s a fascinating thing to sit down with colleagues, formally or informally, and ask that question: what do we want our students to be able to do in terms of communication when they leave our degree program?

Then ask, if possible together with colleagues, what do we want our individual courses to contribute toward that.  In my work in my own department and in consulting with other departments, those conversations seem to turn quickly to questions of what kinds of writing or speaking will we be having them do, formal and informal.  Then criteria begin to emerge from thinking about it in broader terms, and often times, grading criteria or rubrics start to take shape.  I found through working with others, that criteria I had, I had never articulated.  I had just assumed.  I realized that students can’t read my mind.  They don’t know what my expectations are and why I have those expectations--how those expectations fit into what a person in this field will do when they leave and why it’s important to write and speak in these ways.  So now when I face that stack of papers I often--I sometimes--will look at the set of grading criteria that I have come up with and that I have shared with the students well in advance of their starting the assignment, and I will think, “Yeah.  Me going through this stack of papers matters to them, and they may have an understanding of why it matters beyond getting the grade.”

WR: One of the things that we try to do with faculty is to get them to see the different kinds of writing they can use to help their students learn critical thinking skills and content--not just the "big bomb" fifteen-page research paper at the end of the term.

Russell:  Yes, yes.  The “big-bomb” fifteen-page research paper, which is such a tradition in higher education in so many fields is like, all too often, like a grave-robbing expedition.  Students go and dig up some old bones and then turn them in and rebury them.  That’s not my metaphor, but I can’t remember whose it is.  Writing to learn is really an important concept, and I think it’s another one of those things that tends to be invisible.

One of the things that I do with faculty in workshops at various kinds of institutions in a huge range of disciplines is ask them to think about the writing that they do in their professional work, in their systems of activity--both formal and informal writing, speaking, and creating visuals--things like taking notes in the margins, writing memos or abstracts, writing proposals and requests for proposals. Then I ask them to sit down and ask themselves, preferably with two or three colleagues, what they would really dream that their students could do with writing or speaking or visuals when they leave the curriculum.  Not what they want them to know necessarily, although that’s important, but what they want them to be able to do with writing.  In that way, they can think through a broader range of tasks that they might work with student to do.

For example, one of the things that almost all of us want our students to do is to gradually learn to read the professional literature and to have some map of the field--some map of the activity system--what the important questions are, the methods people use to go about answering those questions, why those questions are important, not only to the field but to the wider society, what the controversies are, what’s being debated.  Students have difficulty just reading, I think, no matter what the course level, and there are all kinds of writing things that can improve reading.  Those are things that we as professionals do routinely.  We make marginal notes and notes of other kinds, and we collect and organize those notes.  It sounds very dry and dull and like what my high school English teacher made me do to write that grave-robbing research report, and yet note-taking and reading are also discipline-specific, as well as subject to our own personal style of doing it.  Writing to read is a great way to help students read to write.

Russell:  Gee, I hope you can understand what I am saying on the tape through the sounds of rustling paper and munching (all laugh).

WR:  What other techniques can you suggest for WAC practitioners?

Russell:  One of the things that’s been promoted in writing-across-the-curriculum programs for most of their now almost thirty years of existence is journaling.  To many faculty that I talk to, the term journal sounds a little touchy-feely.  It sounds sort of like a personal journal that people keep under lock and key.  But if you think about it, we keep a record of our learning as researchers, and at some points we make that record.  We write our notes, for ourselves primarily, and sometimes we share those with other people and organize those in various ways--arrange them around questions.  Quite a number of my colleagues have taken this idea of a journal as an ongoing record of one’s learning and found ways to structure it so that one can ask students guiding questions to respond to before they read, which is part of many textbooks.

You can also to do it the other way around.  Have students do a quick question, maybe even on a 3x5 note card, and then turn that in at the beginning of class.  Some people call these admit slips.  The instructor collects them and quickly flips through them, maybe while an appointed student takes the roll.  When I do this, and other faculty have reported this, I get a really great sense of how the students have read the work.  You can do the same thing with a lecture.  You can have students give you a 3x5 card or a slip of paper with the muddiest point or have them email you the muddiest point.  Where are you unclear?  It’s possible often to find patterns in the mud and address those questions, those confusions, in the next class period.  But I don’t want to overlook the possibility for this kind of informal writing to turn into larger, more formal writing as questions begin to evolve and potential answers begin to evolve--for students to do longer things.

WR:  How widespread is writing-across-the-curriculum and how does that benefit professors?

Russell:  Survey research shows that about one-third of the some 5,000 institutions of higher education in the country have WAC initiatives of one kind or another.  Unlike so many other initiatives in higher education, WAC has managed to stay vital for almost 30 years now. For faculty in the disciplines, this means that there are other people in your field who have been innovating and sharing their experiences, whether anecdotal or more formal kinds of research, with their colleagues in the field.  There is a large literature now in some fields, smaller literature in other fields, about how writing works for people in that field and how faculty can help students use it more effectively to help them learn that particular field.  I was shocked to find my research on writing-across-the-curriculum cited in the most obscure journals--to me--cited several times in the forestry literature, for example, when I knew nothing of forestry. By the same token, people from English or communications departments who are studying WAC have learned a tremendous amount from the different ways that faculty use writing to help students learn in other disciplines.  It’s immensely variable.  It’s as variable as writing itself.  We know today, and this conference emphasized, that writing is getting even more variable, different--different genres, different styles, different, purposes, different audiences, different technologies.

WR:  So then, WAC instruction should not be seen as limited by the boundaries of the classroom or department?

Russell:  It is not limited by the classroom. Some professional associations are now looking very seriously at the role of writing, speaking, and visual communication and doing things like making writing part of requirements for professional credentials--accounting, I believe--or making writing, speaking, and visual communication part of accreditation criteria, such as in engineering with the ABET process.  People are just recognizing that lawyers, business, industry, and non-profit aren’t kidding when they make communication, particularly writing and speaking in the top five, usually in the top two, things that they want graduates of higher education to do well.

WR:  Can you tell us more about how WAC helps teachers reach a larger audience and why that is important?

Russell:  Yes. It’s not only an interest in writing for other specialists, but also an interest in presenting one’s discipline and one’s profession to wider publics.  Professionals increasingly need to make the case for what they do.  Not each and every professional each and every day, but certainly students who come through a degree program looking to go out into the world will be much more comfortable if they can explain what they’re about and the value of what they’re about to others--deal with social, ethical, environmental issues.

A forestry professor once said that the technical knowledge for managing forests--the biology, ecology, and so on--was reasonably well-known among the specialists, but the role of foresters was rapidly changing so that they have to negotiate the various political interests that are contesting the forests.  He [the forestry professor] said, “I’m beginning to think of forestry as one of the humanities.”  I think he was exaggerating it because of who he was talking to, but certainly, the most arcane fields are called upon to justify their work, to make a case, and to help various publics understand and use what they do.

WR:  We are almost at the end of our interview time. Um, these chicken wraps were really tasty.  How was yours, Dr. Russell?

Russell: Very good, thank you, and filling.

WR:  What would you like our readers to know that we haven't covered?

Russell: Let me say, our activities in our different disciplines and professions use writing so much in so many different ways that sometimes writing seems to disappear.  I talked to a colleague of mine in engineering and asked him, “Do your students do any writing in your courses?”  He said, “Oh no.”  But after knowing him for a period of time and seeing what he did in his courses, it turned out that his students were doing these very sophisticated computer modeling simulations and writing collaborative reports, which they presented to each other in class and then later to other faculty and people outside the university in industry.  I asked him one day, “I thought you said your students weren’t doing any writing?” And he said to me, “Oh.  They’re not.  They’re not writing.  They’re just writing it up.”  So there’s a big difference between writing--writing it down and writing it up.  He was thinking of writing as something that happened in English courses.  The writing was so embedded in the work of his discipline, in his system of activity, that he kind of took it for granted.  After he stepped back and looked at it, he realized there were some things he could do in his course to use that writing of various kinds to help the students learn better.  I also learned a lot about how the focus of the English department type of writing had to be expanded to understand things like dealing with databases as part of the process--dealing with computer simulations as part of the process.  That is one of the fun things about the Watson conference: to see how writing is so embedded in so many different systems of activity.

Writing is really much like the activity of playing the piano.  It’s not a single generalizable skill learned once and for all, but it’s a developing accomplishment, and it takes a lot of practice.  Like playing the piano, you can write in many styles.  So when we say we want our students to learn to write, I think some people imagine that we want them to learn to write for anyone at any time talking about anything.  Instead, we have jazz writing, classical writing, ragtime writing--all kinds of things, and although a person might be able to play in several styles, you have to learn to play in those styles one at a time.

WAC Clearinghouse Introduction to WAC: http://aw.colostate.edu/resource_list.htm

<http://aw.colostate.edu/reference/wac-faq/intro.htm, which has sound,  practical tips on creating writing assignments in a range of genres and types of courses

Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas : The Professor's Guide To Integrating  Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San  Francisco : Jossey-Bass, 1996

Howard, Rebecca Moore. The Bedford Guide To Teaching Writing in the Disciplines: An Instructor's Desk Reference.  Boston: Bedford Books  of St. Martin's Press, 1995

HarperCollins publishes short student guides to writing an a wide range of disciplines, such as Pechenick, Jan.  A Short Guide to  Writing About Biology.  HarperCollins, 1993.